Fiction
 Portrait of a Chair
A Novel
by Marie Krohn
ISBN 978-1-56474-505-7
192 pages, paperback, $15.95
Publication Date: October 2011
Harriet, a middle-aged, warm-hearted widow, owns an antique store on Main Street in Elm Grove, Nebraska. Into her life walks a young recently-divorced painter named Rachel. Harriet displays Rachel’s work in the shop and also rents her the apartment above the store. But when a treasured vase disappears from the store, Harriet has reason to suspect her new friend. The friendship survives, however, and the true shoplifter is discovered to be Mabel, the bossy town gossip. Meanwhile, both Harriet and Rachel find romance in the form of suitable men. This is a story about small-town gossip and small-town charity; about love of antiques and love of people; and about what it means to be an independent and strong-minded woman.
Read more about this book
Order this book
 Unwelcome Light
A Novel
by David Lehner
ISBN 978-1-56474-499-9
128 pages, paperback, $12.95
An unnamed narrator learns after his father’s death that this “father” was in fact not his father. The protagonist grew up on the campus of a boarding school, as the son of the headmaster. Now he returns to the school as a teacher in classics, hoping to solve the mystery of his birth. Things go wrong. Natalie, one of his students, is brilliant and beautiful, and there is gossip (untrue) that they are having an affair. He spends time with a former classmate, Elizabeth, now a teacher of art. Gossip spreads (also untrue) that they too are having an affair. A former teacher, who was fired in the past by the protagonist’s mysterious father, shows up with shocking information about the snarled family, a tale of adultery and incest. Elizabeth’s deranged husband goes into a mad rage and wreaks havoc with a shotgun, worthy of classical tragedy, and the protagonist is doomed to a life of blindness and madness. The moral of the story: fate is out of our hands, and the gods are cruel.
Read more about this book
Order information
 Devora in Exile
Stories
by Barbara Cherne
ISBN 978-156474-848-5; 1-56474-848-1
96 pages, paperback, $12.00
These four stories are about Devora Marcus, an elderly widow in Santa Monica, California. In "The Conversion," Devora, a non-observant Jew, becomes a yoga master's disciple and undergoes a spirtual awakening, only to find out that she is, in fact, rooted in her Jewishness. "Exile" tells of a night Devora spends in her backyard contemplating mortality, time, and space. "A Holocaust in My Breakfast Room" is a chilling tale of elder abuse, with an imposter invading Devora's home and taking advantage of her generosity. "The Countess" recalls Devora's childhood; in it she tells her granddaughter about her childhood in Russia and illuminates a moment of courage and compassion during that tumultuous time.
Read more about this book
Order information
Non Fiction
 Zoë Dusanne
An Art Dealer Who Made a Difference
by Jo Ann Ridley
ISBN 978-1-56474-505-7
192 pages, paperback, $15.95
This is the first book-length biography of a ground-breaking art dealer, Zoë Dusanne (1884-1972), a highly respected African American woman whose pioneering Dusanne Gallery in Seattle, Washington significantly affected the lively mid-fifties art scene in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Opening the first gallery of its kind in the city, Mrs. Dusanne championed contemporary art, including abstract expressionism, on an unprecedented scale, promoted Northwest art and artists throughout the United States and in Europe, and left her mark on world-known private collections as well as permanent collections in acclaimed art museums.
Read more about this book
Order information
 The Return to Judaism
Descendants from the Inquisition Discovering Their Jewish Roots
by Sandra Cumings Malamed
ISBN 978-1-56474-504-0
336 pages, cloth, $32.50
During the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal many Jews were forcibly converted to the Catholic faith. These Conversos, as they were called, were required to give up their religion, their traditions, and in some cases even their names.
During the 1990s, historian Sandra Malamed conducted a series of probing interviews with people of Spanish and Portuguese descent, who considered themselves Christians or even non-believers, but who nonetheless practiced various Jewish traditions—often without knowing where the traditions came from. When she explained to them what these customs were all about, they were fascinated to learn that Judaism might be part of their families’ history. The word spread, and before long people from all around the country and beyond began to contact Malamed.
Included: a brief history of the Inquisition, the interviews with 50+ descendants of Conversos, a survey of Sephardic Judaism worldwide today, lists of Sephardic surnames, timelines, glossary, bibliography, index. Illustrated with black and white photos throughout.
Read more about this book
Read Library Journal's starred review of this book
Order information
 Valley Animals
True Stories about the Animals and People of California's Santa Ynez Valley
by Brooks Firestone
ISBN 978-1-57464-500-2
208 pages, paperback, $14.95
Twenty-five years in the making, this book is a collection of true stories about the animals and the people of California’s Santa Ynez Valley, in the heart of wine country, farm country, and animal country. The animals Brooks Firestone and his neighbors have lived with, worked with, played with, and otherwise associated with include horses, cattle, dog, cats, elands, alpacas, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, deer, ostriches, parrots, geese, ducks, and even an Elephant at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. This book is a tribute to a beautiful valley, with all its landscape in both town and country. Most of all, it is a celebration of that magic that happens when human beings and their animal neighbors interact.
Read more about this book
Order information
Memoir
 Late Discoveries
An Adoptee's Quest for Truth
by Susan Bennett
ISBN 978-1-56474-513-2
176 pages, paperback, $14.95
Publication Date: October 2011
Susan was forty-three years old before she ordered a DNA test and learned the truth that she had long suspected: that she was adopted. By this time, the woman she had always called her mother, who had kept the adoption a secret, was dying, so Susan never got to talk with her directly on this important matter of identity. Then came the long, involved search for her half-siblings and her biological family roots, a roller-coaster of emotions that uncovered secret after secret, revealing truth after truth. At the climax of the book, she visits the building where she was born (when the building was a facility for unwed mothers) and makes a remarkable, almost magical connection with her deceased birth mother. She discovers, still stuck to a wall, a painting of a Christmas tree signed by her eighteen-year-old mother. The most important truth Susan learned from her quest was that she had been wanted and loved by both her mothers.
Read more about this book
Order this book
 Tolstoy in Riyadh
A Story of a Teacher and Her Muse
by Chris Cryer
ISBN 978-1-56474-517-0
160 pages, paperback, $14.95
Publication Date: November 2011
In 1982, Chris Cryer spent a year in Saudi Arabia, teaching English to women at King Saud University. Accompanied by her fourteen-year-old son, and a few books by and about Leo Tolstoy, Chris found a sense of connection where she least expected it. The fast-moving, slightly comic, always fascinating adventure pulls us directly into the journey. We come to respect and love the mother-son duo for their unprejudiced outlook and their cool-headed survival of matawas (moral police), strict laws, and customs. This book is one of very few based on true events, written from the inside out, that show the Arab side in the Islamic world, a place long held in mystery under the dark images of Western media. The author presents the Saudi culture at that time with a sensitivity to their need to preserve values and traditions in the face of modernity.
Read more about this book
Order this book
 The Lapp King's Daughter
A Family's Journey Through Finland's Wars
by Stina Katchadourian
ISBN 978-1-56474-498-2
160 pages, paperback, $14.95
This is the story of a Finnish family during World War II, combining a gripping correspondence between the author's parents, who were separated by the war, with the interspersed memories of the author, who was their youngest child. While her father was at the front fighting the Soviets, her mother moved the family around the country, ending up on a farm on the Arctic Circle, trying to keep her daughters safe from Russian bombs. Finland sued for peace with the Soviet Union in 1944, which made them enemies of the Germans, who had a standing army of 200,000 men in Finnish Lapland. War broke out with Germany, and the author's family managed in the nick of time to flee to Sweden. Throughout this historic drama are a tapestry of letters and family stories, along with the touching voice of the little girl Stina, whose observations, reflections, and worries move the reader along to the dramatic conclusion.
Read more about this book
Order information
 Twenty-Five Missions
A Bombadier's Story
by Charles R. Wayman & Candace R. Wayman
ISBN 978-156474-479-1
ISBN 156474-479-5
80 pages, paperback, $14.00
This first-person account of World War II is a father-daughter collaboration. Charles’s contribution is the material he left behind: a nostalgic introduction about his youth and adolescence during the great depression, entries from the journal he kept after he joined the army and went through training in the Army Air Corps, and his flight log, a record of the 25 missions he flew over Europe from November 1943-1944. Interspersed between and among Charles entries are annotations by his daughter, Candace, who comments on the events in Charles’s journal and gives historical background information about what was going on in the war effort at that time.
Read more about this book
Order information
Poetry
 I Love You to the Moon
Poems
by Jack Moser
ISBN 978-1-56474-516-3
112 pages, paperback, $14.00
Publication Date: October 2011
These poems display a fine narrative and autobiographical style, remembering moments of the poet’s life, from his Brooklyn boyhood up to the present, that have changed him and opened him to new ideas about love, war, disability, childhood, religion, and the human condition. The recurring presence of his disabled son in the poems has a haunting quality; he is clearly not only the poet’s son, but also his friend and teacher, even when he is “the son from hell.” The poems also display a sense of humor. Anger too, when they concern the tragedy of war as he experienced it in Vietnam. He offers brave new thoughts about religion, reconciling his disappointment in God’s seeming unfairness by balancing in the presence of Shekhinah, the feminine, compassionate side.
Read more about this book
Order this book
 Up From the Marsh
Stories and Poems
by Phyllis Binkley
ISBN 978-1-56474-512-5
128 pages, cloth, $15.00
These stories and poems, written by a woman in her eighties, look back over a long real and imagined life, and deal with big issues: redemption, family love, the haunting past, the bonds of friendship, the importance of what remains of life on earth, and the dignity of aging and dying. The stories are told with plain, clear style, a graceful narrative arc, a fitting climax, and a satisfying resolution. The poems are skillfully crafted, whether in free verse or formal, whether the mood be whimsical or somber, about the folly of progress, the wisdom of simplicity, nature, love lost, and the presence of the past.
Read more about this book
Ordering information
 Crane Creek, Two Voices
Poems
by Robb Jackson and Vanessa Furse Jackson
ISBN 978-1-56474-511-8
96 pages, cloth, $14.00
This collection tells the story of the first year in a relationship between two poets. The antiphonal voices describe their adventures exploring the natural world of northern Ohio, specifically Crane Creek, on the shore of Lake Erie, and sometimes also on the banks of the nearby Maumee River. One poet, Robb grew up in and near this setting; the other, Vanessa, is from England, and hence experiences many of the natural wonders of New World for the first time. At the heart of the narrative lies the shared experience of falling in love, against and within the changing seasons, and among the wide, wild varieties of birds, mammals, insects, and plants. The poems form a nature guide, to an area and to the wild territory of new love.
Read more about this book
Order information
 Love Like Snow
Two Decades of Snow Poems
by Natalie Safir
ISBN 978-56474-507-1
48 pages, paperback, $10.00
LIMITED EDITION
These poems are full of both weather and nature, especially human nature and the weather of the heart. Natalie Safir has an eye for white, now and then accented by black crows, a red house, a blue shadow, a yellow sled.… The natural world in her poems comes alive when it intersects with civilization (a street scene in Moscow, steel barges on the Hudson, a typewriter, schnapps by the fire) and with a range of human emotions from exhilaration and joy to loss and sorrow, with the awareness of the fragility of relationship. These poems, both moving and playful, filled with sensual imagery, welcome winter with a wise respect.
Read more about this book
Order information
 The Dust Catcher
And Other Poems
by Marjorie Sparkman Jackson
ISBN 978-1-56474-501-9
96 pages, paperback, $14.00
These poems are haunting in two senses of the word. They beg to be read aloud, because for the beauty in their sounds. The poet is a master of her craft, working well in various rhyme patterns, various meter schemes. Sometimes her rhymes are exact, sometimes provocatively just off, just enough. More haunting than the poems’ technique, however, is the magical, romantic atmosphere throughout the collection. Reminiscent of Poe, the poems are full of gothic, wondrous tales, populated by witches, mermaids, agents of death, ghosts, devils, angels both light and dark, faeries, sweet demons, and spirits of the unborn. Some of these narratives are moral tales, dispensing supernatural justice. But the poet also does a fine job with landscape, weather, descriptions of small towns, graveyards, houses, and nature let loose and running wild.
Read more about this book
Order this book now
 Shaking the Tree
Poems
by Jeanne Lohmann
ISBN 978-56474-493-7
96 pages, paperback, $14.00
This brave collection of poems focuses on what is to come and what remains, and how the two interact. Many of the poems are about nature—trees, of course, but also wildflowers and gardens with weeds, birds in flight, horses and dogs, the sea, the mountains. The hours of the day, from morning to night; the seasons of the year, from spring to winter and back to spring. And running throughout is an acknowledgment of time passing, the end approaching. The poet bravely accepts what is coming, even celebrates the coming of what will change us all from body back into nature. Meanwhile, until we greet that day, we greet each day. Jeanne Lohmann works with nature and listens to nature’s lessons, a lifelong practice. The lessons seem to say that each moment is to be appreciated as unique, even if the whole process is recurring and dependable. Permanent and transitory, Nature stands for our well-being. So do trees.
Read more about this book
Order information
|
