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By Steven Wishnia. 2012
Bass player and rapidly aging punk rocker Underend Vicodini is an unlikely hero. He loves New York City like nobody's…
business but does it still love him despite his lack of affluence and influence? His former band, The Gutter Astronomers, was riding high in the 1980s, releasing albums and touring across the country playing to packed nightclubs filled with eager fans, but the Great Recession finds the band members middle-aged and struggling not to drown in the seas of gentrification and disillusion. When lead singer Mickey gets an offer to reunite the band, he jumps at it. But can the old bandmates overcome their acrimonious break up? Can they get back into it without shredding their lives? Can Underend Vicodini find inner peace and, more importantly, a reasonably priced apartment below 14th Street or in Brooklyn? Steven Wishnia is a New York-based musician and journalist. Born on the Lower East Side, he grew up in Brooklyn, New England, Edinburgh, and Long Island. He has played in numerous bands, including the False Prophets, an eclectic punk group that recorded two albums released by Alternative Tentacles. After the False Prophets broke up in 1987, he earned an MA at New York University's School of Journalism, writing for failing newspapers before working for many years as news editor at High Times. Recipient of two New York City Independent Press Association awards, he currently works as a freelance writer and editor, most often for AlterNet.org and Junior Scholastic, and often performs musically with artist Mac McGill.By Ben Pastor. 2012
FOURTH IN THE MARTIN BORA SERIES.SPELLBINDING MULTI-LAYERED CRIME NOVEL SET IN UKRAINE AS THE GERMANS REGROUP AFTER THE DISASTER OF…
STALINGRAD.FOR FANS OF PHILLIP KERR (BERNIE GUNTHER SERIES), ALAN FURST (SPIES OF THE BALKANS).THE HERO, MAJOR MARTIN BORA, IS AN ARISTOCRATIC GERMAN OFFICER OF THE ILK OF CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG, TORN BETWEEN HIS DUTY AS AN OFFICER AND HIS INTEGRITY AS A HUMAN BEING.Ukraine, 1943. Having barely escaped the inferno of Stalingrad, Major Martin Bora is serving on the Russian front as a German counterintelligence officer. Weariness, disillusionment, and battle fatigue are a soldier's daily fare, yet Bora seems to be one of the few whose sanity is not marred by the horrors of war.As the Wehrmacht prepare for the Kursk counter-offensive, a Russian general defects aboard a T-34, the most advanced tank of the war. Soon he and another general, this one previously captured, are found dead in their cells. Everything appears to exclude the likelihood of foul play, but Bora begins an investigation, in a stubborn attempt to solve a mystery that will come much too close to home.By Jacob White. 2013
Stories of the modern South, of people who no longer recognize themselves, who have arrived, like the Sunbelt itself, to…
a strange day that seems disconnected from all the old days, the old stories. Yet it's on this day we must always answer for ourselves&emdash;right an overturned car, recover a brother's body, convince a son of our worth and his.By George Singleton. 2012
My dog Tapeworm Johnson needed legitimate veterinary attention. It had been two years since she received annual shots. I read…
somewhere that an older dog can overdose on all these vaccinations, and I have found--I share this information with every dog owner I meet--that if you keep your pet away from rabid foxes, raccoons, skunks, bats, and people whose eyes rotate crazy in their sockets, then the chances of your own dog foaming at the mouth diminishes drastically. I also believe that dogs don't need microchips imbedded beneath their shoulder blades if you keep the dog leashed or in the house, or with the truck windows rolled up when you drive around showing the dog farm animals living in pastures. I brought this up to Dr. Page one time, back four years earlier when Tapeworm Johnson was somewhere between eight and nine. Tapeworm showed up at my door one morning, her ribs as visible as anything you'd order down at Clem and Lyda's Barbecue Shack off Scenic Highway 11, her paw pads split open from, I assumed, days traveling from wherever her conscienceless owner dropped her off. Eleven stories, all previously published in journals like The Atlantic, The Oxford American, and The Georgia Review, in which George Singleton brings small-town South Carolina alive. Using everyday situations like a dog needing its annual vaccination and buckets of humorous observations, Singleton pokes and prods his readers into realizing we're all simply restless for a pat on the head.By Diana Wagman. 2012
Winnie Parker, mother to an angst-ridden teenage daughter and ex-wife to a successful game show host who left her for…
a twenty-something contestant, begins a normal day in her hum-drum existence by dropping her car off at the repair shop. After accepting what she believes is a ride to pick up her rental car, Winnie realizes too late that she's been kidnapped.What follows is a riveting psychological game of cat and mouse set in the kidnapper's tropically heated house-kept that way for Cookie, a menacing seven-foot long Iguana headquartered in the kitchen. While desperately seeking to escape-which leads to several violent clashes with her increasingly unstable kidnapper-Winnie also tries to understand why she was taken captive. Is her kidnapper merely seeking a ransom or does he have something more sinister in mind? Does he know that Winnie's mother is an Oscar-winning actress? Or did he connect her with Jonathan, her famous ex-husband? When the truth reveals itself, Winnie is not only forced to fight for her life, but must also protect the lives of those she loves from the kidnapper's deranged master plan.An engrossing, darkly humorous, edge-of-your-seat story, The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets explores the dynamic between kidnapper and kidnapped, bizarre reptile lore, and the absurdity of the celebrity lifestyle.Diana Wagman is the author of the novels Bump, Spontaneous-which won the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction-and Skin Deep. She is also a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times.By Rob Funderburk, Michael Czyzniejewski. 2012
For everyone who's always wondered what would happen if Roger Ebert had taken Oprah Winfrey to a critics' screening of…
Revenge of The Nerds for their second date..In Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions by Michael Czyzniejewski, each story is told in the persona of a famous Chicagoan, from Mrs. O'Leary to Barack Obama.Illustrated by Chicago artist Rob FunderburkBy David Kranes. 2013
A 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award Winner"In this exceptional collection of stories set mostly in Idaho in the deep backwoods…
along river banks and lonely county roads, Kranes' characters are all thrown out of their comfort zones. And so is the reader. Richly drawn and complex, these stories challenge the intellect. Kranes has managed to somehow dam the river of souls these stories possess. They do not lie still, however, between the covers but rather spin in far-reaching whirlpools of genuine humanity and mortality."-15 Bytes"There's something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What's remarkable about David Kranes's writing and these stories, though, is that each story stands out on its own merit, while every story is well crafted and conceived. Nothing one-dimensional about his people, nothing one dimensional about his prose, either."-ForeWord Reviews"From rainbow trout jumping in the Salmon River to watering holes on the edge of McCall Lake, each of the ten stories in author and playwright David Kranes's The Legend's Daughter transports the reader to the wilderness of Eastern Idaho. While Kranes renders a common setting in each story, the collection is not simply a detailed portrait of Idaho, but an examination of the lives of restless people seeking to escape from their lives and find peace."-ZYZZYVA"The Legend's Daughter is a story collection of real people struggling with identity, with love, with time, rooted in the rugged and indifferent beauty of Idaho where each character finds his or her mirror in water, in stone, in place. David Kranes shows how our tenacious love of life can transform any situation, large or small, into alchemy. We are all living inside these raw and well-drawn pages."-Terry Tempest Williams, author of When Women Were Birds"These Idaho stories are vintage David Kranes. He, more than any other writer, is the one whose work spurs me to reconsider what fiction can do. He uses language like a knife and the worlds in his stories come off the page at me. We haven't seen this Idaho before. I'm thrilled to have these stories, every one of them provocative, riveting, and robust."-Ron Carlson, author of The Signal"In these times of disconnection, David Kranes lassoes us with the delicate tether of his multiple gifts and brings us home . . . a storyteller and an elegant craftsman."-Mary Sojourner"David Kranes has given us ten stories, entirely various, often splendid, sometimes hilarious or heartbreaking."-William Kittredge, author of The Willow FieldBy Mark Maynard. 2012
Convicts round up wild mustangs, a schizophrenic homeless man wins the jackpot and disappears, a truck driver with a child's…
mind spends his last hours in the embrace of a prostitute's photos-disparate and vivid, Mark Maynard's characters intersect in the new wild west of Reno, Nevada."Throughout the volume's eight tenuously linked tales, lives and fortune are lost, and the city of Reno emerges as a locus of shattered souls. Maynard's debut collection bursts with idiosyncratic characters...packs a strong emotional punch...is strangely entertaining."-Publishers Weekly"In Grind, Maynard reveals a world the Nevada tourism board would rather you didn't see...A debut collection of stories that perfectly captures the seediness, desperation and sense of loss permeating the hot desert world of Reno."-Shelf Awareness"Mark Maynard's Reno is so sleazily appealing, so filled with convict cowboys, wild horses, racing pilots, truckers, snow bums, eco-terrorists, tattoo conventions, pawnshops and jackpots that you emerge from reading Grind dazed by this author's empathy for neglected quarters of humanity. You feel gritty all over-and more alive."-Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution"The characters in these stories are as beautiful and broken as the desert itself. Mark Maynard explores the stony truths of lost lives with an unflinching eye for detail, an insider's sense of the place and its people, and an honest compassion. The heartbreaks here are real, as are the moments of uncommon grace and hard-won redemption."-Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men"Mark Maynard's Grind is chock full of men and women who are desperate with want and full of spirit. Pawnbrokers. Truckers. Casino shills. Prison inmates. They're all here, and they're all gloriously alive. This is prime American fiction-tough, generous, and open-eyed."-Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto"Grind is exactly what I like in a locally based book. Plenty of those characters who make a visit to the environs of Reno both an exciting potential and an illicit affair...This is a Northern Nevada book."-D. Brian Burghart, Reno News & ReviewBy Jacques Chessex, Donald Wilson. 1973
Praise for A Jew Must Die:"Chessex, our new Flaubert, has no equal when describing horror without flinching, screaming sotto voce…
and exploring guilt in taut prose."--Le Nouvel Observateur"A masterpiece. Beauty of the world, ubiquity of evil, God's silence, it's all there, delivered like a slap to the face."--Le Point"A great author explores a nightmare not as anachronistic as it might appear."--L'HebdoA novel based on a true story.On April 16, 1942, a handful of Swiss Nazis in Payerne lure Arthur Bloch, a Jewish cattle merchant, into an empty stable and kill him with a crowbar. Europe is in flames, but this is Switzerland, and Payerne, a rural market town of butchers and bankers, is more worried about unemployment and local bankruptcies than the fate of nations across the border. Fernand Ischi, leader of the local Nazi cell, blames it all on the town's Jewish population and wants to set an example, thinking the German embassy would be grateful. Ischi's dream of becoming the local gauleiter is shattered, however, when the milk containers used to dissimulate Bloch's body parts is discovered floating in a lake nearby, leading to his arrest.Jacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, is one of Switzerland's greatest authors. He knew the murderers, went to school with their children, and has written a terse, implacable story that has awakened memories in a country that seems to endlessly rediscover dark areas of its past.By Richard Ammon. 1989
Anna and her family live on a farm, but they don't have tractors or electricity. The "old fashioned" clothing of…
men and women, boys and girls doesn't have zippers or buttons. Anna is Amish, and here is the story of what her life is like day to day. Anna and other Amish children attend their own school, they raise farm animals and do farm chores without modern technology. They wear their distinctive clothing every day and attend long church services every other Sunday. Anna's life is a full and satisfying one. She and her family work hard, but they play, too. There are picnics, excursions, a trip to buy a new horse, school parties, and sports like hockey, volleyball, skating, sledding, baseball, and fishing. There are indoor games, books to read, songs to sing, and good food to eat. Along with Anna's story, this book includes recipes, songs, poems, and games so that the reader will better understand and appreciate the Amish--a group of very special people who only accept from the modern world those things that do not interfere with their way of life.By Steven Horwitz, Julie Schaper. 2013
"Local editors Schaper and Horwitz have assembled a noteworthy collection of noir-infused stories mixed with laughter...The Akashic noir short-story anthologies…
are avidly sought and make ideal samplers for regional mystery collecting."--Library Journal"The best pieces in the collection turn the clichés of the genre on their head . . . and despite the unseemly subject matter, the stories are often surprisingly funny."-City Pages (Minneapolis)Brand-new stories from John Jodzio, Tom Kaczynski, and Peter Schilling, Jr., in addition to the original volume's stories by David Housewright, Steve Thayer, Judith Guest, Mary Logue, Bruce Rubenstein, K.J. Erickson, William Kent Krueger, Ellen Hart, Brad Zellar, Mary Sharratt, Pete Hautman, Larry Millett, Quinton Skinner, Gary Bush, and Chris Everheart."St. Paul was originally called Pig's Eye's Landing and was named after Pig's Eye Parrant--trapper, moonshiner, and proprietor of the most popular drinking establishment on the Mississippi. Traders, river rats, missionaries, soldiers, land speculators, fur trappers, and Indian agents congregated in his establishment and made their deals. When Minnesota became a territory in 1849, the town leaders, realizing that a place called Pig's Eye might not inspire civic confidence, changed the name to St. Paul, after the largest church in the city . . . Across the river, Minneapolis has its own sordid story. By the turn of the twentieth century it was considered one of the most crooked cities in the nation. Mayor Albert Alonzo Ames, with the assistance of the chief of police, his brother Fred, ran a city so corrupt that according to Lincoln Steffans its 'deliberateness, invention, and avarice has never been equaled.' As recently as the mid-'90s, Minneapolis was called 'Murderopolis' due to a rash of killings that occurred over a long hot summer . . . Every city has its share of crime, but what makes the Twin Cities unique may be that we have more than our share of good writers to chronicle it. They are homegrown and they know the territory--how the cities look from the inside, out . . ."By Ben Pastor. 2014
Praise for the Martin Bora series:"The tone of Liar Moon has a flu-like grimness, appropriate the 1943 setting. Pastor is…
excellent at providing details (silk stockings, movie magazines, cigarettes) that light up the setting."-Booklist"Lumen's plot is well crafted, her prose shap . . . a disturbing mix of detection and reflection."-Publisher's WeeklyRome, 1944. While the Allies are fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, Rome lives the last days of Nazi occupation. Their world is falling apart as the German Army, the Gestapo, and the SS vie for power while holding glittering and debauched parties. But this is also a time of Italian partisan attacks, arrests, and mass executions, all to the sound of Allied artillery bombardment just outside the walls of the city.Baron Martin von Bora, an officer in the Wehrmacht, has the complex and delicate task of solving not one, but three murders. A young German embassy secretary has "accidentally" fallen to her death from a fourth-floor window, and a Roman society lady and a headstrong cardinal of the Roman Curia are found dead in her apartment. The cardinal is personally known to Bora and, like the officer, secretly active in the resistance against the Third Reich. With Italian police inspector Sandro Guidi at his side, Bora sets off to establish the truth. Different as they are, the two men confront crime, war, and dictatorship in the awareness that the dignity of man comes at a price beyond all imagination.By Ben Pastor. 2001
Praise for Ben Pastor's Lumen: "Pastor's plot is well crafted, her prose sharp. . . . A disturbing mix of…
detection and reflection."--Publishers Weekly "Rivets the reader with its twist of historical realities. A historical piece, it faithfully reproduces the grim canvas of war. A character study, it captures the thoughts and actions of real people, not stereotypes."--The Free Lance-Star "And don't miss Lumen by Ben Pastor. . . . An interesting, original, and melancholy tale."--Literary Review Italy, September 1943. The Italian government switches sides and declares war on Germany. The north of Italy is controlled by the fascist puppets of Germany; the south liberated by Allied forces fighting their way up the peninsula. Having survived hell on the Russian front, Wehrmacht major and aristocrat Baron Martin von Bora is sent to Verona. He is ordered to investigate the murder of a prominent local fascist: a bizarre death threatening to discredit the regime's public image. The prime suspect is the victim's twenty-eight-year-old widow Clara. Haunted by his record of opposition to SS policies in Russia, Bora must watch his step. Against the backdrop of relentless anti-partisan warfare and the tragedy of the Holocaust, a breathless chase begins. Ben Pastor, born and now back in Italy, lived for thirty years in the United States, working as a university professor in Vermont. The first in the Martin Bora series, Lumen, was published by Bitter Lemon Press in May 2011.By Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.By Michael Garland. 2017
*Notable Social Studies Trade Books Selection for Young People 2018* “I was six years old the day we left the…
farm in Mississippi,” remembers Cassie in this richly textured picture book. “Between the boll weevils, the floods, and the landlord, there was no way a family could scratch out a living there anymore.” Packing themselves into an old jalopy—with Daddy, Uncle Vern, and Mama in the front seat and Cassie and her two brothers in the back—they joined the Great Migration from the impoverished Deep South to Chicago, where there was work to be had in the stockyards. Across the kids’ laps lay Daddy’s prized possession, a six-string guitar. Daddy worked hard to put food on the table, but what he really loved was playing the blues. This evocative tale of the African-American odyssey in search of a better life is also a homage to the uniquely American music that developed from African music and American spirituals, work songs, and folk ballads. In the book’s backmatter, Garland relates how he first heard and fell in love with blues music, beginning a lifelong fandom. Portraits and thumbnail biographies of great blues musicians and landmark songs complete this tribute to the great American music and the yearnings that produced it. Fountas & Pinnell Level SBy Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.By Ben Pastor. 1999
Equal parts wartime political intrigue, detective story, psychological thriller and religious mystery, Pastor's debut follows a German army captain and…
a Chicago priest as they investigate the death of a nun in Nazi-occupied Poland. Stunned by the violence of the occupation and by the ideology of his colleagues, Bora's sense of Prussian duty is tested to the breaking point.By Devorah Gurwitz. 2019
Discover which civilization made the first pizza. Was it the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, or Romans? Also discover who made the…
first round, flat bread—considered to be the pizza we all eat today!By Lisa Rowe Fraustino. 2001
By Riyukta Raghunath. 2020
This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary…
genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.