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Flavia Cosma

The Fire That Burns Us by Flavia Cosma Singular Speech Press, 1996: As the title suggests, this novel brings in front of the reader an entire complex of emotions and life experiences, all of them being perceived as threatening and devouring. The symbolism of the fire is essential, placing the accent on the idea of internal combustion, purification and supreme suffering and sacrifice. The story in itself is not very complicated, a beautiful love story having as its main protagonists two young people: Alexander Visan and Anna, two young and free spirits destroyed by the rigidity and absurdity promoted by a communist system. Alexander decides to choose the exile, leaving behind his beautiful wife whose constant attempts to leave the country are met with refusal. Step by step, the inner struggle becomes the main character of this novel, two tormented souls trying to find a common path, although their communication is impossible. Her letters never reach him, his attempts to contact her are all in vain and their interior monologues are constantly separated by a permanent physical and spiritual wall. Different pieces of thoughts, different instances of consciousness make up the body of this psychological novel. --Ana Maria Felecan
$11.00 | ISBN: 1-880286-34-3 | 114 Pages | In Stock: 2

Carol Costa & Jim Woods

Olla Podrida A collection of short fiction by Carol Costa & Jim Woods Publish America, 2006

A collection of short fiction.

An Olla is a clay pot. The functional interpretation of the combination, Olla Podrida, is "a highly seasoned stew."

Carol Costa is the published author of several novels, short stories and non-fiction articles. She is an award-winning playwright and a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Jim Woods is the author of seven books and has published numerous articles in national magazines. He has contributed to various non-fiction anthologies.

$24.95 | ISBN: 1-4137-9990-6 | 284 Pages | In Stock: 3

Mykola Dementiuk

Vienna Dolorosa by Mykola Dementiuk Synergy Press, 2007

A full-length historical novel set in Vienna, Austria, Vienna Dolorosa takes place during a one-day time period - March 12, 1938, the day Hitler "invades" Austria - in an Inner City hotel managed by a transvestite and doubling as a brothel for men who like boys dressed up as girls. Told from the perpectives of various hotel personnel and guests, brothel employees and clientele, a talkative Viennese official, German police, Nazi SS, and a darling street boy Petya. Nor for the faint of heart, Vienna Dolorosa includes rape, incest, intergenerational sex, prostitution, transvestism, teen sex, brutality, castration/mutilation, and murder.

http://www.mykoladementiuk.com

ViennaDolorosa.com

$20.00 | ISBN: 0-9758581-5-7 | 242 Pages | 3 in Stock

Selected Tales by Mykola Dementiuk Synergy Press, 2006

Mykola Dementiuk has given us a fine collection of short stories just in time for summer reading, though they can be enjoyed anytime! Each story reveals Mykola's sharp eye for detail and his great insight into the human condition. Humor, tenderness, passion, and pain are all part of Selected Tales.

http://www.mykoladementiuk.com

$10.00 | ISBN: 0-9758581-3-0 | 53 Pages | 5 in Stock

Vernon Frazer

Commercial Fiction by Vernon Frazer Beneath the Underground Press, 2002

In Commercial Fiction, Vernon Frazer does to post-millennium America what Mark Twain did to its nineteenth century counterpart in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
--Garrison T. Steadwell

Instead of telling a story, Frazer places the reader in the middle of it. As a result, the kaleidoscopic reality of Commercial Fiction assumes an unprecedented immediacy…August Strindberg wrote A Dream Play. Vernon Frazer has written a dream of a novel.
--Palmer Ford Hamilton

$15.00 | ISBN 0-9633465-9-8 | 164 Pages | In Stock: 3

Relic's Reunions by Vernon Frazer Beneath the Underground Press, 2000

Vernon Frazer's Relic's Reunions is a wonderful blend of two sorts of books. It is a great novel about entering your forties and facing the test of the high school reunion. It is a great subterranean novel, a worthy heir to Jack Kerouac and Chandler Brossard…
--Don Webb, author of Endless Honeymoon

Beneath the Underground, where Charles Mingus's underdog still resides, Vernon Frazer has been building a reputation as a "writer's writer." In Relic's Reunions, Edsel Relic, a high school outcast turned performance poet, receives a telephone call from his unrequited teenage love, who invites him to attend his 25th class reunion - just as he's reeling from a mid-life diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome…
--Richard Freeman, Editor, Plain Brown Wrapper

$16.00 | ISBN 0-9633465-6-3 | 239 Pages | In Stock: 3

Stay Tuned to This Channel and other stories by Vernon Frazer Beneath the Underground Press, 1999: The thirteen stories in Stay Tuned to this Channel explore the terra incognita of cutting-edge fiction in a manner as accessible as it is adventurous.
$14.00 | ISBN 0-9633465-4-7 | 141 Pages | In Stock: 3

Miriam Gallagher

Song for Salamander by Miriam Gallagher Trafford Publishing, 2004

When Salamander Quinn decides to liberate all the lost souls at St. Job's infirmary, he embarks on a Kafkasque journey. His plans are further complicated by the arrival of a mystery woman, who sets in motion a chain of startling events. Faced with mounting odds, as his past comes back to haunt him. he struggles to prevail. With the Health Service in crisis and Dublin in the grip of Global warming, he risks all to attain his goal. Powerful forces determine his ultimate destiny.
Miriam Gallagher and Trafford

What has been said about her work;

She shows vivid imagination and is something of a surrealist.
Irish Times

Vigorous and lively work. New York Daily News

Displays inventiveness and style. Sunday Tribune

Impressive. Books Ireland

$12.50 | ISBN: 141201299-6 | 238 Pages | In Stock: 2

Daniel Hawkes

Catching the Bullet and Other Stories by Daniel Hawkes Scarlet Tanager Books, 2000: Is elegant the right term for a world of fold-up baby strollers, big- timewrestling, and misplaced pants? These stories trace the awkward surfaces and clarifying depths in parenthood, working life, and love. They move with the assurance of a long forward pass, soaring and dropping right on target, its trajectory graceful and exact.
--Don Bogen, author of The Known World
$12.95 | ISBN 0-9670224-1-X | 64 Pages | In Stock: 2

Alison Hicks

Love: A Story of Images A Novella by Alison Hicks Amherst Writers & Artists Press, 2004

(Blurb Excerpts)

This novella is a small, perfect miracle of understanding of how the heart works -- for and against us.
--Phyllis Theroux, author of Giovanni's Light and The Book of Eulogies

In Alison Hicks' intense, lyric story of one woman's--and every woman's coming of age from the inside out, we hear the clarion voice of the novelist at home in the usual terrain of the poet, the tale communicated in the spaces between pieces as much as through the narrative itself.
--Liz Abrams-Morley, author of Learning to Caculate the Half Life: Poems

Love: A Story of Images should be required reading for any college student facing the technical and moral choices inherent in writing her life.
--Elizabeth Mosier, author of My Life as a Girl

$15.00 | ISBN 0-941895-27-0 | 92 Pages | In Stock: 5

Jack Phillips Lowe

Pariah Tales by Jack Phillips Lowe Onzo Imprints, 2007

"This kid's got a lot of energy."
-Mark Spitzer, Exquisite Corpse

"Mr. Lowe covers a lot of ground at a brisk pace, with craft."
-Phil Wagner, The Iconoclast

"Lowe tells stories with a plot and a point. His characters are real and his dialoque snappy. He makes you laugh, then cringe in suspense."
-John Berbrich, Barbaric Yawp

"To enter Lowe's world is to submit to one entertaining story after another, each different and unique, yet all a delight."
-Laura Stamps, Chiron Review

$3.00 | 76 Pages | 3 Copies

Richard Moore

THE INVESTIGATOR by Richard Moore Story Line Press

"Moore probes at the variations of normalcy and the edges of madness in this strange tale, building a sense of foreboding and revealing the truth, to the extent we can know it, only on the final page."
--Michele Leber, BOOKLIST

$18.95 | ISBN 780934-257770 | 220 Pages | In Stock: 2 (Signed)

James Penha

Snakes and Angels Adaptations of Indonesian Folk Tales by James Penha Červená Barva Press, 2010

Winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Contest

A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past eighteen years in Indonesia. He teaches at STB-ACS (International) School in Jakarta. No Bones to Carry, the latest volume of Penha's poetry, is available from New Sins Press at www.newsinspress.com. His award-winning 1992 chapbook On the Back of the Dragon is downloadable from Frugal Fiction at www.frugalfiction.com.
Among the most recent of his many other published works are articles in NCTE's Classroom Notes Plus; fiction at East of the Web, Big Pulp, and Ignavia; and poems in THEMA, Storie, Naugatuck River Review, Waterways, and in Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Press), and the two Silver Boomers anthologies. Penha edits The New Verse News, a website for current-events poetry at www.newversenews.com.

Excerpt from DUST AND STONE

After a rival's magic transformed a young Wizard into a common cur, the latter lit out from his village to the jungle where he attempted to revoke his canine form through self-metamorphosis. This sorcery failed, as would all conjurations requiring the twitch of a thumb or the pointing of an index finger.

The Wizard did retain enough vocal control to shape his barks into words. Abetted by the spin of a tail or the point of a snout, he tried casting some simpler spells. His abracadabra halted a sparrow in mid-air. His astaga turned dew into lace. An orchid whistled to his magic lyrics. But the Wizard failed miserably to articulate the enchanted tongue-twister meant to gild a great teak. He howled like an adolescent hound. The tree shook wildly before it fell, destroying a nest of siamang monkeys hidden in its branches and clobbering a man making his way through the jungle.

The Wizard had always railed against harmful magic; indeed, this was the argument that had so enraged his evil rival. Guilt-ridden now, the Wizard ran to help the monkeys. He found them weepy but unhurt. The dog apologized for his carelessness and promised the aid of his talents, such as they were, forever. No pledges, however, could revive the human. The Wizard-dog followed the man's scent so that he might make amends to the family whose head he had killed.

$7.00 | 34 Pages | In Stock

Leora Skolkin-Smith

EDGES O Israel O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith Glad Day Books, 2005

Edges is an elegant and moving novel. Leora Skolkin Smith has that rare gift of the writer who can convey the sensibility-the essence of place and its people-with precision and clarity. A moving and provocative debut.
Katherine Weber, author of The Little Women, The Music Lesson

Summary of the novel as written on the back of the book: EDGES is set in a pre-1967 Israel and Palestine. Liana Bialik is fourteen years old when the suicide of her American father forces her to return with her sister and mother to Jerusalem where her mother was born and grew up. Liana's family were once members of the 1940's Haganah and are now living among the complex tensions of Israel's modernalization and expansion. Liana learns about her mother's childhood in the old city, her tragic uncle. With her young lover she lives in the Palestinian world beyond Jerusalem's border. She grows away from her intense relationship with her mother into a womanhood formed by the boundary-less spaces of a lost geography and people.

$15.00 | ISBN: 1-930180-14-4 | 176 Pages | In Stock: 5

Paul Steven Stone

Or So It Seems by Paul Steven Stone Blind Elephant Press, 2008

"Or So it Seems" offers a breathtaking but comical look at one man's spiritual journey. As we meet Paul Peterson he is being dragged reluctantly toward an oversized couch by a wine-emboldened, faded beauty named Allison Pratt. As a former member of The Seekers For Truth, a school of self development, Peterson holds a mystical view of the universe through which he examines the chain of events that have brought him to this absurdly humorous personal crisis. The novel follows Peterson's Do-It-Yourself Workshop, a supernatural, self-examination that takes him back and forth in time. Along the way, he is joined by a Hindu Holy Man known as The Bapucharya. Greatly amused by Peterson's life challenges, the irrepressible Bapucharya plays both Greek Chorus and Sancho Panza to Mr. Peterson's comically tragic hero. It is Peterson's search for answers to the mysteries of his life that this fantastic tale speeds us through, with a conclusion as startling as it is supremely fitting. You have never before read a novel like this!

One of the few incompetent managers not appointed to a position of high responsibility in American government, Paul Steven Stone has contented himself with being a creative director in advertising, a columnist, an environmental and human rights activist and a dime store philosopher. He presently works as Director of Advertising for W.B. Mason (Who But W.B. Mason!) and lives in Cambridge, Mass. with his lovely companion and wife, Amy. For the record, it took him 11 years to write “Or So It Seems.”

$20.00 | ISBN: 978-1438207698 | 434 Pages | 2 in stock

How To Train A Rock Short insights and Fiction Flights by Paul Steven Stone Blind Elephant Press, 2009

A collection of 'short insights and fiction flights' culled from over 20 years of the author's newspaper columns. Each one a highly polished gem. These short pieces are often funny, occasionally profound, generally insightful and always creative. Stone knows how to surprise the reader with twist endings, unexpected points of view and more narrative styles than a roomful of writers. You will be delighted.

Author of the innovative, comic novel, "Or So It Seems", Paul Steven Stone has contented himself with being a creative director in advertising, a newspaper columnist, an environmental and human rights activist and a dime store philosopher. He presently works as Director of Advertising for W.B. Mason (Who But W.B. Mason!) and lives in Cambridge with his lovely companion and wife, Amy. And did we mention Katie, Kristin and Jesse, Stone's three wonderful adult children...?

$15.00 | ISBN: 978-1442117211 | 189 Pages | 1 in stock

Susan Tepper

DEER & Other Stories by Susan Tepper Wilderness House Press, 2009

Susan Tepper grew up on Long Island where many of the stories in DEER take place. Prior to settling down and studying writing at NYU and New School University, Susan Tepper was an actress, flight attendant, marketing manager, television producer, bank teller, interior decorator, travel agent, singer, tour director and rescue worker. The late David Kozubei (founder of David's books in Ann Arbor) once told her that she has lived the writer's life.

Nothing is off-limits in Susan Tepper's stories, yet not a single sentence feels gratuitous. Each of the tales that make up DEER exists as it's own world, endowed with so potent a presence that one feels one has witnessed a truth unfold in the reading. Gladly our minds stretch wide to catch her fictions and weave them into our reality.
-Eric Darton, Free City

In her debut story collection DEER, Susan Tepper takes us into the forest of her imagination, shining a light on a pack of off-kilter characters caught in unusual and compelling circumstances. Tepper is one of the most original voices in fiction I've heard in quite a while. While reading her loopy-beautiful dark narratives, I was reminded of the first time I read Denis Johnson. Yes, she's that good. This is a writer to watch!
-Jamie Cat Callan, The Writer's Toolbox & French Woman Don't Sleep Alone

Susan Tepper creates brilliant, quirky, unpredictable worlds in her story collection DEER. Whether set in the Italian countryside, a post-modern house in the Hamptons, or backstage at a community theatre, they teeter between the familiar and the extreme, the peculiar and the poignant, and her characters, brimming as they are with eccentricities, never let us forgot how deeply human they are at their core.
-Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America

$14.00 | ISBN: 978-0-578-02479-0 | 100 Pages | In Stock

Jim Woods

The Lion Killer by Jim Woods Publish America, 2005: The Lion Killer is a tale of conspiracy, murder, and intrigue that could be-might be-actually happening but if so, is not being reported in the press. Enter the shadowy world of political extremism where bullets, not ballots, are tools of those who would lead a country backward into the days of white supremacy and racial expression.
Jim Woods and Publish America
$19.95 | ISBN: 1-4137-6346-4 | 237 Pages | In Stock: 3