Search results for ""Guernica Editions""

Earth, 2212: The novel, third in the Against The Machine trilogy, yet free standing on its own, tells of a dystopian society in the midst of catastrophic climate change. Billions have died. The minority of people remaining inhabit the MEGs, former cities transformed by technology into huge protective domes; outside is the MASS living by subsistence. All seems well for those in the CORPORATE. It is not. With worsening climate, the MASS increasingly restive and their AI Silicons becoming sentient, those at the top have concocted a final solution: to leave Earth for Alpha Centauri, destroying the planet in their wake. Four protagonists, each from separate segments of this world, come together to attempt to prevent the plan. By the end they have managed to alter the human/machine interface, so changing human evolution.

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In October 2016 Peter Jickling left the Yukon to write in Toronto. His resulting poems document subjects ranging from subletting to subways ? illuminating quiet moments amidst noise. Sometimes sad, often funny, and always humane, Downtown Flirt is an outsider?s account of urban life.

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In math for couples, we re-visit the past to discover our place in the contemporary world. A long-dead father watches his daughter work on her Mac, a woman converses with a photo of her young self. Adele Graf leads us on a journey that is rich and hopeful, evoking powerful nostalgia even if we've never been to the places described. When these poems release us back to our current lives, we feel restored to savour the warmth in a "glad red hat" and the love that arrives "still summer lush."

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In 2005, after four months in hospitals, Dick Rayburn returns home with a limp, a disfigured face, and pain. Around tense conversations between him and his wife, Valerie, concerning their absent son, Jamie, the narrative weaves memories triggered by objects in the house. An old self-portrait draws him back to his childhood and the studio of his father, who trained Dick to be an artist, while an article critical of the Iraq War, by the journalist to whom he was engaged when they were graduate students, resurrects the person he was and the woman he loved. Dick relives his evolution from a young artist and left-wing university student to the war profiteer Valerie blames for Jamie being in Iraq, and cannot stop reliving the horror that he witnessed the day he flew into Fallujah and was shot down as his helicopter left the city. To cope with the memories that haunt him, Dick returns to his passion for painting. He paints what he saw in Fallujah, the person he feels he has become, and the loved ones he has lost. The images emerge from a deep, dark background, the principal ingredient of which is ivory black.

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The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After) is an existential meditation on grief, the kind which pins you down and minimizes you. The first half of the collection, The Vanishing Act, captures the ruminations of a mind which feels limited physically and spiritually. The imagery in this section intermingles magic and violence as the speaker confronts systemic issues as a middle-class woman, a person of colour, and a survivor of abuse.The second section, (& The Miracle After), offers a fresh perspective on recovery. In this section, the speaker revisits images of bodily harm. Objects previously used for violence are brought back to a state of benign normalcy. As spring arrives, the speaker contemplates renewal and the paradoxical nature of taking agency of her life, while knowing the act of survival is made possible only because of miraculous intervention.

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Bearing witness to women in history.A History of Touching is a poetry collection about women in folklore and history who were ill, disabled, or otherwise labelled 'hysteric.' The work bears witness to the lives of women with varying experiences, such as a woman whose epilepsy was mistaken for demonic possession, Sarah Winchester's grief, Mary Roff and her love of leeches, and the "witch", Biddy Early. There is a poem about Bridget Cleary, who upon displaying her independence was burned to death by her husband, believing her to be a changeling. The collection includes pieces on anchoresses, Rosemary Kennedy, and accused witches. A History of Touching tells the stories of 'difficult women.' Each poem discusses an aspect of or a moment in a woman's life, connecting these moments to different aspects of embodiment and the natural world. A History of Touching is an examination of women vilified or left behind for their strength or their weakness. This book uses strong poetic imagery and metaphor to elevate details drawn from real life to that of poetry. The book comprises of three sections, each drifting between biographical poetry (Scrying, about Biddy Early), experimental poetry (Projections of a Glass Womb, which manipulates the text of a midwifery textbook), fairy tale sequences (What a Pretty Sight), folklore, (Macha, Flickers) and pieces that incorporate elements of confessional poetry (Bloodletting, Whiskers).

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Celebrating life in America's fiftieth StateA father in Hawaii takes his troubled son fishing, unable to tell him the sad news he must share. A woman is lost at sea during a reef walk and sends her family into turmoil. An unlikely relationship develops between a Realtor and an Ultimate Fighting Champion. These are just some of the sad, funny and memorable characters found in the Made in Hawaii short story collection.

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A ghostly tale of family ties and madness.A young man, Ray, returns to where he was born, Weyburn, SK, after several years traveling anonymously around the country. He's recently been suffering from frightening nightmares and he feels they may have something to do with his past, especially within the walls of the abandoned former mental asylum where his father had worked and his mother had been a patient. Old loves, old wounds and old grievances are rekindled, made especially difficult by the fact that his brother is the town sheriff and is also married to Ray's former girlfriend. The presence of an older, mute, indigenous woman adds to the mystery

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A story of three loves and a journey of self-discovery.After years spent living in the Middle East, Sofia, an Italian freelance journalist, moves back to England, determined to leave her past behind and build a new life for herself and her daughter in Leeds.On a night out on the town, she meets an enigmatic Iranian man whom she is immediately drawn to, as he reminds her of her Omani ex-husbandAt first, she seems to have many things in common with him: from a difficult childhood and a rebellious personality, to a disdain for social norms and a nostalgic love for the Middle East. The two enjoy a whirlwind romance which will make her question herself and her certainties.As she relates her story to him, she will be forced to face her painful past, and make sense of it to discover a new sense of self that will change her outlook on life forever.

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This book is grounded in W. Strawn Douglas' personal battle with mental illness and his experiences with it at the mental institution where he's lived for almost three decades. Different portions of it were created in different times, with Douglas in a variety of different mindsets, and it concerns itself mainly with the hoops that the government wants people who are mentally ill to jump through in all too often vain hopes of regaining their freedom. Some of the hoops are admittedly linked to reasonable goals and ideals. Unfortunately, too many others only serve the whims of our captors, serving the traditions of abuse in the oxymoron of "forced care."

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Choosing Eleonore tells the story of a one-way friendship, of tragic loneliness. In it, award-winning Quebec author Andrée A. Gratton explores the syndrome of the delusion of being loved. Centred on two young women: Eleonore and Marianne, this is Marianne's story. From the first sentence, we feel that something is wrong in her perception of reality. "Long before we met, Eleonore had been dreaming of me," she says. But who is this Eleonore, whom Marianne had never spoken to? What is so fascinating about her? Neither humiliation and rebuffs nor rejection will disabuse Marianne of her certainty of being loved by Eleonore.

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Twelve years in America and Eziafa Okereke has nothing to show for it. Desperate to re-write his story, Eziafa returns to Nigeria to find a woman he can mold to his taste. Eighteen-year-old Zina has big dreams. An arranged marriage to a much older man isn't one of them. Trapped by family expectations, Zina marries Eziafa, moves to Houston, and trains as a nurse. Buffeted by a series of disillusions, the couple stagger through a turbulent marriage until Zina decides to change the rules of engagement.

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Why do we travel the world to discover where home really is? Even if we find it in the place we started from, is it ever really the same? In buckled into the sky, Adele Graf routes our search for home through ancestors in their own country and family who settled abroad. Yet it's only after travel that we're drawn to "zigzag back" to our "pillared front door" — whether that's our current home, our childhood home, our mind's home, our home in the world — or all of these at once. We'd left home, had even ignored our "house with its blue shutters," because, as these vivid and tender poems assure us, "it will always be there."

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In our era of #MeToo and fresh attempts to break the gender biased holds on our culture, a portrait of gender bias in the art world offers a microcosm of the pervasive challenges to achieving equality. Living Dolls and Other Women provides a fictionalized account of that world set against the pervasive sexual harassment in every corner of urban daily life. Set in the late 1980s, with New York City in the middle of a real estate crash, Living Dolls and Other Women chronicles the lives of five urban women as well as an activist organization comprised of women in the art world, the Living Dolls. Living Dolls and Other Women is an urban drama, chock full of action: crime, mystery, culture, and romance. The book takes on the contemporary issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, artistic merit, feminism, family values, and sexual preference. It delves into the main characters' lives and traces dramatic and personal transformations of each. The comical yet dead serious antics of the Living Dolls thread through the novel as the backbone of the book

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"Mays's passion for art electrifies fascinating sketches of Beuys." -Quill and QuireA brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called "Jupp". The fictional Jupp is a thinly-veiled cipher for the late real-life German artist, Joseph Beuys, and the photos in the novel are photos of the performances by the controversial Beuys. At once echoing the moody worlds of W. G. Sebald and incorporating outrageous elements of pulp fiction, this novel of dark romanticism is not for optimists seeking redemption, but for those willing to take a look into a searing heart of darkness.

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Winner of the 2021 Ottawa Book Award for English FictionIn her debut collection of poetry, Conyer Clayton hovers in the ether, grasping wildly for a fleeting sense of certitude. Through experiences with addiction and co-dependence, sex and art, nature and death, she grapples for transcendence while exploring what it means to disengage. What is revealed when you allow yourself to truly feel? What do you ask for to carry you into life, and where do you land when this fails? And when you are finally, beautifully, emptied out, who are you? The poems in We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite wonder aloud amidst tangled revelations, and yearn to be lifted away.

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Kessaris manages to convey a sense of shared history through the prose itself, bringing the Montreal immigrant experience to life with wry humour and painstaking attention to detail. —Montreal Review of BooksThe Butcher of Park Ex is a humorous collection of personal stories inspired by the author's life growing up in Montreal's Park Extension neighbourhood, with Greek immigrant parents who never quite adapted to life in their new country. Never really fitting in with his ethnic community, and never feeling like part of mainstream Quebec or Canadian society, he sets out on an over forty-year search for answers, encountering amazingly interesting people and unique misadventures while trying to navigate a world where he is constantly the odd man out.

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A property harbouring a gruesome secret goes up for sale. Two men—perhaps, the wrong men—are shot in plain daylight. Nothing is what it seems. And matters do not turn out as anticipated. De Angelis, an inscrutable northerner, is travelling to a small town perched somewhere in Sicily’s hinterland to negotiate a real estate transaction, only to find himself embroiled in a criminal conspiracy. While en route, the train he’s on mysteriously breaks down, forcing him to spend the night in a squalid whistle stop. What follows is a web of unsettling events, involving child prostitution and brazen killings, leading to the abrupt demise of his business deal. But De Angelis is undeterred and intent on discovering what went wrong with his transaction. As he embarks on a reckless sleuthing, an unexpected turn of events sends him into a tailspin. At the heart of it is an alluring blue-eyed girl, Marinella. The chance encounter with the eleven-year-old traps him in a psychological and moral cul-de-sac, leaving him no choice but to confront the type of man he really is. Told in a cinematic, darkly humorous genre-bending prose, The Transaction traces De Angelis’ Kafkaesque descent into deviancy.

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River is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who travels back in time, and across continents, encountering her maternal forbears when they were her age. From the Australian Outback, where she meets a young Aboriginal man, to racist, rigidly segregated South Africa during World War II, to the midst of a pogrom in Lithuania, and then all the way back to the Babylon of biblical times, Emily has deep encounters with the young women she meets, as well as with the history that shapes them -- and ultimately, the histories that have mysteriously and yet powerfully shaped her own soul.

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Tragedy at Montreal's End of the World restaurant. A little marriage fatigue, a cottage to sell and a woman in cashmere: suddenly twenty seven years of conjugal life are swept away. Jean-Charles has left his wife. And with her goes the charm the restaurant possessed, where simple food was served to simple people. Sleepless Nights and Days of Glory, the third volume in Hélène Rioux's Fragments of the World series, opens with the theme of abandonment and betrayal, and then takes the reader around the world.

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Telescope is a story cycle about Lawrence Teitel, the protagonist of Living Room (Boheme Press, 2001). The collection deals with seeing distances: above all, the growing distancing of Lawrence's family as they cope with new challenges and Lawrence's own maturation, physical and spiritual. The cycle is made up of nine stories, each covering a different stage in Lawrence's development after his family has moved from their old neighbourhood in Montreal to a somewhat wealthier suburb, Ville St. Laurent.

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The poems in The Massacre Confirmed Our Worst Suspicions were written over a 25-year period between about 1993 and 2018. They were written as they came to me. Where they came from I have no idea. Something strikes me, bugs me for a period of time, and gets written as a kind of relief. The poems seem, to me, to be a curious mixture of whimsy, longing and outrage about the passage of time, memory, relics, unrequited love and death. Most of them, if not all, are more or less objective, or attempt to be. This is because of a conscious effort by me to strip personal pronouns from my poems. The damn things get in the way. They say, in effect, that the poet has had some ultra-special experience that the reader can't possibly have had, and that the poet, in her or his magnanimity, has deigned to bestow them on less special people. I think of myself as a reporter whose reporting just happens to take the form of poems.

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When thirty-two-year-old Eric Boulanger returns to his Vermont hometown to care for his mother, he attempts to revive the town's failing economy by drumming up a contest that will offer a free wedding. The winner is Bostonian Ryan Toscano whose fiancé has left to become a Jesuit, but whose beloved, outspoken, Jewish grandmother insists she find a substitute in time for the gala affair. Eric's well-intentioned brainstorm sets three millennials on an –at times hilarious at times painful– odyssey of self-discovery, one, full of surprises amid deceptions, that forces them and an entire town to confront their notions of faith and death, love and acceptance.

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French journalist Marc Taragon is at the apex of his career in 2007. A tenacious idealist, Taragon has spent the last thirty years attempting to bring to readers the truths about the wars and political intrigues of the region. He is unsparing in his criticism of extremists and has earned many enemies. He agrees to be interviewed in Cyprus, by a young Canadian journalist, Marie Boivin, not knowing that Marie has a hidden agenda: to discover through Taragon the truth about her childhood.Before Marie finds the answers she seeks, she is enmeshed in Taragon's plan to broker peace negotiations between a left-wing Israeli politician and a dissident Palestinian leader. Taragon succeeds in persuading the two adversaries to agree to an ambitious peace plan. The action then moves quickly through Europe and the Middle East as Taragon and his associates try to stay one step ahead of deadly opponents of their initiative.Parallel to the main plot is the narrative of Taragon's early years as a journalist in war-torn Lebanon, his bonds to his partners in the peace initiative and Marie Boivin's tragic childhood.

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A tour guide leads a Valentine's Day-themed ghost walk, visiting the sites of horrific, yet romantic, deaths. A homicide cop solves tough cases using tips from his plants. Scientists discover a new species of religiously observant gophers, and a young math whiz, on the hunt for her escaped boa constrictor, ponders the theory of multiple worlds. Replete with dark humour and cheeky interrogations of philosophy and metaphysics, the thirty-three stories in How to Tell if Your Frog is Dead expose the fundamental absurdity of the human condition.

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Bartholomew the Englishman was a 13th century Franciscan friar and scholar whose only surviving work, De proprietatibus rerum (The Properties of Things), was intended as an encyclopaedia of the world. The Herb Garden is an imaginary representation of what his herbarium might have looked like. The dialect of the collection is a mix of middle and modern English, a verbal florilegium meant to explore the exuberant richness of the English language that much of contemporary poetry has scanted or forgotten. The collection is also conceived as a kind of "sapiential book," a form of counsel literature or life manual with an emphasis on everyday practice and the poet's craft.

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A new Interpretation and a new English Translation with the original Portuguese EditionThe story of The Anarchist Banker takes place in a Lisbon café where the narrator meets an old friend, now a wealthy banker. He questions his friend about his anarchist origins and discovers to his amazement that the banker still considers himself to be an anarchist. The story revolves around the banker's vigorous defense of his position and his assertion that he is the only genuine anarchist among the banker's so-called anarchist friends. This is a bilingual English/Portuguese edition.

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Four strong women: Anjali, an Indo-Canadian single mother who eagerly accepts an African posting with her non-profit organization; Grace, her dedicated but dominating colleague, who opposes her; Fatimah, a farmer ousted from her home and fertile farmland, whom Anjali befriends; and Mary, Anjali's kindly maid, who must secure the future of her son, Gabriel. In Land for Fatimah, Anjali involves herself in Fatimah's quest to find new land for her scattered community, and is thrown into a web of intrigue that upturns her safe, orderly world. Capturing the warmth and vitality of Africa, illuminating everyday heroism, the novel explores expat life, the forced displacement of the poor and the complexities of development.

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Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife addresses themes of destiny and the repercussions of our choices. Before she dies, actress Alma Joncas instructs her husband to bury her ashes where she was happiest. He decides that was their garden. But relatives, friends and Alma's colleagues disagree. After they tell him where they think she was happiest, not only is he no longer sure about the garden, he wonders if he truly knew the woman he was married to for twenty-four years.

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A Voluntary Crucifixion traces the story of 20th century Canada through the MacKinnon clan and David J MacKinnon?s life. Disillusioned with the slow death of the soul promised by life at a major Montreal law firm, MacKinnon ripped himself untimely from the profession, making a personal vow to discover society "from the bottom up". A Voluntary Crucifixion recounts the tale of MacKinnon?s adventures and misadventures from post-Tiananmen Hong Kong to various ports of call in the Indian Ocean, offering MacKinnon?s views on everything from censorship to indigenous issues, all of which reflect his life ethos that the key to life is to refuse to adapt, and to fight tooth-and-nail for every square inch of your freedom before others wrench it from you.

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The longstanding challenge and problem of living through tragedy, as opposed to living beyond it or simply carrying on in spite of it, is highlighted in this extensive and in-depth scholarly study. Shakespeare was able to live through tragedy and consequently could come into those higher evolutionary states of mind and being, until now so little known, that are so impressively represented in his last plays.

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The second part of Book I of "The Canticles" continues the dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- of those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of the Negro in the Occident; as well as those who struggled for liberation and/or anti-racism. In this work, Dante can critique Christopher Columbus and Frederick Douglass can upbraid Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Barrett Browning can muse on her African racial heritage and its implications for child-bearing, while Karl Marx can excoriate Queen Victoria. Book II will focus on Black folk readings of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, with a few other religious texts canvassed too. Book III will narrate the rise of the African Baptist Association of Nova Scotia.

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Thin is the line between dreaming and wakefulness, wellness and disorder, here and there, this and that. Elana Wolff's poems illuminate the porousness of states and relations, the connective compulsion of poetic perception, in language that blends the oracular and the everyday, the elliptical and the lucent, the playful and the heart-raking. The de- and re-constructive workings of the poems in Everything Reminds You of Something Else argue for empathy and attentiveness. At the core of this work is the belief that art is the sanest rage.

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Max has been a freelance reporter dodging bullets in Latin America, a small-time newspaper editor who delights in infuriating his publisher and, finally, a flack for a communications company -- the elephant's graveyard for journalists. But none of this compares with the terrors of assisted living, so instead Max risks everything on something he's kept secret until recently: his increasingly unreliable ability to travel in time. In turn laugh-out-loud and poignant, replete with dark humour, sarcasm, wise-cracking characters and satire, this debut novel is going to ring some bells and stir some pots.

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Charles Mingus, the renowned musician, composer and civil rights activist, claimed to be three people, was married to one of his wives by Ginsberg, and collaborated with such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Joni Mitchell. Twelve of the poems in A Mingus Lullaby explore moments in his life, compositions, performances, or are part of a fictional conversation between Mingus and the author. Themes from his life permeate throughout the collection.

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The stories in this collection centre around new immigrants ? spirited people who are prepared to leave their home and hearth to travel to distant lands to pursue their dreams of a better life. But often times there?s a reality check , and they are left to grapple with unexpected challenges of cultural shock, paucity of jobs, lack of Canadian work experience, absence of affordable daycare, and non-recognition of their educational credentials. Though the accounts are fictional they show the determination of new immigrants to survive on alien soil.

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From the drunk tank to the graduate seminar, We Are No Longer The Smart Kids In Class asks what it means to think and be, play and learn, ride bikes and make love in a world of depleting resources, technological proliferation, and corroding ecosystems. This collection contemplates moustaches, mountains, and oceans from Halifax to Victoria, always wondering how poetry matters to the heaving, melting, masturbating world it dramatizes.

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Frank Lentricchia was born to working-class parents in Utica, New York, on May 23rd in 1940. He earned his M.A. from Duke University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in 1966. His first two books were about modern poetry, and he then began to write more about literary theory, publishing his ground-breaking books in the early 1980's. Lentricchia served as the editor of two book series, one for The University of Chicago Press (The Wellek Library Lectures), and one for the University of Wisconsin Press (The Wisconsin Project on American Writing.) During these years, he began to drift from his previous work in theory. Lentricchia's first non-scholarly book, The Edge of Night, was published in 1994, and he soon followed with his much-noted essay in Lingua Franca, 'Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic,' his farewell to certain types of academic criticism and theory. Though he did not completely abandon literary comment, Lentricchia from then on devoted himself to fiction.

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Alina has red hair, green eyes and an extraordinary intelligence: at the age of two, she can already read and count. She loves to surgically dissect the world around her and listen to the stories that her grandfather Giuseppe tells her, as they wander through the alleys and rocky coastline of Polignano.Hers is an atypical childhood, always poised between genius and discomfort, skipped life stages and looming bullying. Because she is always the youngest one, the best one, the strongest and most fragile one at the same time. A fish out of water with intellectual and sensory "superpowers", with depression and anorexia always lurking. Until Nicola arrives to break her crystal ball.A love that is as strong as it is socially unacceptable and that will mark the beginning of her real life, of her forced growth, of her precocious blossoming into a strong woman, capable of loving and suffering. This is the story of Alina and of her way of being, living with Asperger's syndrome, in a crescendo of emotions "differently" felt between Polignano, Milan and Paris, to then return to the starting point: the twelfth room.

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The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald's novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby's great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.

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The dozen stories in this collection chronicle the life of Karl Pringle, a wannabe philosopher who had once been enrolled in the graduate Philosophy program at the University of Toronto where he imagined himself as an Ubermensch, a Superman derived from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. But he was summarily dismissed from the program after punching out his academic supervisor. Now Karl lives in a decrepit apartment above a butcher shop in Toronto's Kensington Market, is unemployed and very much rootless. The stories in The Philosopher Stories follow Karl as he moves from one strange episode to another, none of which end well. Although Karl likes to think of himself as an Ubermensch, in the bleakest moments following his many mishaps, he seems to know better, that perhaps he is only fooling himself with his grandiose dreams. That he is nothing more than one of life's rejects, an out-and-out failure. Nuanced and multilayered, funny and yet achingly sad, these stories depict a yo

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Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness is Danila Botha's third collection of short fiction. In these thirteen brilliant stories, she observes with her signature vulnerability and humour what it's like not to fit in. From a photographer teaching English in the Middle East (Sometimes I Like to Shoot Kids) to a chalk eating South African immigrant teen, who struggles to fit in (Nothing My Parents Taught me Turned Out to be True) to a neurodiverse travel agent who is tired of pretending to be like everyone else (Congratulations on Everything) to a woman who fakes a pregnancy (All Good Things Take Time) and an artist with a desperate need to communicate during the pandemic (There's Something I've Been Meaning To Say To You), these stories pulse with the empathy and originality Botha has become known for. As in her previous collection, the Trillium and Vine nominated For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I've Known, Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness will make you laugh, and cry

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Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor's poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child's visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.

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The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato's family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.

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Once Our Lives is the true story of four generations of Chinese women and how their lives were threatened by powerful and cruel ancient traditions, historic upheavals, and a man whose fate – cursed by an ancient superstition – dramatically altered their destinies. The book takes the reader on an exotic journey filled with luxurious banquets, lost jewels, babies sold in opium dens, kidnappings by pirates, and a desperate flight from death in the desert – seen through the eyes of a man for whom the truth would spell disaster and a lonely, beautiful girl with three identities.

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This flip book features two separate novellas: In Sickness and In Health: Lily's most cherished goal in life has always been to be normal, so as an adult she has painstakingly constructed a normal life for herself, with family, friends, and career. But her need to keep hidden her invisible disability, due to its stigma and her shame, now threatens to destroy everything she has worked so hard for. Yom Kippur in a Gym: Five isolated strangers in a synagogue on Yom Kippur a day of intense reflection and soul-searching are each struggling with a major personal crisis, when unexpectedly they are thrown together by an emergency that, in one hour, changes all their lives forever.

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Enter the cross-cultural tale of gusto and enchantment, adaptation and loss, preserving the old ways of making a life. Presented in six acts with intermissions and curtain calls, it is a new form of literature presented in interactive libretto form. Read it silently, read it out loud, or step upon the imaginary stage of all life to commandeer the operatic recitative called sing/speak. Il Vagabondo is a love story-an opera rusticana of the people, by the people, for the people. It is all true.

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Almost daily scientists are sounding dire warnings about the effects of climate change. Our young will bear an unprecedented burden. They are eager to discover what can be done, as time slips away. But few of them – or us – are aware that global warming is but one facet of a looming planetary catastrophe. Most of the natural and social systems humans depend on for survival are also in various stages of collapse. Each failure will impact the other systems, including climate, in a series of feedback loops that can unleash a virtual tsunami of destruction, and do so far sooner than climate scientists, looking only at their own discipline, predict. The corona virus pandemic has shown how unprepared we are. Multiply its effects times 10, times 50, to get an idea of what's coming. We have entered what scientists term a "critical state," at the brink of an unstable precipice. The smallest push or pull, from any direction, could suddenly topple us. Despite the global scale of the emergency, its root causes are predominantly human and surprisingly simple. With courage to act, we can slow the devastating cascade and, perhaps, even reverse some of the worst impacts.

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