Catalog 

 

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Five Star Amazon Review:

Relationships are complicated in the House on Figueroa. And their complexity drove me to read on. A really wonderful book of stories.

 

• ISBN 978-1736500125    $19.95

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Or from Amazon
Or from Bookshop.org

 

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Rebecca Kavaler:

Doubting Castle
A Novel by Rebecca Kavaler

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A novel of intrigue in the Gilded Age in which money, sex and female intelligence
are brought into play in fin-de-siecle New York.

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The New York Times: "Vivid and witty..."  Ms Magazine: "Rebecca Kavaler has contrived a novel of enormous skill and cunning..."   The Washington Times: "The book is great fun. Miss Kavaler is gifted and witty, writing with a flair for both comedy and drama..."

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ISBN 0-9654043-5-8       $15.95
To read an excerpt from Doubting Castle, click here
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A Little More Than Kin
Stories by  Rebecca Kavaler

Publishers' Weekly:   With a keen eye and sharp wit, acclaimed author Rebecca Kavaler lays family relationships bare in this collection of stories, A Little More than Kin. In 'Give My Brother My Best' a grown woman reflects on her estranged sibling, the golden child who took all the wrong turns; a son confronts his father after his mother's death, stirring up old secrets, in 'The Inheritance.' Kavaler adds a sci-fi touch to 'Servants,' in which a wife sees 500 years into the future, only to find that 'the servant problem' has not been solved. The descriptions are vivid, the metaphors fresh, the language precise, the insights profound.

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ISBN 0-9654043-8-2       $14.95
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The Animal Within
Poems by  Rebecca Kavaler

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ISBN 978-0-9714873-8-3       $12.

To Order A Little More Than Kin by mail, click here
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Honeymoon
Novel by  Rebecca Kavaler

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ISBN-13: 9780980178654      $14.95

To order by mail, click here 

To order online, click here. 

 

 

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Eva Kollisch

 

The Ground Under My Feet
Memoir

For an interview and background on Eva, click here.

New York Times obiturary of Eva Kollisch:

 

Buy online at the usual suspects, including from Bookstore.org,
the online megabookstore that gives cash back to brick and mortar stores and Amazon. 

Kindle version;   Kobo ebook ;  Other ebook formats

ISBN 978-0-9714873-7-6      $14.95
To order by mail, click here 

The Ground Under My Feet 

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Edith Konecky:

A Place at the Table
Novel by Edith Konecky

A sharp and tender portrait of a New York woman as she faces the end of love, the complexities of friend- ship, and her own mortality. 

San Francisco Chronicle :"A small gem of a novel... A wise, lively, honest and well-written story."

Houston Chronicle:"This is a book about friendship...perceptive, funny, and deliciously complex..." 
The West Coast Review of Books: "It is Konecky's honesty and humor, her wit and wisdom that make this novela superior and memorable reading event." 

Library Journal: "An entertaining novel...a funny, lively look at the upheavals that seem to be increasingly unavoidable rites of passage for all of us."   

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"I fell in love with Konecky's writing when I picked up A Place at the Table. As I read the first few pages, I found myself reading more and more slowly, because I realized I would never have another chance to read the book for the first time. And, while the experience has been different, I've equally enjoyed reading it several times. Konecky creates such vibrant characters that I'm always drawn into the world of her novel." --Rachel Jaffe

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ISBN 0-9654043-3-1     $14.95
To order A Place at the Table by mail, click here 

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Past Sorrows and Coming Attractions
Short Stories by Edith Konecky

 

Collected for the first time, eighteen highly praised and widely published stories that illustrate the breadth of Konecky's voice, stories filled with diverse characters, richly portrayed and poignantly observed. Also-- special note: Konecky's much loved first novel, Allegra Maud Goldman, after 25 years in print, is now also available from The Feminist Press at CUNY, the first in its Contemporary Classics by Women series. Of Konecky's other work, reviewers have said, "A small gem.... A wise, lively, honest and well-written story" and "Konecky's honesty and humor, her wit and wisdom ... make this ... a superior and memorable reading event." 

ISBN 0-9654043-4-X      $14.95
To order Past Sorrows and Coming Attractions by mail, click here
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View To The North
Novel by Edith Konecky

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Praise for View to the North :    "....a woman's life journey from youth to middle age, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and lover. The narrative alternates between moments of "then," times past, and moments of "now," living in the present, and confrontling the future. Bisexual themes as well as the universal conflicts and self-reflections of a parent watching her chidlren grow up and grow more distant add a poignantly human tone to this introspective story."

                                   -- Midwest Book Review

 

ISBN 0-9714873-3-2      $14.95

To order View to the North by mail, click here
To order from Amazon.com, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love and Money
Novel by Edith Konecky

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This is the wonderful new novel by Edith Konecky, author of Allegra Maud Goldman and View to the North. Konecky', whose work has been praised by periodicals all over the country, forays this time into the world of wealth, family– and love! Witty and broad in her perspective, Konecky takes us on a cruise in delightful waters.

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ISBN 978-0-9714873-6-9      $17.95

To order Love and Money mail, click here
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To order from Barnesandnoble, click here.
For the E-book versions, click here.

For Kindle, click here

 

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Fiction and the Facts of Life
Novel by Edith Konecky

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As age takes us, we try to understand the quickly changing world around us. "Fiction and the Facts of Life" is a [novel] from Edith Konecky, a woman approaching the senior years as she shares the challenges of life and how to deal with the world and its many twists and turns...."Fiction and the Facts of Life" is filled with plenty of sensible wisdom which remains timeless and can be understood for any generation.

-- Midwest Book Review

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The main character in "Fiction and the Facts of Life," Rachel Levin, is an author. She tends to base the characters in her books on people she knows which does not often go over too well with the individuals. The story begins with Rachel as a wife and mother who goes off to Erato, which is a prestigious place for aspiring students of the arts. It is here that her life begins to take a drastic turn as she begins an affair with another woman. She no longer perceives herself as she used to and becomes increasingly insecure and unsure of the choices she is making. After a series of other failed relationships, Rachel looks for some resolution in her life in an attempt to figure out if she followed the right path.

As Rachel ages throughout the book (by the end she is probably in her seventies or eighties) she becomes very introspective about everything, but especially about the meaning of life and the definition of love. She becomes very nostalgic about her past relationships, reflecting on her loneliness and the things in her life that are gone. She also worries about what other people think of her writing and whether she has any talent.

"Fiction and the Facts of Life" is written differently than most books. It is presented as a book within a book. There is the story about Rachel, but intermingled is the book that Rachel is currently writing. This is an interesting but risky method to utilize. It was obvious which parts were Rachel's book. But knowing that she bases her writing on people she knows, it was not always easy to figure out which of Rachel's characters corresponded to the "real person" in the novel. Also, there were a few too many minor characters which made it hard for me to remember how they fit into the book.

"Fiction and the Facts of Life," was written for an older adult female audience. It is based more on feelings and sentiment than it is on action and drama. This book is a little depressing as the reader is constantly reminded about the negative aspects of getting old. However, there is a quirky end to the book which captures its overall theme very nicely.

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Leslie Granier in Reader Views (12/11)

 

9780980178678         $17.95

To order by mail, click here
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For the E-book versions, click here.

For Kindle, click here

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Jane Lazarre

 

Breaking Light

"I spent the day reading one poem after the other, amazed and comforted by what Jane Lazarre has managed to get down in words and musical lines. The poem that struck me perhaps the deepest is Shubert Sinking In, how she manages to link music - that cello, that violin - with the music of words, rising and falling, the exultation of hope amidst the dark despair of our lives - something I have pondered for years, but which Lazarre actually got down on the page in Breaking Light."

Paul Mariani, author of Ordinary Time: Poems, and The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity

 

"Jane Lazarre excels in all forms, across multiple genres. Here, in Breaking Light, she gives us poetry as insightful as it is illuminating; poetry that you will want to return to again and again and again.

                                                                 Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand

 

"Jane Lazarre is one of America's foremost writers of memoirs, a few of which—among them The Mother Knot and The Communist and the Communist's Daughter—are seminal works of contemporary non-fiction. She's also a respected and accomplished novelist. But with Breaking Light— her first full-length volume of poems—Lazarre establishes her impressive bona fides as a poet who has important and urgent things to say and writes about them with a generous heart, depth and admirable craft."

                                                                  Jaime Manrique, author of Like This Afternoon Forever

 

"The poems in Jane Lazarre's Breaking Light are dazzling and powerful. Quite an accomplishment to write about bodies in so strong and true a way."

                                                                 Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of No Way Out But Through

 

"The poems in Breaking Light sing of truth. There is power in words that refuse to let go, as these poems show. Their illumination and clarity insist on not forgetting."

                                                                                                                            Beverly Gologorsky, author of Can You Hear The Wind

 

"I'm struck by the sense of access to the underlife in these beautiful poems, the revelation of patterned interiority, a kind of permission and invitation to cultivate my own."

                                                                                                                                  Jan Clausen, author of Veiled Spill, A Sequence

 

"There is a formality in these pages, a reliance on structure to contain the powerful yet often restrained emotions. Light, nature, mourning, and love provide a deep and familiar comfort and stimulation that remain long after we've stopped reading."

                                             From the Introduction by Miryam Sivan, Professor of Literature, author of Make It Concrete, a novel

ISBN 9780990376781
$16.95
Order by mail
Or from Bookshop.org

 

 

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Inheritance

 

 

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"Lazarre is unflinching in her depiction of the destructive historical assumptions and taboos on all sides of the color and racial divide. . . .
and in [her] luminous prose, Inheritance becomes an unsettling and necessary meditation on
the messiness of America's shared racial heritage in all its quarrelsome parts."
                       Wesley Brown - Darktown Strutters, Push Comes to Shove

"Inheritance is rich in hard-earned wisdom and wonderful characters, resonant with African-American and Jewish
history. It drew me and made me think. Lazarre's commitment to story and truth shines in this powerful book."
                          Joanne Frye - Living Stories, Telling Lives;

"A powerful and poetic narrative that seems to float on a shifting surface of emotion. . . . The novel strengthened
my hope that art can stiffen our spines and shape our thinking and feeling around race."
                          Sekou Sundiata - prize-winning poet and playwright, The 51st (Dream) State, Blessing the Boats

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". . .reveals deep and painful truths, encompassing the horrific realities of slavery and some of the complex stories of
Jews in America. It leaves the reader understanding more about who we are and how to attain forgiveness, wisdom and
empathy to move forward."
                     Rabbi Rachel Cowan - Executive Director Emeritus, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

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" . . .simply wonderful . . .beautifully orchestrated . . .A fierce and honest novel that once again proves the searing
truth of fiction."
                   Beverly Gologorsky - The Things We Do To Make It Home

"A gripping story, [Inheritance] shows how the themes of race play out in the most personal ways."
                          Nan Gefen - publisher, PersimmonTree

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978-0-9801786-8-5      $18.95

To order Inheritance by mail, click here
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Some Place Quite Unknown
Novel by Jane Lazarre

Some Place Quite Unknown by Jane Lazarre

Rain Taxi says: "Jane Lazarre's latest novel-- as intimate as a memoir, as beautifully worded as prose poetry-- looks like a quiet book on the surface, but it's much more. It's a whisper that leaves the main character Celia's throat and grabs hold of the reader's."'

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Some Place Quite Unknown is as intimate and urgent as a poem. Lazarre’s enraptured and lyrical prose probes, with rigor and dazzling artistry, the deepest places of a woman’s heart. A powerful and original work .                         –-Jaime Manrique, author of Our Lives Are the Rivers, Twilight at the Equator, and other works.

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Jane Lazarre’s Some Place Quite Unknown is a beautiful, original novel. I finished it with sadness at having to leave its richly detailed world --- the reverberating psychological repercussions of a woman’s early loss of her mother, the best scenes of psychoanalytic sessions in current literature, exquisitely rendered scenes of nature. Lazarre’s intricate interweaving of ideas and storytelling is akin to reading The Golden Notebook or Simone deBeauvvoir’s The Mandarins for the first time. A contemporary classic
                           –- Marnie Mueller, author of Green Fires, The Climate of the Country, My Mother’s Island

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I feel honored as a reader to be ushered into this space where the walls of the psyche become permeable and time boundaries collapse; where cherished differences between “down there” and “up here” stop making sense. This reality of psychic life holds true for us all – and shows that truths are multiple, ever-shifting, resident in the body, not just in words.
           –-Jan Clausen, author of Apples and Oranges, If You Like Difficulty, and other works of poetry and fiction.

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I read Some Place Quite Unknown in gulps of deep absorption. It is a beautiful fearless book of unblinking concentration and unfathomable depth – an immense accomplishment.
                           –-Carol Ascher, author of Afterimages, A Family Memoir, The Flood, and other works.

978-0-9714873-9-0      $14.95

To order Some Place Quite Unknown by mail, click here
To order from Amazon.com, click here .

 

 

 

 

Worlds Beyong My Control
Novel by Jane Lazarre

“Jane Lazarre’s new book is a special sort of literary adventure. It has the rich, dense texture of life itself.”  
                                                                                 -- Lynne Sharon Schwartz

“Jane Lazarre has written a wonderful novel – generous, wise, brave and enthralling.”
                                                                        -- Sara Ruddick

“Lazarre combines the genres of fiction and memoir to weave a work that is quite unique. Maybe sublime.”
                                                                                             -- Lynda Schor

 

ISBN-13: 978-0990376750      $16.95
To order Worlds Beyond My Control from Amazon.com, click here .

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Nathan Leslie

 

Drivers
Stories by Nathan Leslie

Fans of classic cars may enjoy these stories for their authentic feel—fans of the short story for the characters, some of them memorable. Either way, Drivers makes a mark with it's simple, relevant themes and the whisper, faintly heard, of the lonely American highway, folding in on itself the million dreams of all the drivers with their hands tightly gripping the wheel.

-- Review by Craig Snyder in rumble

 

For more on Nathan Leslie and Drivers, look at Ghoti for an interview and more reviews at ghoti and percontra

SBN 0971487359     $14.95

To order Drivers by mail, click here
To order from Amazon.com, click here.

 

 

 

The Invisible Hand
Stories by Nathan Leslie

In The Invisible Hand Nathan Leslie turns his eye towards fathers. Within these pages you will find strange and caustic stories of wayward, eccentric and obstinate fathers. Told with an eye towards askew details, Leslie's collection builds upon his reputation as a master of the short story.

 

ISBN 978-1736500118     $14.95

 

To order hard copy from Bookshop.org. click here

 

To order hard copy from Amazon.com, click here.

To order e-book for Kindle, click here.

To order e-book for all formats (e-pub, mobi, etc.) click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Night Sweat
Poems by Nathan Leslie

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Eric Weinstein says in his review in Prick of the Spindle , "Night Sweat is essentially about the encroachment of the dream world on daily life, the endless (re)visitation of one’s past via the vehicle of dream, and the blurring of one’s real and imagined selves. The last few lines of  'In the Rumpus Room'  beautifully sum up the simultaneously nightmarish and nostalgic qualities in these opposing worlds: 'Promise me the forceps aren’t rusty, / that you can pinch me at arm’s length. / Pinch me awake when the clouds cover the sun.'”

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The Comstock Review says: "Nathan Leslie has turned his strong writing efforts from short stories and other fiction to poetry to produce the unique Night Sweat (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2009), poems of dream and nightmare, vividly described and well-imaged. The poet takes us through a cast of children, memories of experiences at different childhood ages, experiences culled from sights & sites, birds, and art works, seen through a prism of night's distortions, sometimes better than reality, other times not so. The same blurred vision edges the poems of the day as well, and creates a unified vision for this poet's first strong collection of verse.

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The Midwest Book Review says: " Established fiction author Nathan Leslie comes to readers with his first foray into verse, Night Sweat. A story teller by nature, it rings true through his verse giving readers a glimpse into the common aspects of life that readers so often experience. Night Sweat is an expertly crafted book of work, a fine addition to any collection. "The Portrait": The stain of light from/the thick, entrenched hole/reveals a woman in a sable,/pearls and earrings to her neck,/hair black as her husband/standing stiff next to her.//Their picture is aslant,/strung up on thick thread,/yet the tattered bristles at the/window deny them the moment,/curling the shopworn into redundancy."

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ISBN 978-0980178623       $12.95

To order Drivers by mail, click here
To order from Amazon.com, click Night Sweat

 

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Roger Mitchell

 

 

Their Own Society is a selection of essays, reviews, and talks written during Mitchell's career as a poet & teacher that considers what poetry is, does, and sometimes struggles to do. The book makes no central thesis about the state of American poetry today, except to indicate how varied its poems have become as the sense of a definable center to American poetry continues to undergo the fate of virtually all forms of centralized authority in the arts.

ISBN 978-1736500101 $19.95
To order from Amazon.com, click here.

 

 

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Miguel A. Ortiz

The Cisco Kid in the Bronx
By Miguel A. Ortiz

In the Bronx, on a street called Rogers Place, Mario Ortega grows up remembering his childhood in Puerto Rico. We follow him into early manhood as he weaves the cultural strands of the past with those of an urban present in New York City.

Against the wall, we'll tell ourselves what we need to in order to survive. "The Cisco Kid in the Bronx" follows Mario Ortega who deals with his young childhood in Puerto Rico and moving to New York, and into early manhood, as he deals with the pressures of becoming an adult, the implications of manhood, and the pressures of education and just what he's going to do with the rest of his life. "The Cisco Kid in the Bronx" is an insightful delve into growing up in Puerto Rico, with strong autobiographical elements, highly recommended.
                                   

             -- Midwest Book Review, December 2011

 

The Cisco Kid in the Bronx is a Caribbean emigrant bildungsroman that at moments may remind the reader of the classic collection Drown by Junot Diaz. Ortiz’s collection certainly fulfills many of the conventions of what could be considered a Caribbean Diaspora literature.

The subtitle of this book is Episodes in the Life of a Young Man, and although I didn’t find it to be useful, it does lend the reader an idea of how a good deal of these stories operates. Certainly too many read more like vignettes than stories, but they all contribute to the understanding of how two entirely different cultures blend to create a unique third mode of identity.

The book is structured in three parts, bookended by two standalone stories that familiarize the reader with the dim days in Puerto Rico of the protagonist, Mario Ortega. These two stories are compelling in the ways the character reflects on how his life has changed by being forced to leave his home at a young age. These, along with “Yesterday,” are the most noteworthy in this collection. “Yesterday” explores how Mario’s seemingly most important relationship blossomed and then fell apart thanks to unpredictable variables, such as parents sabotaging their relationships with other family members. Mario longs to repair the damage but nothing can be done. The ramifications are so brutal that Mario forgets to name his wife in the final story of the book, and we are left to wonder what sort of woman could persuade him to settle down and even take the place of Isabel.

The first of the three main parts is entitled “Rogers Place,” and the stories are set in a small, close-knit neighborhood in the Bronx. As children, Mario and his brother cope with the crushing anxiety caused by the feeling of not belonging by exploring their world in imaginative ways—marveling, for instance, at snow and the deep cold of a Northeast winter. Mario is the Cisco Kid referenced in the title, a kid who fancies himself not only a protector of the neighborhood, but also worthy of attention and affection and never afraid to seek out adventure. The story encapsulates how other family members immigrated to New York and failed to assimilate, and how the Ortega family barely manages to scrape by no thanks to predatory lenders and vendors.

The second section, “A Higher Education,” explores Mario’s days as a college student, although it is fair to speculate that this may have more to do with how he learns to love and interact with the opposite sex than his academic studies. (In fact, we learn fairly late in the collection that Mario is a poet, and it’s rare that his writing is ever mentioned. This is definitely a missed opportunity on the author’s part.) Most of these stories deal with the various ways that Mario falls into sexual encounters, and this section, more than the others, feels composed of vignettes rather than stories. In the end, they just don’t add up to anything substantial other than a foundation for the aforementioned story, “Yesterday,” and all of its ramifications.

The final section is also called “Yesterday,” and in it, Mario has achieved adulthood. Most of the stories here deal with Mario’s job at an employment service and his life in a converted apartment in a former light industrial area. The reader gets a sense of how Mario has been able to achieve a respectable stasis as compared with the drug addicts, prostitutes, and general troublemakers who share his building and workplace. This stasis is somewhat troubling as Ortiz seems to lose the thread of the Cisco Kid himself while focusing on secondary and tertiary characters. Nevertheless, the book ends on a strong note, and overall, it is definitely worth checking out for those interested in fiction focused upon the experience of the immigrant.

                                  Paul Pedroza, New Pages

 

 

ISBN 978-0980178692       $16.95

To order The Cisco Kid in the Bronx by mail, click here
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Also available as a Kindle Edition here.

 

 

 

Parental Sins

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This is the beautifully written story of how a Puerto Rican family ends up in the Bronx. The people struggle to make a living, to love, and think about their lives, their futures, their pasts. The novel gives an active, intellectual inner life to people who are too often portrayed from the outside only.  While still childless, Julia Ortega has to deal with her husband’s terminal illness. He in turn regrets, more than his own demise, not having an offspring to carry on his name. In his heart, he blames Julia for that failure, and in response she takes on the task of providing him with an heir, an endeavor that embitters the rest of her life. The story goes on to the next generation, whose members are forced to deal with the remnants of the past.

ISBN  978-0983666837       $16.95

To order Parental Sins by mail, click here
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Also available as a Kindle Edition here.

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At Fortunoff's

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At Fortunoff’s is a collection of short stories focused on the life of New Yorkers in the second half of the Twentieth Century. The conflict between the impulse to fall in love and the necessity of dealing with the practical needs of everyday life is explored with an intensity that makes the reader both apprehensive and fulfilled. From the first story, a snapshot of a relationship between a young woman and an older coworker, to the last, an exploration of how a frontline soldier deals with the irrationality of war, the subtleties of the relationship between men and women are closely explored.

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ISBN 978-0983666868       $12.95

To order At Fortunoff's by mail, click here
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Also available as a Kindle Edition here.

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Carole Rosenthal:

It Doesn't Have to be Me
Stories by Carole Rosenthal

Imagine those dreams in which you're in your old high school, even though the place looks nothing like your old high school. Events seem normal enough at first, but then, suddenly, everyone is using fire poles instead of stairs to get from floor to floor, and you realize you're wearing pajamas. Reading Rosenthal's short stories is like having one of those dreams. People say out loud what they would normally only think, and they act in ways usually inhibited by social convention, creating situations that cause the characters (and the reader) to wonder, "Did that really just happen?" Sometimes it's clear that it didn't– as in the group-therapy participant who swallows the group's leader whole–but other times, the premise is less fantastical, as in the New York woman who invites the homeless woman living under her building's stairwell inside for visits. Through these original and imaginative scenarios, Rosenthal explores ideas that would otherwise go unexamined, providing a fascinating glimpse of the fears that lurk beneath the surface of our everyday lives.
                                                                             – Booklist

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These brief, often startling stories turn familiar urban situations into surreal moments of cautionary insight that will linger long in the reader's mind. In Carole Rosenthal's fictional universe stories lurch unpredictably into that haunting territory accessible only through the powers of imagination.

                                                – Alix Kates Shulman

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Carole Rosenthal's stories are like doors to those spacious half-forgotten rooms that appear in dreams. I see myself and my experience in her work, parts I almost lost, or perhaps purposely kept hidden. Her language is original and often startling, penetrating what Virginia Woolf called "the cotton wool of daily life." At times the author seems to associate freely, yet each story reveals a beautifully constructed shape. While aware of her formal literary brilliance, I am still pushed into an intensity of emotion that feels raw and dangerous. Rosenthal's stories are deeply recognizable and yet utterly new. Hers is a completely original voice.

– Jane Lazarre

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Brilliant, buoyant, and disturbing, Carole Rosenthal's stories are about savvy characters who wear their insecurities like badges of honor. Written in a style that is weirdly innocent and often comic, the stories in It Doesn't Have To Be Me are psychological x-rays . . . sharply insightful, revealing, yet full of fun.

– Dalton Conley

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For more commentary, see Carole Rosenthal's website at Carole Rosenthal.

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ISBN 0-9654043-7-4  $14.95
To read an excerpt from It Doesn't Have to Be Me, click here. 
To order It Doesn't Have To Be Me  click here.

To order from Amazon.com, click here .

 

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Harriet Rzetelny:

Graveyard Blues
Novel by Harriet Rzetelny

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See video clips of Harriet Rzetelny on "Books and the World" cable show discussing the source of the title of Graveyard Blues. For more of the interview, click here.

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"Graveyard Blues is the story of Molly Lewin as she confronts the crushing environment around her. A homecare worker, she faces a client's murder, and the pending eviction of everyone at a low rent complex as big business wants to take over their land. Crushed between family issues, the murder, and the loss of home for people with few other options, "Graveyard Blues" is a fascinating and intriguing mystery not to be missed."

-- Midwest Book Reviews, July 2010 (5 star review)

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“Harriet Rzetelny is an inheritor of the great tradition of the social novel which mixes imaginative and documentary writing. Her wise and melancholy protagonist, Molly, is a walker in the city who bestows her gifted and caring vision on the sensuous details of the “inner city” neighborhoods through which she moves, and the marginalized people who inhabit them. This tragicomic novel is magnificent in its reach. Combining profound knowledge of the alleyways and corridors through which a soul can be lost and found, Graveyard Blues haunts the imagination of the reader long after the murder mystery has been resolved. Images of human differences and conflict, of attraction and repulsion, sanity and madness, love and destructiveness fill the pages of this book and embed themselves in memory. Ultimately, it is the quality of Rzetelny’s writing that distinguishes it most – the echoes of song, the cadence that takes one’s breath away, the musicality that saturates her storytelling.”
     --  Marc Kaminsky, author of What's Inside You It Shines Out and Shadow Traffic 

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“Harriet Rzetelny mines the grit of the city and comes up with gold. Her indomitable social worker detective, Molly Lewin, relentlessly traces the twisty path that has lead to the murder of one of her clients. When the casual bureaucracy and corruption of city agencies threaten to topple the investigation, Molly’s determination leads her to confront her own personal demons. Thought-provoking and compassionate, Rzetelny’s first novel presents a deeply sympathetic female detective with a profound understanding of people and the complexity of their emotional lives.”
        -- Carole Rosenthal, author of It Doesn’t Have to Be Me

"Graveyard Blues is a YOU CAN’T PUT IT DOWN book, and I share. . .with Marc Kaminsky the experience of having my imagination haunted by the book. Molly Lewin is a wonderful social worker – first rate practitioner, friend, social activist, and family member. Isn’t it wonderful to have a really good social worker as the central character of a terrific book? Enjoy and take pride!"

-- Dr. Rose Dobrof, Professor Emeritus, Hunter College School of Social Work and Executive Director (Ret) of Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging & Longevity.

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"Graveyard Blues is not just a mystery. It crosses the boundaries between mystery – of which there is a good one – multi-layered literary fiction, and the great social novels of the 19th century. Molly, the heroine, is a complex character. She pours her heart into caring – for her older, vulnerable clients, some of whom are being forced out of their low-rent apartments by a group of upscale real estate developers, and for her brilliant but schizophrenic brother. But at the end of the day, she goes home alone and listens to old jazz and blues and wonders why she can’t connect with men. When a man finally does turn up that she can connect with, he’s an NYPD detective, a Viet Nam vet with PTSD who has a painful way of suddenly appearing and then disappearing from her life.

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"The novel is set in an imagined Brooklyn neighborhood a year and a half following the World Trade Center disaster. But when you are in Rzetelny’s neighborhood, you know exactly where you are because she perfectly depicts the little details that make up a place, and pulls you right into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Even the quirky, surprising characters unfold with the truth of who they are and make themselves real to you. Graveyard Blues stayed with me long after the mystery is solved and the story comes to an end."

.- B.J Giges, Amazon.com Customer Review

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Set in Brooklyn, New York a little over a year after September 11th, 2001, this multi-layered mystery features social worker Molly Lewin, who first appeared in a series of short stories in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

After one of Molly's elderly clients, Cal Buchman, is murdered and his 82-year old life-companion, Willie Cobb, a one time Delta bluesman, is threatened with eviction, Molly discovers a scheme by a group of developers who want to demolish the low-rent buildings occupied by mostly elderly tenants and replace them with an upscale shopping complex. To Molly, a neighborhood's older people are like the roots of a tree. “Without [this] strong root network, there is no continuity, no history, nothing to maintain the balance of life in a community.”

The murder, and then another one, reconnects her with NYPD Detective Steve Carmaggio, a troubled Viet Nam vet and recovering alcoholic last seen by Molly the night before the Twin Towers were destroyed. Another of the disappearing men in her life is Molly's dearly loved brother, Ben, whose once exceptional mind is relentlessly vanishing into the unfathomable world of his mental illness.

Still, Molly sees life's humor as well as its tragedies. She becomes friends with Da Mour, a cross-dresser known to her in another guise, who may or may not be trying to date her, but who definitely knows something about the murders. Da Mour is but one of several surprising, quirky but never cartoonish characters that provide Molly with information and support. But it is ultimately the music that supplies the inspiration she needs to unravel the mysteries in her life, including the solution to the murders.

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ISBN 9780980178630 $14.95

To order from Amazon.com, click here.
To order from Barnes & Noble, click here.

To order by mail, click here .

To read the first chapter of Graveyard Blues, click here for a .pdf.

Also see the book website at http://www.graveyardbluesmystery.com/

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Lynda Schor:

Appetites
Stories by Lynda Schor 
 

Few writers manage to be witty and hilarious at the same time, but Lynda Schor is—I was delighted by her stories, which encourage me to expect the unexpected: there's an astonishment on every page. 

--  Nora Sayre

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To write about desire—of the body or the heart—requires a certain kind of fearlessness, the courage to solidify into words those deep and mysterious sensations that most of us are content merely to feel. The stories in Appetites are brilliant. Appetites pushes the boundaries of conventional good taste, but it also presses the frontiers of the short story form in important new ways . . . The ironies of everyday life become magnified. They begin to clank and rattle like ghosts chained to an unconscious past, groaning of lust and loneliness, comically exaggerated, absurd.  
                                                 —Carole Rosenthal

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Appetites is a collection of 12 short stories that are variously funny, bitter, surreal, and exotic. Lynda Schor  writes about sex as matter-of-factly as a harried housewife trying to make food stamps stretch at the local A&P.  Appetites is to be recommended for its honesty, its inventiveness, and above all for its meticulous attention to the details of a woman's life. Lynda Schor is the first woman writer of short stories since Grace Paley to make art from such materials

      —Screw

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One of my favorite stories is Lynda Schor's "The Rape" 

—Doris Grumbach

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It's a book you just want to read. Appetites is funny, vivid, and expresses the hidden, unfreudian feelings about everyday life and so-called love.

  —Barbara Garson

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She turns over the rock of female experience and reveals the truth underneath.

  —Gloria Steinem

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Lynda Schor reminds me of Fellini more than any other artist I can think of. There is no escape from feeling for a writer like Lynda Schor. Not in distance. Not in analysis or abstraction Just the powerful record of experience on experience. Fortunately for us, she has the courage, the energy, the completely original talent to write it all down.

—Jane Lazarre

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This book is recommended only to free, liberated women, who believe that freedom and unlimited license is theirs. 

—Ed Mintz, Brookyn Daily Bulletin

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Schor emphasizes the ridiculous, but she is a serious satirist of the transactions between the sexes.

—Ann Barr Snitow

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ISBN 0-9654043-6-6    $12.95
To read an excerpt from Appetites, click here. 
To order Appetites by mail, click here .

To order from Amazon.com, click here .

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Leora Skolkin-Smith skillfully tells the story of a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father’s suicide, brought abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and present. The poetry of the girl’s sexual awakening ripples through many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared land, and the mother’s childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious, cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author’s vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem....a powerful evocation of lost worlds which it is a joy to wander back into.”

                         -Mark Mirsky,writer and founder of Fiction Magazine

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"Elegantly written,  quite moving novel that has a lot to say about love, identity, history and the meaning of nationality. The book is worth reading alone for its superb language, but it is gripping and unforgettable as well in its story telling and evocation of place and emotions. It is a wonderful novel by an author with a quite accomplished voice and style, one well deserving a wide and receptive audience.”

     -Oscar Hijuelos, author of Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Mambo King Sings Songs of Love

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“A dark and penetrating look at pre-1967 Israel and Palestine through the eyes of a 14 year old Liana Bialik. After her American father’s suicide, Liana’s Jerusalem-born mother decides to take Liana and her sister back to her homeland, where her family had lived for four generations. Once they get to Israel Liana, who feels overwhelmed and suffocated by her mother, begins to detach herself from her. She embarks on a mission of self-discovery to learn why her mother does not speak about her father and why he took his own life. Edges is well-written, powerful in both imagery and subject matter…”

                                                     -Jewish Book World

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“…. Leora Skolkin-Smith’s new novel...(is) about the adventures of an adolescent girl in Israel in the early ’60s. Her character’s mother had grown up in British Mandate Palestine, one of several factors making the memory bank of this book so rich — appropriate for a place with almost too much history to bear and retain one’s sanity at the same time.

"What is most memorable to me is the sense of place that Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved — the sunny and scary Jerusalem and countryside — and the hope, love, hate and fatalism of the groups, Palestinian and Israeli, living amongst and apart from each other in a thin, rocky, brilliantly bright corridor too rarely shaded by old gray-green olive trees.

"Perhaps above all, the novel, told with restraint and poetic precision, is about how we shoulder on (and wing it) under the weight of history — family and public."

                                    – Robert Whitcomb, Providence Journal

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ISBN 978-0980178647    $15.95

To order by mail, click here .

To order from Amazon.com, click here

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Kelly Watt:

 

Mad Dog

 

 

It’s the summer of 1964 and the Supremes are the reigning queens of radio. Sheryl-Anne MacRae dreams of running away from her home on an apple orchard in southwestern Ontario to find her missing mother. But the teenager’s plans are put on hold when her uncle and guardian, Fergus, the local pharmacist and an amateur photographer, brings home a handsome young hitchhiker. When Sheryl-Anne meets the guitar-toting Peter Lucas Angelo, she falls in love.

But life in Eden Valley is not as idyllic as it seems. As the summer progresses, Peter is pulled deeper into Fergus’s dangerous underworld—a world of sex, drugs, and porn. In this thrilling tale, Watt captures the ethereal and complex Sheryl-Anne, and with vivid, often frightening detail, charts the destruction of a family. Mad Dog marks the arrival of a gifted storyteller.

“The irony is dark and palpable.” —Ottawa Citizen

“The strangest coming-of-age story you ever did read." —National Post

"At the heart of Watt’s startling new novel is a look at fanaticism that dangerously blurs good and evil for the perceived fulfillment of a prophesy." —Jenivieve DeVries, The Book Shelf

ISBN 978-0990376705  $16.95
To order Mad Dog by mail, click here.
To order from Amazon.com onlne, click here.
To order from Barnes and Noble online, click here.
To order as various e-book formats, click here.
For Kindle, click here.

 

 

 

Camino Meditations

More Ways to Buy Re-Visions

ISBN 978-0-9801786-6-1     $14.95
To read a sample story, click here. 
To order Re-Visions by mail from Hamilton Stone Editions, click here .
To order from Barnes & Noble, click here.
To order from Amazon.com, click here .

E-Book Version
For Kindle
for all other formats, click here.