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People:

James Cervantes
Halvard Johnson
Rebecca Kavaler
Eva Kollisch
Edith Konecky
Jane Lazarre
Nathan Leslie
Carole Rosenthal
Lynda Schor
Meredith Sue Willis

 

Poetry

The Animal Within by Rebecca Kavaler

Guide to the Tokyo Subway by Halvard Johnson
Night Sweat by Nathan Leslie

Organ Harvest With Entrance of Clones by Halvard Johnson
Temporary Meaning by James Cervantes

 

Prose

Appetites (Stories by Lynda Schor)

Doubting Castle (Novel by Rebecca Kavaler)
Drivers (Stories by Nathan Leslie)
Dwight's House and Other Stories (Stories by Meredith Sue Willis)
The Ground Under My Feet (Memoir by Eva Kollisch)
Higher Ground (Novel by Meredith Sue Willis )
It Doesn't Have to Be Me (Stories by Carole Rosenthal)
A Little More Than Kin (Stories by Rebecca Kavaler)
Only Great Changes (Novel by Meredith Sue Willis )
Past Sorrows and Coming Attractions (Stories by Edith Konecky)
A Place at the Table (Novel by Edith Konekcy)
Some Place Quite Unknown (Novel by Jane Lazarre)
Trespassers (Novel by Meredith Sue Willis)
View to the North (Novel by Edith Konecky)

 

 

 

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James Cervantes:

Temporary Meaning
Poems by James Cervantes

 

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James Cervantes reclaims Horatian varietas, swerving from political satire to restrained meditation. From the taut, disjunctive and eminently comestible iambs of "Weathers" to his Frost-iest scenarios, readers of many different stripes will find something to pique their interest. Cervantes' always temporary styles serve as a welcome antidote to the tedious seriality that can result from the search for "personal" style.   Readers, taste the chameleon.

                                                                                                    - Alexander Dickow

 

 

Jim Cervantes would be a surrealist if the world didn't keep getting in his way with its insistent realities and demands. Many of the poems in Temporary Meaning turn out to be records of such unfair struggles with the world. Fortunately for the reader, the language of the poems usually wins out and we are invigorated by the effort we have been forced to make. The sentences themselves trace out the difficulties of the human encounter with the impossible facts of our existence.

                                              --Joseph Duemer, poetry editor The Wallace Stevens Journal

 

 

ISBN 0971487340    $14.95

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Halvard Johnson:

Guide to the Tokyo Subway
Poems by Halvard Johnson

 

 

Many poets send me their books, but few I've received are as fine as Halvard Johnson'sGuide to the Tokyo Subway.  I have at least fourteen favorite poems, including "Morning Calm," "Paris in Old Photographs," "La Violencia," "How to Write Your Own Obituary" and "Take Me to the Water."  And for sheer delight, "Thirteen Variations on a Line by Robert Frost." In just about all of the poems there's something fascinating—an image, a tone, a total consciousness (often an achieved calm), an experiment with sound or phrasing.  I found myself re-reading many of the poems, so many are "locked" and provide complete satisfaction. It’s also the wide range of Guide to the Toyko Subway that I greatly admire, the complete interest Halvard Johnson brings to so many things, the expansiveness of these poems even while they're leading us to still moments. I've never seen another poet acknowledge the nuclear power plant, include it in solid lines, and then, in the same poem, move beyond it out to the Zen-like horizon in that unique "bomb and calm" style which is all Johnson's own. -- Dick Allen

 

 

 

ISBN 0971487316 $14.95

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Organ Harvest With Entrance of Clones
Poems by Halvard Johnson

 

 

 

 

ISBN 978-0-9654043-9-6    $14.95

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I begin with Halvard Johnson's Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones (Hamilton Stone Editions) because there is no other American poet who writes so thrillingly of the present and with such imagination and craft. This volume, his 13th, is a metrical vortex, dazzling in its constructions.

                                 Remy Jansen in  The Bloomsbury Review, November/December 2007, p. 30.

 

 

Halvard Johnson's book Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones represents the work of a quiet pluralist who is by equal measure amazed by the world and dismayed & angered by those who would control it. The poems here range from abstract musings (or amusements) on relationships to ironic assaults on the hypocrisies that run through the current political landscape. Throughout, Johnson uses the fungibility of language to say at least two things at every opportunity, one of them literal and the other ironic or whimsical. There is an aspect of jesterism or merry prankster in each poem, though at the center of the book is an optimism that our "better natures" still reside in us somewhere and that eventually, perhaps through the application of poetry and intelligence, they will rise to the surface, if only just in time. A solid book recommended.

                                                                                           Jorn Ake

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Rebecca Kavaler:

Doubting Castle
A Novel by Rebecca Kavaler

 

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.

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..."

 

 

 

ISBN 0-9654043-5-8       $15.95
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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.

 

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

 

ISBN 978-0-9714873-8-3       $12.

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Eva Kollisch:

The Ground Under My Feet
Memoir by Eva Kollisch

ISBN 978-0-9714873-7-6      $14.95

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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."   

"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

 

 

ISBN 0-9654043-3-1     $14.95
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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
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View To The North
Novel by Edith Konecky

 

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

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Jane Lazarre:

Some Place Quite Unknown
Novel by Jane Lazarre

 

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.

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

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.

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      $15.95

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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

 

ISBN 0971487359     $14.95

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Night Sweat
Poems by Nathan Leslie

 

 

 

 

 

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.'”

 

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.

 

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."

 

ISBN 978-0980178623       $12.95

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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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

  —Gloria Steinem

 

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

 

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

—Ed Mintz, Brookyn Daily Bulletin

 

 

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

—Ann Barr Snitow

 

 

ISBN 0-9654043-6-6    $12.95

To read an excerpt from Appetites, click here. 
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Meredith Sue Willis:

Dwight's House and Other Stories
Stories by Meredith Sue Willis

 

The occupants of two summer lake houses in western Massachusetts spend a couple of stormy winter days coping with their own problems and getting involved with each other's. Privileged Elaine Roth, a housewife whose children have grown, has fled to her summer home to escape the twin revelations that her husband has been committing adultery and that she has a lump in her breast.  Next door, in a rundown fishing cottage, jobless Dwight and Susan huddle in blankets trying to avoid the cold. Their two young sons and Susan's adolescent daughter Fern haven't gone to school in weeks, since Dwight's truck stopped functioning. When Elaine impulsively invites Dwight's family over for brunch, the situation turns explosive. Willis breaks out of the narrow borders of the short story by switching among the points of view of Dwight, Elaine, frazzled Susan, and obdurate Fern. She develops the four corners of this stubborn rectangle with equal care. Although Dwight is the obvious candidate for the villain of the piece, even he is not a totally unsympathetic character. Willis nicely balances empathy with implicitly moral judgment....Willis regards all of her characters with unsentimental compassion. Her fiction leads us by the hand into dark places, and then leaves us on our own to find our way out.

-- Margaret Quamme, American Book Review

 

 Written by a prize-winning member of the Appalachian Renaissance in literature, Dwight's House & Other Stories is an anthology of short stories by critically acclaimed author Meredith Sue Willis. Focusing on believeable characters put in paralyzing dilemmas, these tales examine the troubling paradoxes of the human condition with sympathy and synchronicity. The stories presented are "Dwight's House", "Attack", "Tiny Gorillas", "Another Perversion", and "Tales of the Abstract Expressionists". Highly recommended.

-- Midwest Book Review  

 

Meredith Sue Willis...has delivered a new collection of short fiction, Dwight's House and Other Stories (Hamilton Stone Editions). Known for pitch-perfect rendering of her native Appalachia, she is in top voice, pitting the familiar against other American subcultures and threats ranging from surreal air attacks to the specter of death in old age. She creates messy lives hurtling toward even worse complications, but they always release a slyly reassuring spirit, as when a scandal-ridden narrator concludes, "I don't know. I'm worn down by loneliness and fear. I'm afraid I may be on the verge of trying altruism, the last, the greatest, perversion.

-- Claudia Ebeling, Bucknell World 

 

ISBN 0-9714873-2-4   $14.95
To read an excerpt, click here.
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Higher Ground
Novel by Meredith Sue Willis

 

 

Kirkus Reviews: Willis's breathtakingly subtle soundings of homes and small town(where everything happens and nothing happens) reaffirm her as a writer of real consequence.

Publisher's Weekly: The adolescence of Blair Ellen Morgan, who attends the high school where her parents teach, isrichly realized in the complexities of relationships begun when she was 11, with the slatternly Odells, hill-country people who were her aunt's neighbors. Blair is a delight of paradoxes in her quest for "my special friends who mean exactly what I want them to mean...." Higher Ground is heartwarming, funny and sad, quite delightful reading.

Houston Chronicle:  A look at the secret feelings of a growing girl. These feelings might be shared with a best friend, if you had one you trusted completely. 

 

 

ISBN 0-9654043-0-7      $13.95
To read an excerpt from Higher Ground, click here . 
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Only Great Changes
Novel by Meredith Sue Willis

 

 

San Francisco Chronicle:  Willis makes a familiar story fresh and engaging with her wise perceptions and unusual language. Kirkus Reviews: Willis again picks meaningfully at the charge-laden fences between peoples, castes, and individual needs.

 

The Plain Dealer:  Authors....pretend to write about all of life, but mostly they opt for the excitement. It takes talent, observation, and a particular caring to bring the average person's experience to life in a book. Willis does it here, making gold out of common materials. There are indications that she is not done with Blair Ellen yet, and I can't wait for the alchemy of her next book.

 

Radical History Review:  In Meredith Sue Willis's Only Great Changes, the familiar conventions of the novel of initiation are made new by a convincing female protagonist and a narrative that uses politics as the setting and vehicle of individual maturation. Willis locates the experience of coming of age in the matrix of a larger history, focusing 1960's young and political culture through finely cut lenses of region, gender, and race.

 

New York Newsday:  Take a half dozen of the novelists who routinely show up as repeaters on the best-seller lists, ask them to put their united talents into one collaboration, and the chances are they couldn't write a page which Meredith Sue Willis couldn't do better. She would beat them with the acuteness of her eyes and ears, her unfaltering way of bringing the fruits of her observation alive on paper and her sure sense of where to look in the crannies of human affairs for the materials of drama.

 

 

ISBN 0-9654043-1-5      $13.95
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Trespassers
Novel by Meredith Sue Willis

Bucknell World: With the same attention to detail she brought to her character's small town childhood, Willis brings the people, ambiance and events of the urban experience out of the past and into a fresh light 30 years later. The silky locution that springs from the Appalachian heritage of storytelling is fully empowered here. Critics agree: Others have written of the same era, but few write as well.

 

The Washington Times: Trespassers, the final volume in Meredith Sue Willis's luminous Blair Morgan trilogy, brings its West Virginia-born heroine to the brink of adulthood and to the epicenter of her generations' rage. it is 1967, and 20-something Blair is off to New York City to begin life on her own....The novel is different in tone than the earlier books of the trilogy, in which it was possible to detect the cadence of West Virginia (right down to Blair being called Blair Ellen by those who knew her then). This book is blunter, with more dialogue. There's no mistaking New York.

 

 

ISBN 0-9654043-2-3     $13.95
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