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The Essential Worker An excerpt from a composite novel in progress, The Essential Worker takes place during the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. These compelling short stories from down under are told in the voices of workers who kept Australians fed, well and alive in Autumn 2020: supermarket workers, bicycle food couriers and truck drivers, as well as overworked teachers and health care providers. By turns frightening, hilarious and tender, seven linked stories recall that eerie and uncertain time when no one really knew what was happening on our planet. Each essential worker is a survivor with a distinctive voice—among them truck driver Reddy and Lilla, a teacher: From “Roadkill” From “Shiny Shoes” |
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Also available as a Kindle: Australian readers, click here. |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Salvaged (April 2023) What can be salvaged from lost or damaged relationships, troubled times or long lives well lived? The stories, essays and poems in our 13th anthology and 48th issue explore emotional residue ranging over time and space from pre-industrial Europe to 1930s Taiwan to an Afghani war zone. NONFICTION: New in this issue, our first Editors' Choice, “Imperfect Machines” by Joyce Hinnefeld, is a meditation on her mother's life, in which personal, cultural and political history are deftly interwoven. David Blackmore's powerful and insightful “Allegheny Brush Heap” also reflects on a parent, along with the truth about the forest his father loved. Salvaged FICTION pieces are all very short stories—concise but deep reads, bitingly funny or achingly sad. For a peasant child whose mother is a wet-nurse for the privileged (Lila Kurth's “Peasant Child”) and for the former foster child in “Catch and Release” by Brenda Jacobsen, the emotional residue is loss. Remnants of the near and distant past resurface in Julia Dron's two stories set in Taiwan, “The Setting of the Sun” and “The Land Where Her Ancestors Live.” In Madeleine McDonald's “The Letter,” a woman sees her deceased ex-husband through new eyes, and in William Cass’ “Redemption,” a man confronts his own youthful regrets. In other stories, the salvage may be life itself (David MacWilliam's “Take the Shot”) or an alcoholic mother's potential rehabilitation (Michele Alouf's “Leaning Too Far”). POETRY: There's a baker's dozen of salvage in Laura Sweeney's “13 Ways of Describing a Car Wreck,” and Lynne Burnett's “Trust Account” takes hope from life's sorrows. What is salvaged by poet Heikki Huotari? An ape, a butterfly, a lily, a “Glockenspiel”? Click here to sample each author's work. |
Salvaged includes Editors’ Choice “Imperfect Machines” by Joyce Hinnefeld and two honorable mentions from our summer 2022 fiction collection submissions: Lita Kurth’s “Peasant Child” and William Cass’ “Redemption.” Read Salvaged online or download a pdf of the entire chapbook. |
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Death in the Cathedral: A Novella in Five Stories From “Death in the Cathedral” From “More’s Utopia” |
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The Satisfaction of Longing: Stories From “How to Spell Egypt” From “Far From Home” |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Up-Ending (April 2022) Our 12th anthology and 45th issue features Nancy Bourne's “Somewhere a Phone Is Ringing,” a tale of a woman who sees an uncanny resemblance to her own dying self in the repellent grandmother of her childhood. This is the last story Nancy wrote; it was published in a limited edition, print chapbook and distributed to guests at her life celebration in September 2021. We are reprinting it here to honor the extraordinary life and work of our friend and former fiction editor. Nancy would prefer we not focus on illness and dying, and so we are including stories and poems in this issue that offer both heartache and hope, wonderfully nuanced characters and mostly upbeat endings. FICTION: NONFICTION: POETRY: Click here to sample each author's work. |
Up-Ending includes three honorable mentions from our summer 2021 fiction collection submissions: Read Up-Ending online or download a pdf of the entire chapbook. |
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Arrest: Stories From “A Casual Chat About Nothing” From “An Unexpected Sunday Tourist” |
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Snitch: Stories From “Thief” From “The Tectonics of Time” |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Love (April 2021) The theme for our 11th anthology is love in all its painful, confusing, passionate and joyous diversity. Read about the edgy and disquieting relationship of two young misfits in the aftermath of wildfire (Dare); a widow recovering from her husband’s infidelities (Submerge); the unrequited love of a divorcee isolated on a Navajo reservation (Crossing Continental Divide(s)); a man's cross-cultural romance with the daughter of an arranged marriage (The High Life); a decades-long, ardent but problematic marriage (Together Forever); or tales of parent-child love: a mother and her adult son confront each other in the wake of a difficult divorce (Owl Boy); a new mother struggles to bond with her baby when breast-feeding is almost too painful to endure (The Climb); a daughter questions inconsistencies between her memories of childhood and her mother's disturbing version (Whisper to a Scream). Dip into flash fiction, poetry and prose poems about the sublimity of passion or its banal ending, dysfunctional sister-brother love, a father's delight in his child, the importance of friendship to love, the legacy of unwed parents. Fiction by Louise Blalock, Margaret Emma Brandl, Ed Davis, Stefan Kiesbye, Nick Sweeney; nonfiction by Jane Boch, Ruth Askew Brelsford, Laura Foxworthy, Carmela Delia Lanza; poetry and prose poems by Leonore Hildebrandt, Robert Murray, Jacalyn Shelley. Click here to sample each author's work. |
This issue is dedicated to Nancy Bourne whose loss (March 11, 2021), we who love her mourn. LOVE includes honorable mentions from our summer 2020 fiction collection submissions: Margaret Brandl’s “Pomegranate” and “Endings,” and Nick Sweeney’s “The High Life.” We are also pleased to present first publications by two authors: Read LOVE online or download a pdf of the entire chapbook. |
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First Kings and Other Stories In three dreamy and introspective stories, award-winning author Morrissey take us to a remote and frigid landscape where blinding white snow and sky are indistinguishable, and those who must venture out to pit their resolve against icy weather lose their way and possibly their senses. We encounter a terrified adolescent girl seeking a midwife for her mother, an older farmer hunting the coyote that killed his sheep, and the village mortician, whose life has long been devoted to the dead, heading out to collect his next client. Morrison describes these linked stories as a work in progress. We think you too will eagerly anticipate more. Here are some samples: From “First Kings”: From “The Widow's Son”: |
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The Estrangement Effect Five stories by Rebecca Andem explore the startling, disconcerting, unsatisfying, and liberating moments in which we understand that the most central relationships in our lives are inhabited by strangers, strangers we are deeply connected to, be they lovers, spouses, parents, siblings or children. From “They Were Strangers”: From “Inside the Lines”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Onward! (April 2020) For our tenth anniversary issue we have selected stories of survival and of loss, poetry and a prose poem that evoke dreamlike possibilities, and a few downright funny tales to lighten the prevailing gloom. Be assured, no protagonists, fictional or actual, succumb to despair. Onward they go, as shall we, into a future more uncertain than usual. Amanda Yskamp's eerie yet strangely hopeful cover art inspired the title of our first unthemed anthology. The lineup: fiction by Cathy Cruise, Sam Gridley, Ashley Jeffalone, John P. Loonam, Loren Sundlee and Lazar Trubman; nonfiction by Lisbeth Davidoff, Kandi Maxwell, Eileen Obser and Guinotte Wise; poetry by Michelle Lerner and a prose poem by Robert Clinton. Read about a cancer patient who rediscovers the autographed baseball that long ago rescued her from illness and despair (The Magic Ball). Or a scrappy but unhappy, fifteen-year-old girl who adores her older drug-addicted sister (Farewell to Easter Weekend). At the wake for his favorite aunt, a man encounters his ex-wife and learns why she left him (A Wake). Can an estranged couple survive a freezing night together after an accident on their snow-bound dairy farm (Kicker)? What do a parakeet and a Holocaust survivor have in common (Pretty Boy)? And how does a hot-rod era, scofflaw teen stay out of trouble (Rocky and the Rebel Punk)? Click here to sample each author's work. |
Onward! includes four honorable mentions from our summer 2019 fiction collection submissions that were too good not to publish: Cathy Cruise’s “Gently Used,” Sam Gridley’s “The Magic Ball,” Loren Sundlee’s “Kicker” and Lazar Trubman’s “Northern County, Here We Come.” We are also pleased to present Ashley Jeffalone's first publication, “Farewell to Easter Weekend.” |
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New Songs for Old Radios B. B. Garin's closely-observed and exuberant tales are inspired by itinerant guitar players and the women and men drawn to them and their songs. The collection opens and closes with encounters between reclusive loners—a tragedy-haunted barfly, the estranged son of a famous musician—and vagabonds who may or may not stick around. Other stories depict a wanderer who only believes in “long roads and songs with swampy bass guitars,” immigrant rock n' roll hipsters, and a slacker who murders a man for his song. From “The Last Ballad of Saddler Vance”: From “Ashes Hit the Floor”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords |
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Female Education Ciresi's 14 thought-provoking flash fictions deal with love, loss, and the hard choices women make. Her characters experience great joy and passion; they endure failed marriages, displacement, rejection, and grief. Their narratives are influenced by contemporary ideals of female empowerment, as well as former "female education" practices that attempted to control women. In spare prose, these stories are hilarious, poignant, and sad, and sometimes all at once. Here are a few gems: From “On His Way to American History”: From “Four Ways of Looking at a Wife”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Upheavals (April 2019) The unexpected happens. Then what? The stories and poems in this issue reveal complex personal landscapes in upheaval: While men walk on the moon a teenage girl’s life descends into chaos; a gang of cruel boys jeopardizes the safety of an older woman; adult children startle their mother into confusion; two adolescents confront dilemmas they can't resolve; a bipolar soldier-father comes home and wreaks havoc on his family. Fiction by Sarah Freligh, Julia Ballerini, Catharine Leggett and Emma Wunsch; nonfiction by Grant Price. Poems by Lynne Burnett, Robin Carey, Linda Ferguson, Donna Isaac, Catherine Montague and Jonathan Travelstead capture the disruption of death and disease and the displacement caused by fire, ravaged nature and the tumultuous spin of a distant cosmos. Click here to sample the work by each author. |
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By the sea, by the sea... Maryland author Jim Beane's five riveting tales of the Eastern seashore depict the elemental beauty and terror of salt air and wild water and its impact on the harsh, often stormy lives of coastal dwellers. “Across the Bay” explores class divisions between long-time locals and summer residents, the “richies,” in the wake of a devastating storm. In “Fragile,” a young fisherman befriends a hapless, grieving older man. “Before the Storm” explores the difficult relationship of two brothers, one of whom is seriously ill. “Ocean View” is the sometimes hilarious saga of conflict between local and immigrant workers at a sea-side construction site. In “The Rising Tide,” an older, long-married couple lose their car keys in the sand and rediscover each other. Here's a sample: From “Across the Bay”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords |
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Ovenbirds In this disturbing and powerful, sometimes bitingly funny, short story collection, award-winning author Dorene O’Brien explores the disasters and misadventures that shape or distort lives — among them the plight of a young girl held captive in a remote cabin, an elderly woman bewildered by dementia, a man who takes antidepressants to placate his overly-anxious wife, and more. Some samples of O'Brien's compelling writing: From “Ovenbirds”: From “Emma Reflected”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Rites of Passage (March 2018) Stories and memoir explore the life-changing experiences of concentration camp and other near-death survivors; the healing reunion of an estranged mother and daughter; a young man on the road searching for his vanished father; a female war veteran’s painful transition to civilian life; and a writer coming to terms with her dysfunctional family. Fiction by Antoinette Mehler, Ellen McGrath Smith, Robin Carey, Mariah Smith and Lyn Stevens; nonfiction by Annie Dawid. Poems by Scudder Parker and Diana Sher illluminate shifts in consciousness that are themselves rites of passage. Click here to sample the work by each author. |
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Protected Contact Stielstra explores the vibrant and troubling connections between people and the worlds they inhabit, be it nature, art or literature, writing with equal enthusiasm and wit on cloning a woolly mammoth, bee swarms, road kill and a romantic encounter in a London bookstore. The seven stories in this collection are about relationships made, missed, flawed, chosen or avoided. Some samples: From “Posthumous”: From “Little Deaths”: |
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Nowhere Is Always Somewhere In the six tales of Nowhere is Always Somewhere, short story master Robert Earle creates compelling characters caught up in life’s dramas all over the world: Americans imprisoned in Bolivia…homeless kids forging a relationship under a bridge in L.A. …a man whose writer daughter understands him better than he thinks…a Brit encountering the Chechen insurgent who cast him off as a child…a young girl challenging her father’s racism in the South…a son humbled by his father’s nursing home experience in Pennsylvania... Earle's fiction fully inhabits and renders credible an exciting range and diversity of people and places. From “Nowhere Is Always Somewhere”: From “The Last Summer”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Pushing Boundaries/Breaking Barriers (March 2017) Stories and memoir exploring the outer boundaries of human experience and endurance depict people who are love-lorn, demented, drug addled, guilty of deception or facing near death in a deluge. Fiction by Daniel M. Jaffe, Steven Ostrowski and Erika Staiger; nonfiction by Samuel R. George, Darryl Graff and Eileen McGorry. Edgy poems by Leah Angstman, Joseph Buehler, Josephine Cariño, Leonore Hildebrandt, Michelle Perez and Maggie Rosen stretch the limits of language and take readers across unfamiliar emotional terrain. Click here to sample the work by each author. |
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Lost in Translation A cycle of linked stories about love, loss and the difficulty of communicating emotion in any language. Two men and a woman struggle to mend their complicated, intertwined lives; whether funny, sad, ecstatic or outraged, the voices of Jesse, Roy, and Julie are pitch perfect. From “The Sign”: From “Practicing”: From “A Bird and a Picture Window”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords. |
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Beyond the Line In this powerful collection from “down under” — by turns, beautiful, disturbing and funny — Goldsmith gives us resilient characters who push or are swept beyond the lines of acceptable or customary behavior; some of them live in barely sustainable emotional territory. A pregnant woman (in “North of Goyder’s”) tries to protect a refugee in Australia’s unforgiving outback. “RU OK?” tells of a university counselor confronted by an assertive student on World Suicide Prevention Day. On a lighter note, true love prevails (in “Dear John”) over a damaging electronic blunder, thanks to the mailer-daemon! From “North of Goyder’s”: From “RU OK?”: |
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FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology Devices (March 2016) Sixteen authors explore the ways technology impacts human relations. Fiction by Lewis Gray, Larry Lefkowitz, Ken Poyner and Carole Stivers; nonfiction by Katrina Marks; and poetry by Cathy Bryant, Catherine Edmunds, Casey FitzSimons, Marie Kilroy, Fran Markover, Nate Maxson, Anne McCrady, Lee Nash, Jacalyn Shelley, John Stupp and Laura Sweeney. Click here to sample the work by each author. |
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The Marriage Bed View love and marriage from every angle except Happily Ever After in these five stories and two novel excerpts. Ford sympathetically captures the emptiness of faded love, the disappointment of affection misplaced, the humor of narrowly-escaped misalliance. Many err but none are mocked in this sparely-written, humane collection. From “Birthing”: From “Original Brasses, Fine Patina”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords. |
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Family Ties In these vivid, unsettling tales, Bache has created flawed characters who might be related to any of us. They are the family black sheep you helplessly love or hate — here so finely drawn you will never forget them. From “Siblings”: From “Husband”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords. |
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FICTION, MEMOIR & POETRY anthology Strange Encounters (February 2015) Life and literature are voyages from one encounter to the next, some of them surpassing strange. Read about strange encounters with a gigantic tuna, an absentee father, a vagrant, a holocaust survivor and a sock puppet, among others. Fiction by Teresa Giordano, Sheree Shatsky, Nancy Méndez Booth and Robert Bradford; memoir by Erika Price, Barbara Hallowell, Amelia Wright and DeVonna Allison; and poetry by G. Timothy Gordon, Meg Eden, Jamie Gage, Katharyn Machan and Müesser Yeniay. Click here to sample the work by each author. |
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Job Hazards Milbrodt's quirky tales probe the impacts of jobs, whether unusual or ordinary, on the lives of a love-lorn circus clown, a racecar driver/pole dancer, a retired sideshow fat lady and her “skeleton man” friend, a 60-year-old, cliff-jumping caregiver, and two shopping mall security guards who are single parents. From “Job Hazards”: From “Fat Lady to Marry Skeleton Man: Tickets 25 Cents”: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords. |
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Monsters in the Agapanthus These powerful, edgy stories explore love and estrangement between daughters and mothers, siblings, and spouses. Inclán's characters stretch the outer bounds of family responsibility, creating burdens they never dreamed of. From “Leaving Mr. Wong”: “Salsa” is a tour de force, told entirely from the point of view of a woman with dementia: |
Also available as a Kindle: and on Smashwords. |
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Distortions In this subtle and nuanced probing of family dynamics, a brother and sister find themselves “in the middle of the kind of stillness that comes from size.” She wants to disappear; he likes mysteries. “The sunrise over Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni upset proportion. The salted ground was so dry it cracked like hammered plaster, but the rain from the day before left round films reflecting purple, pink, and orange. Dane couldn't tell where the salt flat ended and the sky began, and when he glanced at his sister Jenny she looked like someone thicker. She wore a lot of layers.” READ MORE. |
Also available as a Kindle
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Talk in the Reading Room The first poet laureate of the Silicon Valley meditates on the meaning and mystery of memory, looking back on his childhood as the son of a chauffeur in New York and his college days in Eastern Kentucky. This is an insightful and often funny memoir from a member of the last generation to grow up without TV or coed dormitories. |
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MEMOIR, FICTION & POETRY anthology Work (2013) Personal narratives by Michelle Valois, Marylu Downing, Owen Abbott; fiction by Jessica Hahn, Marsha Temlock and James Stafford; and poetry by Ken Poyner and LouAnn Shepard Muhm. Read about the lives of blue collar workers, fishermen, a warehouse worker, waitress, barista, roofer, marijuana grower, psychotic data entry clerk and tap dancing birthday cake. Click here for a glimpse of the work by each author. |
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Catching the Send-Off Train A work of imagination and heart, Melanie Faith’s Catching the Send-Off Train traces the impacts war has on the family left behind. With the lightest of touches, Faith’s poems tell intimate stories of separation, remembrance, and return. Each short vignette adds another layer to the narrative and to an understanding of her characters. The collection delivers the emotional accumulation of these well-rendered moments. |
Also available as a Kindle |
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Our Place Hadari's multi-layered stories constitute a novella within Hadari's novel-in-progress, When We Were Saved. They are complex and beautiful, funny and disturbing, narrated in a distinctive voice with a subtext of survival and loss, removal and annihilation. The narrator is Natan, who recollects his life in a 1930s' kibbutz and the people whose paths crossed his. Mahmoud, Anschel and Sarah are as unforgettable as Natan himself and the place he has come to love. |
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The Old Fever by Rick Gray Excerpts from a 1980s’ Peace Corps memoir: It is really about Kenya's spell — the fever of the place that gets into the blood and never leaves, making a return to everything that came before impossible. Includes hyperlinks to photos, videos and background articles to enhance and deepen the reading. |
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Found. Seven stories and seven poems (September 2012): |
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A City Full of Eyes “James Cihlar’s poems reflect on the modern mythology of film and its intersection with the lives of those who go about their ordinary existence. Cihlar has a versatility with a range of forms and a confident voice that shifts deftly from his mother's divorce to Carl Jung and back to film divas. The title suggests the cinematic subject matter, but also hints at the theme of life-reflecting-art-reflecting-life.”
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California Dreaming (March 2012). Excerpts from two novels by Patrick Fanning and Jerry Ratch. Each presents a different historical take on California as an island of possibilities. (Our double fiction cover is an antique map of the Pacific and North America, circa 1715 (when California was thought to be an island). The Venice of the West by Patrick Fanning offers an alternate history of a 19th century California where the (Mexican) Republic of Alta California prevails from south of the Russian River in Sonoma County and a (Russian) Rossland streteches from Alaska to Fort Ross (the Tsar's summer palace on the coast) and east to Sakrametska (Sacramento). Fanning's narrative switches between dispatches from journalist/novelist Mark Twain and his traveling companion, American impressionist painter, John Singer Sargent, who has come to California to launch a career as a portrait artist and possibly explore his own unspoken sexual preferences. The excerpt includes sketches and watercolors by Fanning, who like his protagonists, is both novelist and artist. It includes a timeline of alternate history versus actual history. Jerry Ratch's How the 60s Ended follows a van load of merry prankster poets on a road trip from the mid-west to the mad-west of California and the San Francisco poetry scene. It's funny, sharply written with the ear and eye of a poet and captures the charm of the 60s and early 70s, along with some of its excesses and blind spots. It includes Ratch's own poetry from the time. It also makes a fascinating extension to our recent memoir issue, Beverly Jackson's Loose Fish Chronicles (see below). |
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The Loose Fish Chronicles: Excerpt from a Memoir in Stories Jackson's memoir gives us early 1960's Greenwich Village from a young woman's perspective. The stories are starkly honest and the language glows in their examination of a young woman starting adult life in the New York neighborhood famed for worshipping the arts and rejecting conformity. Greenwich Village became the epicenter for the enormous cultural shift we now refer to as the "Sixties," yet, even there, attractive young women were still expected to hide their own intelligence and talent. These stories are a wonderful read on their own. But we are also, for the first time, honoring the "E" in echapbook. Hyperlinks to photos, videos, background articles, and Beverly's poetry and artwork add a kind of immediacy that only web-based publication can provide. |
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Loss. Ten stories by eight authors (September 2011): |
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The Wayward Orchard Paul Sohar's language is fresh and surprising, but never jarring, as if we were hearing these words for the first time. You may find yourself reading the poems aloud. Like the fire trail in "The Wayward Orchard," they will take you to unexpected places. |
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Grace The seven luminous stories collected in Grace range from lightly comic to darkly complex. The voices are diverse — hopeful, angry, uncertain, amused, despairing — even where loss is profound, there are grace notes. |
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The Bus Driver's Book of the Dead The Bus Driver’s Book of the Dead evokes Chicago in the ‘80s, where Jesse Millner drove a charter bus by day and by night drank to erase the failure of his life. His memoir is despairing and redemptive, gritty and lyrical, serious and sardonically funny.
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Trouble. Selected Stories
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Translation of Light A collection of new and selected early poems exploring the ground of memory, vision and the illuminations of everyday life.
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Around the Bend. Selected Stories Laura Beausoleil's stories are a lyrical and edgy melding of memoir and fiction.
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Scenes From My Life on Hemlock Street. A Brooklyn Memoir Coming-of-age stories that portray the vibrant and diverse life on one street in Brooklyn over fifty years ago. Selected from a book in progress.
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I Am a Fact Not a Fiction. Selected poems by Edward Mycue (September 2009)
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Old Cars. Fiction anthology from the no-name writers' convivium (September 2008): Wray Cotterill • Judith Day • Richard Gustafson • Chance Lucky • Orianna Pratt • Jo-Anne Rosen • Linda Saldaña • Susan Starbird Eight authors, exploring the mysterious allure of cars, write about infidelity, senility, family bonds, friendship, tough times, troubled marriages and more. |
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