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Two brothers. One mother. One big question.
Phillip, along with his brother Spencer, has grown up believing that they were Jewish-American. After their mother's death, the brothers decide to take DNA tests, and the surprising results send them on a genetic treasure hunt in search of who they really are—and what that might mean. Are they purely products of their genetics; or were they formed more completely by their social interactions and upbringing? And who, exactly, is Mr. Wizard?
"The writing is knowing and engaging, wise about its cultural orientations, and driven to discoveries both reassuring and life-enhancing." —Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor Emeritus, The Atlantic
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Winter in Chicago
by David M. Hamlin
Winter Gets Hot
by David M. Hamlin
Historical Fiction
The Singing Bones
by Stephen Spotte
The Singing Bones recounts the life and times of eighteenth century polymath and explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, the first European naturalist to visit Alaska.
A blend of narrative adventure and biography, this historical first-person novel chronicles the professional visions and conflicted life of a deeply fascinating, flawed, and courageous man who devoted everything to advancing the frontiers of science and improving the lives of the native Siberians.
Copper Sky
by Milana Marsenich
Set in the Copper Camp of Butte, Montana in 1917, Copper Sky tells the story of two women with opposite lives. Kaly Shane, mired in prostitution, struggles to find a safe home for her unborn child, while Marika Lailich, a Slavic immigrant, dodges a pre-arranged marriage to become a doctor. As their paths cross, and they become unlikely friends, neither knows the family secret that ties them together.
The Irrationalist
by Andrew Pessin
The sad life and tragic murder of René Descartes, the world’s most famous philosopher.
Who would want to murder the world’s most famous philosopher? Turns out: nearly everyone.
In 1649, Descartes was invited by the Queen of Sweden to become her Court Philosopher. Though he was the world’s leading philosopher, his life had by this point fallen apart. He was 53, penniless, living in exile in Amsterdam, alone. With much trepidation but not much choice, he arrived in Stockholm in mid-October. Shortly thereafter he was dead.
The Ballet Lover by Barbara L. Baer exposes the beauty and cruelty of the ballet world.
As the orchestra plays the first ominous note of Swan Lake, Geneva, an American journalist and ballet lover, waits for the heart-stopping beauty and seduction of the romantic duet to start, but instead she witnesses Rudolf Nureyev failing to catch his Russian partner Natalia Makarova. The Ballet Lover is a refined, mesmerizing, fictional account of two of the most celebrated dancers in the dance world, how one compromised the other, and how the drama on the stage often mirrors those played out in real life.
Witchy Illusions
by Stephen Spotte
She's a comely, kick-ass witch who won't be put to the stake easily!
Witchy Illusions recounts the trial of Mademoiselle Ambrosine, a girl of fifteen accused of witchcraft in France in autumn 1515. During Mademoiselle Ambrosine's trial, justice plays out erratically, and nothing is ever clear. The proceeding turns increasingly opaque and the issues become more convoluted and muddled by legal precedent. Arguments about God’s will, mankind’s place in nature, and whether demons defecate and have erections obscure focus on the central issue of the defendant's practice of witchcraft. These and similar metaphysical issues puzzle and invigorate everyone, the court and spectators alike, and it becomes evident that Institoris might have met his match in Mademoiselle Ambrosine.
Rosemary in Bloom
by Khristy Reibel
What if war separated you from your true love? What if you married the wrong man? What if the power of love brought you together again?
Inspired by a true story, Rosemary in Bloom explores faith, forgiveness, enduring love against all odds, and the difficult decisions that strong, smart women on the home front had to make during World War II.
Mysteries & Thrillers
Whine & Cheese Cozy Mystery Series: Judy Volhart
There’s something cheesy going on around here…
Thirty-year-old Amalia Kis just opened a new bistro that specializes in selling mouth-watering platters of cheeses, salamis, artisan breads and wines with quirky names like Broke Ass, Well Hung and The Accomplice.
But when she’s greeted by the body of the local town hoarder hanging from the coat hooks at her bistro, she finds herself in the midst of an unsavory murder investigation, and her plans for success are quickly thwarted.
Before dawn in January, 1975, Emily Winter detours from her normal route to work in the newsroom of Chicago’s top pop rock station to investigate a crime scene. The police believe the body on the street is a suicide, but Emily is stunned to discover that the dead woman is a dear friend since high school and begins an investigation that leads to a perplexing mystery – suicide or murder?
Determined to overcome the sexism that infuses her career, Emily negotiates her way into hard news coverage,. Will her investigative diligence uncover the murderer and bring justice for those who entrust their stories to her? Find out in this eagerly anticipated sequel to Winter in Chicago!
Big things often have small beginnings.
As National Security Adviser to the President of the United States, Jane Stewart shepherds an act through congress to subsidize manufacturing of silicon chips on American soil.
Argon Zhi, an executive at one of the world’s best semiconductor foundries, accepts the responsibility to craft a plan for ensuring the competitiveness of Taiwan's technology companies and ensure the continued independence of his country.
Cedric Dyson's job as a Failure Analysis engineer is to figure out why some chips do not work the way they are supposed to. When he notices a pattern among the failing chips sent to his FA lab, he uncovers a shocking truth.
Jane, Argon and Cedric, each operating within their professional domains, make a series of decisions that lead to an international blame game which could escalate into an open conflict between the world’s powers.
Literary & Contemporary Novels
Beneath the Same Heaven
by Anne Marie Ruff
A story of love and terrorism...
Beneath the Same Heaven is a love story of an American woman and a Pakistani-born Muslim man, who seem to have bridged the divide between Western and Islamic world views. But when the husband’s father is killed by a US drone attack near the Afghan border, their cross-cultural family descends into conflicting ideas of loyalty, justice, identity, revenge, and terrorism. With candor, beauty, and unusual insight, their story reveals both how decent people can justify horrific acts, and the emotional power required to heal.
Glassman
by Steve Oskie
Mark Glassman does a surprisingly good job of feigning confidence, fooling nearly everyone but himself.
When Mark Glassman falls in love with Teresa Devlin, he realizes that he is terrified of her sexually, and that his only recourse is to resume his pursuit of Sarah Sloane, one of his housemates and soon he arrives at the neat psychological ploy of playing the two women against one another.
The novels of Thomas Garlinghouse
Stephen Spotte’s bittersweet novel Wiseguys in Paradise opens at the start of the 1960s. An unnamed drifter from southern Appalachia just out of the Army takes a job as dishwasher at an Italian restaurant in Coney Island famous as a gathering place for New York mobsters. The patrons and staff befriend him, and he falls in love with a divorced woman with a young daughter. Wary of commitment, he abandons them and hitch-hikes to Key West. From there the story segues between locations as the narrator finds himself immersed in an unlikely community of love and friendship whose members include Mafia wiseguys, other drifters, a Jesuit priest/marine biologist, immigrants, gays, and lesbians. Spotte's regional dialects crackle with authenticity.
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The novels of Jeff Wallach
High school isn't easy, especially with a learning disability.
While Fred is sure his learning disability is the reason he can never find his shoes, he mostly believes his LD is the reason he will never feel normal. When he walks into high school on the first day, he wishes his LD would just go away. With two successful and confident siblings, Fred knows he is the kid in the family who is different.
When a Marine fireteam searches an isolated Vietnamese village believed to be a supply depot for the Viet Cong an IED explodes, leaving only one survivor of the five-man unit. But who is he: Bunny, Hillbilly, Poke, Injun, or "the LT"? Because he is horribly burned, disfigured, and unable to speak, the military doctors don't know, but the people back home in a coal mining camp in southern West Virginia think they know. Most unsettling of all the survivor himself isn't certain who he is.
Spanning the landscape from Vietnam's warn-torn jungles to hardscrabble Appalachia, In An Empty Room is a gripping examination of time, memory, consciousness, and selfhood and suggests unanticipated conclusions about the nature of human identity.
A Conveersation with a Cat
Stephen Spotte
Stephen Spotte's imaginative novel, A Conversation with a Cat, recounts the tales of a scroungy former alley cat named Jinx, whose memories aren't just his own but those of other cats who existed before him, one of which was Annipe, Cleopatra's pampered pet. Through Annipe's eyes the ancient Mediterranean world of Cleopatra and her legendary lovers, Caesar and Antony, is spread before us in all its glory, pathos, and absurdity. Jinx reveals these stories telepathically one night to his stoned and inebriated owner just home after gall bladder surgery. Annipe's memories are bookended by Jinx's own that detail his early scavenging days in bleak urban alleys.
Memoir
Heartbeats is the light-hearted memoirs of one of the pioneers in modern cardiac surgery, Constantine "Dino" Tatooles, M.D. Dino's stories, as told to his brother James E. Tatooles, will quite literally "warm your heart" as well as provide a background to the advances in cardiac surgery made over the past fifty years.
After Medical School, Dr. Tatooles interned at the University of Chicago and received a grant from the Heart Association to open his own medical laboratory. Later, the National Heart Institute selected Dr. Tatooles as one of five doctors to study at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
"That's where we started to perfect a lot of the new operative procedures that are used today," recounts Dr. Tatooles.
Ironically, Dr. Tatooles recently had some difficult medicine of his own to swallow when he discovered that he needed a quintuple bypass. As his brother James E. Tatooles relates in Heartbeats, a procedure that Dino helped to develop eventually saved his life.
A mother, her son, and mania.
In this fictionalized memoir, a mother recounts the emotional journey she and her son take when he becomes mentally ill.
Jack is known as the Sun King because as a child he resembled the illustrated boy in his mother's deck of tarot cards. Already on the verge of madness, Jack leaves for college in Ohio but secretly decides not to take his medicine. When Jack becomes manic, his mother must retrieve him from a psychiatric hospital and bring him home to Oklahoma. She and Jack spend the next year dealing with court hearings, doctor appointments, and counseling sessions precipitated by his bipolar disorder and resultant psychosis.
Guiding Jack back to sanity leads his mother to a fateful decision—one that brings about her own emotional unraveling.
In the end, it is the Sun King who must save his mother.
Good Morning Corfu chronicles the experiences and observations of an American expatriate living on this Mediterranean outpost of dizzying extremes. From wide-eyed wonder to cultural and personal confusion, from unbridled joy to deep despair, and from empathy to outright loathing, these short essays examine both local and expatriate lifestyles through the lens of one deeply immersed yet forever removed, fundamentally involved yet perpetually on the perimeter of a most curious culture. Even more than a journal of events and experiences, the essays consider many of life's more profound issues and concerns with insight, optimism and humor.
Poetry, Short Stories & Novellas
As long as I reside in their minds and hearts, I will never truly be gone.
The devastation caused by World War II is described by historians in terms of military strategies and battles, the toll on economics, and the numbers of dead. But only the stories of those whose lives were changed or lost, can convey the true horror of the war. These were people very much like ourselves—men, women, children, siblings, poets, soldiers, students, professionals, laborers, givers, takers, jokers, dancers, lovers, dreamers, cowards and brave.
Each is the hero of his own tale. Each tale underscores the uniqueness of human perception based upon personality and circumstances.
By listening to the voices of those with stories to tell, we can grow in our appreciation of what it means to be human.
WAR CRIES: UNHEARD STORIES, UNMARKED GRAVES provides a stage for the voices—many inspired by people present in Europe during World War II—to speak their truths. The characters behind the poems come from different religions, different professions, and different ideologies.
Like all of us, they want to be heard. They want to be understood. Most of all…they want to be remembered.
Almost everybody who was born in the post-agrarian period separated by the two great wars grew up in a place whose growing pains were painfully obvious.
Here the Main Streets of our grandparents were left to developers, who preferred parking lots to promenades. Here generously proportioned school buildings beckoned to a fertile population that would supply them so handily that, once a prototype was made, it could be endlessly reproduced. Here pastimes flourished as they never had before.
Here mostly white people settled in as Ricky Nelson serenaded them. Here needs were synonymous with desires. And here a culture that was made possible by the received wisdom of Father Coughlin, Leo Durocher, and Lawrence Welk sat back, adjusted its goggles, and proceeded, with limitations that grew with every sack of fertilizer that guaranteed a more perfect lawn, to have the time of its life.
Nonfiction
Tales from The Warming is unique in the annals of climate fiction, a new literary genre spawned in the last decade by the climate crisis. The anthology of 10 short stories takes readers all over the world and over time to experience—in human terms—the growing impact of what the author has dubbed “The Warming,” the man-made catastrophe that is increasing the world’s temperature, raising ocean levels and causing increasingly violent weather.
The stories—powerful, prophetic and poignant—are thought exercises that blend fact and fiction to examine the human impact of the crisis. They are based on current worst-case scenarios proposed by climate science. Each concerns a different challenge thrust upon us by the warming. In them readers witness people’s struggles to deal with these new realities. Some of the stories put people in harm’s way; others focus more on human creativity in mitigating its effects.
Story locations range from Bangladesh to Venice, Los Angeles to Polynesia, South Sudan to Southwestern China, Mount Kilimanjaro to the Persian Gulf, Miami to Greenland. The time frame is 2022 to 2059, a period during which the world is beginning to suffer the far reaching effects of this civilization-changing phenomenon.
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Wings of a
Flying Tiger
by Iris Yang
World War Two. Japanese occupied China. One cousin's courage, another's determination to help a wounded American pilot.
In the summer of 1942, Danny Hardy bails out of his fighter plane into a remote region of western China. With multiple injuries, malaria, and Japanese troops searching for him, the American pilot’s odds of survival are slim.
Jasmine Bai, an art student who had been saved by Americans during the notorious Nanking Massacre, seems an unlikely heroine to rescue the wounded Flying Tiger. Daisy Bai, Jasmine’s younger cousin, also falls in love with the courageous American.
With the help of Daisy’s brother, an entire village opens its arms to heal a Flying Tiger with injured wings, but as a result of their charity the serenity of their community is forever shattered.
Love, sacrifice, kindness, and bravery all play a part in this heroic tale that takes place during one of the darkest hours of Chinese history.
The 13 (Ashi-niswi)
by Lorin R. Robinson
A gripping adventure in which 13 young Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) seek to regain the honor of their band.
"A delightful work of historical fiction.”—Midwest Book Review
Following a devastating raid on their camp, 13 Anishinaabe teenagers vow to restore the honor of their band by tracking down and savaging the Dakota raiders. The story is a parable posing the universal question: “What is the price of honor?” It is also a poignant coming-of-age story as the youngest of the youthful warriors struggles to come to grips with the aftermath of
the quest.
The Swan Keeper
by Milana Marsenich
Girlhood, courage, nature, and flight from a tyrant’s hand in post-frontier Montana.
The Swan Keeper is an historical, coming of age novel set in Northwest Montana's Mission Valley in the late 1920s.
The Novels of Milana Marsenich
Passionate and forbidden love clashes with tradition and caste in a changing India.
Kamala Kumari is more than a Gemini Studio starlet: she’s a classical dancer trained in the age-old line of Devadasis, a caste set in place a thousand years ago when girls were first dedicated in south Indian temples to serve the gods and men. Beautiful, brilliant and proud, Kamala struggles to escape the old ways, entangling her Indian assistant, Dutch lover, and his young American wife.
With its turbulent passions amid social upheavals, The Last Devadasi takes readers on a sensual feast in the 1970s palm-shaded trading city of Madras.
Sworn brothers. Captured, imprisoned, and tortured. Survival is just the beginning of the battle...
In 1942, Birch Bai, a Chinese pilot, and Danny Hardy, a downed American pilot, become sworn brothers and best friends.
In the summer of 1945, both airmen’s planes go down in Yunnan Province of China during one of many daring missions. They are captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the Japanese for information about the atomic bomb. Just days before the end of WWII, Danny makes an irrevocable decision to save Birch's life.
For Birch, surviving the war is only the beginning of the battle. He must deal with the dreadful reality in China—the civil war, the separation of the country, the death of one friend in the Communist-controlled Mainland and another under the Nationalist government, and his wrongful imprisonment in Taiwan.
From Chungking to Yunnan, and from Taiwan to San Francisco, the sequel to Wings of a Flying Tiger takes readers along on an epic journey.
Will of a Tiger
by Iris Yang
The Novels of Barbara L. Baer
The 19 stories in marine scientist Stephen Spotte's latest collection penetrate the stormy, watery depth of the human psyche, blending elements of make-believe with sharp, systematic observations and insights into the twisted manifestations of life, love, and death. The tales skip across genres at breakneck speed, mixing humor and pathos with fantasy, sometimes in settings that juxtapose gritty reality with magical realism. Throughout, Spotte scrapes aside the thin patina of everyday existence, offering a glimpse into the strange abyssal world of his imagination.
The Soulful Leader provides poignant and practical examples of Dr. Ciaramicoli's ground-breaking AIE (authenticity, integrity and empathy) leadership platform for leaders in all industries to help them successfully optimize the potential of employees.
AIE leadership produces an environment where staff members grow to respect each other while
Considered an expert in the area of psychopathic behavior, Dr. Espy has interviewed more than 30 serial murderers throughout the world including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Eddie Gein.
But when he was assigned to be the lead evaluator for Montana State Prison inmate Nathaneal Bar Jonah, an already once convicted serial child molester and attempted murderer in Massachusetts, Espy encountered a parasitic personality beyond imagination: a modern-day Cronos, the Greek mythological figure who devoured his children.
Weighing over 375 pounds, Bar Jonah worked as a short order cook at Hardy’s, carried a stun gun, impersonated police officers, told masterful lies, wrote unbreakable codes, cooked and shared with friends strange-tasting chili and spaghetti sauces, and was thought by Montana State detectives to have murdered and cannibalized at least one victim, 10-year-old Zach Ramsay.
Culled from hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with Bar Jonah, dozens of others who either knew or were involved with him, Montana State investigators and prosecutors, and Zach Ramsay’s mother, Espy retells Bar Jonah’s entire life—from the time before he was conceived to after his death—and those who were harmed by him in unparalleled detail and scope.
A how-to guide for new and experienced collectors, How to Collect Great Art on a Shoestring explores the unique opportunity to acquire one-of-a-kind works for $2000 or $3000 by hundreds of mostly forgotten yet startlingly good artists who are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Met, among many other museums.
A veteran and avid collector, Gersh offers pro tips on how, what, and which artists to look for while providing unique insights, an invaluable perspective, and a dash of humor into the world of collecting great art.
The Four Trials of Henry Ford chronicles the Ford Motor Company founder's forays into landmark litigation during the early years of the twentieth century.
Piché follows Ford's lonely defense against alleged infringement of the Selden patent on the automobile brought by a powerful automotive monopoly determined to control prices and competition in the emerging automobile market. He explores a minority shareholder oppression lawsuit brought against Ford by the Dodge brothers who initially manufactured all of the mechanical parts for Ford's cars. He covers Ford's libel suit against the Chicago Tribune for calling him an "anarchist" and "ignorant idealist" in the midst of the patriotic fervor during the U.S. Mexico Intervention and the run-up to World War I, and finally, he examines a Jewish lawyer’s persistent libel action against Ford for the defamation of himself and his race in anti-Semetic diatribes widely published and circulated in his personally owned newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.
In recounting the Ford litigation, Piché examines Ford’s parallel manipulation of public media to advance his own political and narcissistic agenda to become a public sage and an American President. It follows the initial rise of his reputation as a Progressive capitalist to its ultimate erosion as a mean-spirited bigot and contributor to the propaganda that fueled the Holocaust.
The Ice Palace Ice Palace Waltz
by Barbara L. Baer
Two Jewish immigrant families—the rough and ready Western pioneers and the smooth, “our crowd” New Yorkers—come together in a riveting family saga amid the financial and social tumult of early twentieth century America. Baer's moving multigenerational novel traces the American Jewish experience and the enduring power of family and love.
Pretty Chrysanthemum and Other Stories reminds readers how family is at the core of human experience and how relationships, especially those between parent and child, rely on the power of love to overcome challenges. Endearing characters, with their flaws and strengths, persevere to make right decisions, even when the outcome is in doubt.
In China's political chaos, a woman's desperate search for her family and the American pilot she loves.
In the winter of 1942, Jasmine Bai survived the freezing wilderness and decided to keep her baby, even though he was the product of a gang-rape by Japanese soldiers. In 1947, her quiet life in a remote cabin was disrupted by the news of her loved one's death. In the following four decades, Jasmine desperately searches for her family and for Danny Hardy, the American pilot she loves. She is robbed by thugs, thrown in jail by the Nationalist Secret Police, and wrongfully accused by the Communists. In war and political chaos, Jasmine loses her loved ones, but she never loses her sense of decency, nor does she break her promise to the Flying Tiger. Over thousands of miles between Yunnan and Chungking, the third book of the Tiger Saga trilogy takes readers along another incredible journey.
Open Books will publish the much anticipated third book of the Tiger Saga Trilogy, Legacy of the Tigers, in Spring 2020.
Legacy of
the Tigers
by Iris Yang
Introspective, unapologetic, and brave, Natasha's Not My Name is inspirational reading for all women.
Dancer and actress Isabella Grosso introduces readers to the complex underground of the strip club industry as seen from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old as she struggles, and ultimately survives as a child-turned-adult with a double life.
Natasha's Not My Name delves deeply into the dark pockets of sexual abuse, suicide, drug use, exploitation, and the inner strength it takes for a wounded child to grow up to be a strong woman, and what ultimately saves her: a love for dance and the arts, and a desire to share her story to help girls in equally vulnerable situations.
Visit all 54 African countries with an adventurous American guide who has spent over half a century on the continent.
Africa Memoir tells the incredible lifetime story of Mark G. Wentling, a boy from Kansas who grew up to travel, work, and visit all 54 African countries. Derived from over a half century spent working and living on the African continent, Wentling devotes a chapter to each country describing his firsthand experiences, eye-opening impressions, and views on future prospects.
Original and authoritative, this one-of-a-kind, three-volume work deserves a special place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in Africa.
In 1977, Mark Wentling began working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Niger and later served as its principal officer in Guinea, Togo/Benin, Angola, Somalia and Tanzania. Following retirement from the U.S. Senior Foreign Service in 1996, Mark continued to work as an advisor for the Great Lakes Region, then with USAID Missions in Zambia, Malawi, Guinea and Senegal.
He subsequently worked with CARE, World Vision and Plan International in Niger, Mozambique and Burkina Faso. In recent years, he has worked in Ghana, Mali and Angola. His many jobs and travels in Africa, visiting all 54 African countries, contributed to the completion of his latest book, Africa Memoir: 50 Years, 54 Countries, One American Life. Those who know him well say he was born and raised in Kansas but made in Africa.
Mark currently maintains a home in Lubbock, Texas, but he continues to travel frequently to Africa to work. He has also designed a course in international development for Texas Tech University. He holds a master’s degree in International Agriculture from Cornell University and a master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the National War College. In 2014, he was awarded by the WSU Alumni Association its annual alumni achievement award.
Gregory R. Piché is a Denver lawyer who has practiced as a litigator for 45 years. He teaches law and ethics in a graduate degree program at the University of Colorado.
Arthur P. Ciaramicoli
In The Triumph of Diversity, Dr. Ciaramicoli analyzes prejudice by tracing it to personal origins and relates true stories of courageous individuals who have overcome hatred, cruelty and sadism to become open-minded, loving resilient people. He re-emphasizes that we are in desperate need of those who unite rather than those who ostracize.
producing on the highest possible level.
Dr. Ciaramicoli has developed this approach during 35 years of consulting with and counseling
leaders in business, education, politics, and on athletic teams. His communication and leadership groups have been ongoing for over 30 years, which has allowed him to study the personal characteristics that lead to excellent leadership skills. His pioneering approach offers new promise to a society struggling with fear and doubt about those in powerful positions.
Easy-to-use guides devoted to Paris, Pilgrimage to Paris: The Cheapo Snob’s Guide to the City and the Americans Who Lived There and Paris and Parisians: The Cheapo Snob Explores the City and Its Famous French Residents include travel tips, main attractions, free (and nearly free) things to do, shopping, museums, churches, cafes, and restaurants. The book also provides short biographies and addresses associated with famous Americans—writers, journalists, politicians, musicians and performers, artists and architects, and several other interesting people who don’t fit neatly into typical categories—who spent time living la belle vie in the French capital.
What are borders? Are they simply political and geographical, marked by posts, walls and fences, or should we think of them more broadly? Consider the borders within countries, determined by race, ethnicity, or caste. Borders may be physical and economic, and even perceptual—the borders of our minds.
In Postcards from the Borderlands, historian and journalist David Mould rambles through a dozen countries in Asia, Southern Africa and Eastern Europe by car, bus, train, shared taxi and ferry, exploring what borders mean to their peoples.
Mould finds topics of interest even in the most ordinary places—an airport departure lounge, a food court, a roadside restaurant, a government office. Every road trip offers a moving window display of landscape features, crops, livestock, houses, churches, temples, mosques, schools, factories, military bases, vehicles. He notes what people are selling on the roadside and the markets, the restaurant menu, the indecipherable instructions for the TV remote in his hotel room. What people wear. What they eat. How they talk to each other. The questions they ask him. The questions he asks them. Away from the tourist hotspots, he finds that it is often the commonplace that is most fascinating and revealing of culture.
From First Kiss to Forever: A Scientific Approach to Love is a fun and humorous, yet scientific, book about relationships. This book introduces the reader to relationship science. The chapters examine how people meet, select their mates, and fall in and out of love.
Readers need not be scientists to understand the information presented. Each chapter relates present-day research to everyday experiences and real relationship issues confronted by couples. Each ends with take home tips/questions to help the reader apply the lessons in his/her own life.
Do you want to understand the science behind finding a mate, maintaining long-lasting relationships, or even what makes some relationships doomed to fail? Help your relationships grow and flourish, and have a few hearty laughs along the way.
Marisa T. Cohen, Ph.D
While spending thirty years overseas in the US Foreign Service, and living in eleven countries and working in many more, Ambassador Lucke accumulated many stories that would never have happened “at home.” His work took him to Timbuktu (twice), to places in West Africa where kids ran away in fear at their first glimpse of a person with white skin, to the scary run up to Gulf War I in North Africa, to the jungles of Bolivia and Lake Titicaca in the Andes, the fall of Communism in the old Czechoslovakia, biblical sites of Jerusalem, the passing of King Hussein in Jordan, to interaction with a few US Presidents and many members of Congress. He was thrust into the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, deployed into the war zone of Iraq, and finally served as US Ambassador to the last absolute monarchy in Africa. His take on a thirty-year career abroad: “It was never boring.”
Ambassador Lucke re-opening school after Haiti earthquake
"Heaven and Other Zip Codes deals with marital relationships and their complexities faithfulness, divorce, gender roles, etc.), but the narrative is about so much more. Readers will fall in love with this page-turning, brilliant novel. Cailler is destined for an award with this newest post-modern masterpiece." —Niles Reddick, Midwest Book Review
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
In early twentieth century Van Lear, Kentucky, miners in a conscripted coal town go down to work in the shaft only to come back up in pieces.
Company-hired detectives and preachers terrorize the workforce, their women and widows, and children into submission with threats of violence and eternal damnation while the Knights subjugate blacks to acts of unspeakable violence.
Slavery is a way of life. Murder is a daily occurrence.
Then one day in the Sugar Maple Grove, Moses Kitchen takes a stand against the members of the Ku Klux Klan sparking a small but enduring revolt against corporate, religious, and racial tyranny that finds its way throughout the generations from the son of a shoe salesman to a feisty, young female lawyer and beyond in this epic Southern Gothic about race, poverty, religion, and barbarism, and those brave enough to dare to see a different society.
More new titles from Open Books
2018 Nautilus Award Winner!
There's more to see and experience in Paris than just the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame,
and the Louvre.
Killer Cocktail
by David M. Hamlin
In the summer of 1977, Chicago’s WSMP-TV investigative reporter Emily Winter covers the confrontation between a woman’s health clinic fighting to preserve a woman’s right to choose and the equally ardent demonstrators fighting against that right.
Unleashed:
A Comic Relief
by David L. Gersh
What has the world come to? Can people trust a dog more than they trust a politician?
San Buenasara is ripe for the plucking and the Mexican Cartel wants to pluck it. Walter Carsone, the former Chief of Police is running for mayor, a position left vacant by an unfortunate accident involving a steamroller. There’s a lot of outside money behind Carsone. And no one trusts him.
Karen and Jimmy are desperate to save their little town. Everyone is scared. Except Bruno, their brave, long-haired Dachshund. He doesn’t have a hat, but he’s tossed it in the ring.
It all started as a big joke until it turned deadly serious. Through threats and intimidation, through twists and turns…and a 60 Minutes segment, Bruno is running strong.
Will his luck run out? Or can Bruno unleash the future?
SRP (Paperback) $17.95
SRP (eBook) $9.99
Mind Fields
by Thomas Garlinghouse
A mystery novelist. A tormented physicist. A metaphysical adventure.
In the early 1950s, the People's Republic of China invaded and annexed Tibet, forever altering the country's political and social landscape. For mystery writer Taylor Hamilton and his wife, Kate, these events seem part of a remote, forgotten past. Having fled San Francisco for the quiet of a small, coastal town, all Taylor wants to do is surf and write mysteries.
But for Taylor's neighbor, an old man named Havelock Rowland, the invasion of Tibet—and its bloody aftermath—are forever emblazoned on his psyche. Reclusive and secretive, Havelock is a retired physicist who lives alone with an immense black dog and harbors a complicated and painful personal history.
Gradually but inexorably, Taylor is drawn into Havelock's world of Tibetan metaphysics, and soon the past clashes with the present as strange events emerge to overtake the picturesque coastal town.
Each year, more and more Americans adopt extreme views to the right or to the left. America Reunited attempts to provide first-care for the current and serious conflicts that ail us as a society: racism, sexism, immigration, poverty, increases in suicide, and alcoholism and overdoses, as well as address the reasons for the political misinformation that is prevalent every day through various news sources and social medial sites.
Nutritionists tell us that we are what we eat. As a clinical psychologist, Arthur P. Ciaramicoli believes that we are what we perceive. We are in a dark time and in need of enhanced empathy to allow us to regain our civility and our sense of reason. The cancer in our country is deep and it is growing, but it is still curable if we devise a treatment plan that we are all willing to implement.
The untold story of the Angel of Santa Fe and the Gettysburg of the West.
This is the story, based on historical events, of the little known War of New Mexico, of Henry Sibley, who commanded the Texas Mounted Volunteers, Edward R. S. Canby, the Union commander, and his wife Louisa, the Angel of Santa Fe. It explores the desperate struggle at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, called the Gettysburg of the West, and the men who fought on both sides. It examines the tragedies of war and the passion and compassion of those men and women who played a part.
Through letters, diaries, newspaper articles and both first and third person exposition and dialogue, this deeply-researched historical fiction tells of those who heard The Whisper of a Distant God.
Ingrained, enthralled and overwhelmed with the prevailing creed, "Communism will one day seize the world," and following Mao's call to the young during the Cultural Revolution, Cheng Wang, a so-called ‘Educated Youth’, boarded a train destined for a secluded village in Inner Mongolia for the compulsory period of re-education. For the next three grueling years in rural exile, he pondered how his once-privileged, loving family had been caught in a political undertow, and indeed how his own future might unfold?
From Tea to Coffee is the story of struggle and triumph during China’s modern-day cultural and political drama, and is a rare and personal account that showcases the Chinese national psyche. Like all political movements of the past, the Cultural Revolution was not the first of its kind, nor quite possibly the last, yet Cheng Wang, now at home in both America and in China, maintains an optimism that is rare and so very welcome in confronting today's social polarization in the East and in the West.
Where do you look once the search has ended?
Mysteries—and comedy—abound in this stand-alone novel that also continues the stories of Phillip and Spencer Elliot first explored in the novel Mr. Wizard. The middle-aged brothers undertake a quest inspired by their dead mother to discover "wonderful things" – the phrase used by archaeologist Howard Carter in describing his first look into King Tut's tomb.
As miners in hard hats swing pick axes miles underground, the Devil comes calling disguised as a black dust. The dirty soot penetrates deep into the miners' lungs. The first sign is coughing up black phlegm. Then comes wheezing
pain in the chest, and the desperation of being unable to breathe. The Devil tightens its noose around the miners' throats as coal dust invades their chests like a marauding invader that has come to desecrate their lungs. Then, after years of suffering and torture, the Devil claims each victim.
Such is the fate of the coal miner. Not one, not two, but thousands of men suffer the fate of black lung disease. Lied to for a century by the coal companies, pursued by cowardly goons and unscrupulous doctors as the tragedy continues in the name of profit.
Three physicians dare to put their reputations, and at times their lives, on the line to expose the plight of the miners. Doctors Kitchen, McGarrity and McIntosh fight not only for miners' rights but also for their dignity. They try to discover ways of diagnosing black lung disease that can't be dismissed or shamed by the coal companies or their physician cronies. The Devil in the Dust is a story about courage, not only of the physicians confronting the coal companies and their stooges, but the courage of the coal miners to persevere in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual
Alan Rifkin
Richard Leviton is an aging romantic, twice divorced, with visions of literary grandeur. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazine journalism and a period of unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the convulsions of the 2010s, Leviton grows through a harrowing crucible of circumstances—romantic chaos, alcoholism, home loss, professional obscurity, and cultural transition—all while attempting to anchor his son Philip's precarious security. Meanwhile Philip, coming of age, intermittently homeless, and yearning to retrofit his existence into a generation he believes had it all, begs to experience his father’s LA, the essence of which he’s convinced lives embodied in Leviton’s eternally youthful long-time editor Bailey Kavanagh—perhaps the only woman to ever truly love Richard Leviton.
With eloquent, almost intoxicating prose, the nine linked episodes comprise one bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy journey through the ache of generational drift, the cultural rapids of the 21st century, and the timelessness of young dreams.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Within these halls of learning, one must proceed with caution.
Happily ensconced as a tenured Professor of Biology at the small Skowhegan College in the wilds of Maine, Tymoteusz Tarnaszewski—who goes by the moniker "T"—suddenly finds himself in unknown territory when an incident in a colleague's classroom motivates the
A smart, fast, funny, and incisive portrait of today's liberal arts college scene, cancel culture—and more!
A chance encounter—if it is by chance—gives J. the opportunity he’s been hoping for but never expected would present itself. A physician in a midlife funk, obsessed with paintings of corpses and dissections, he is asked to speak about his subject of interest at the beautiful and secluded island campus of Nevergreen College. “Welcome to the asylum!” announces the woman who arranged the invitation and greets him at the dock, and his restless stomach seems an eerie harbinger of what is to come—an initially curious and ultimately terrifying overview of academentia. No one actually shows up for his lecture, but that doesn’t stop it from becoming the center of a firestorm of controversy—with potentially fatal consequences.
Beautiful Ghost
Milana Marsenich
Sequel to the bestselling Copper Sky!
During the fall of 1918, the influenza pandemic crosses the nation and reaches the mining town of Butte, Montana.
The Novels of Khristy Reibel
Goldfinch in the Thistle
by Khristy Reibel
Goldfinch in the Thistle follows the lifelong love story of James V, King of Scotland, and his mistress, Maggie Erskine.
Marriage is impossible, even after Maggie gives birth to a royal son. But when the new Queen of Scots finally arrives at Stirling Castle, what will it mean for Maggie and her son?
Set in sixteenth century Scotland, Goldfinch in the Thistle is a story of unfulfilled promises, loyalties, and shifting perspectives.
The members of Uncle Joe’s Band have spent years playing any venue that will pay for their unintelligible metal band performances while their rock and roll lifestyle has left them with bad livers, multiple divorces, and living in a squalid house in Vallejo, California.
Then one morning everything changes when an assertive twelve-year-old girl named Allison appears on their front porch and announces that she has been sent to stay with her father for the summer.
Meanwhile, years ago, the band’s namesake and inspiration, Uncle Joe, takes a long strange trip as a vagabond hippie through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that includes brushes with Ken Kesey’s bus, Watergate, the Pet Rock, Iran Contra, and Jerry Garcia.
Inspired by their experience with Allison and their budding paternal instincts, recollections of Uncle Joe, and a well-played Stratocaster with the initials “JG”, the members of Uncle Joe’s Band begin to play a new tune in a major key.
Winner Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Startup
by Riko Radojcic
The high tech mystery/thrillers of Riko Radojcic
Chechnya: The Inside Story
From Independence to War
by Mairbek Vatchagaev
In Chechnya: The Inside Story historian and former advisor to the president of Chechnya, Mairbek Vatchagaev chronicles the dramatic events that took place in Chechnya during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Engaged on one side of the Russian-Chechen conflict, he presents what he witnessed, how he became involved, how the struggle with Russia and the internal Chechen rivalries evolved, and how it impacted his family, his friends, his acquaintances, and the Chechen people.
The band is back!
Instead of playing in rundown bars, Uncle Joe’s Band now sell out concert halls.
Prior to a tour in Japan, a letter arrives claiming one of the band members, Ian, is the father of an unnamed young woman, who coincidentally is the member of another band, Stygian Teal. In the hopes of identifying Ian’s daughter, Uncle Joe’s Band attends a Stygian Teal concert. Much to their surprise, they find not one, but four Stygian Teal band members, any of which could be Ian’s daughter.
Meanwhile, as the band’s namesake Uncle Joe, an aged deadhead, makes his way across North America during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, another Uncle Jo, Joji Kinsara, makes his way across the Japanese archipelago. Everywhere he goes, Joji leaves large painted haiku poems, which become noted works of art. In his travels Joji visits the Nagano Winter Olympics, starts an environmental revitalization of Mt. Fuji, and helps ensure that a young Masako Owada becomes a future empress.
As they journey through Japan, Uncle Joe’s Band attempts to discern which young woman is Ian’s daughter, how to deal with newfound fame, and what it takes to formulate a family.
The Novels of Stephen Spotte
Middle East 101: Navigating Culture, Traditions, Psychology and Business Practices
by Igor Ostapenko
For a large number of people, the Middle East has become more than just a place for shopping and ascending the Burj Khalifa. Expats are coming to live and work here. Yet all these people encounter a new culture and sometimes find themselves at a loss.
Cultural competence allows us to understand other people on the level of motives, values, and conventions. Most importantly, it helps us expand our own horizons. If we all had a slightly better understanding of other nations and cultures, the world would see fewer wars.
Middle East 101 provides a comprehensive guide to successfully navigate culture, traditions, psychology, and business practices within this diverse region. Because the more you know about Islam and the Middle East, the less likely you will fall into the traps of conspiratorial thinking, become a victim of cognitive biases, and explain what is happening around you using clichés. Success in the region can only be achieved with emotional intelligence and cultural competence. Gaining trust in the Middle East is possible only if you communicate with complete sincerity, showing respect for the local religion, culture, and interlocutor.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Such Stuff as Dreams
by Thomas Garlinghouse
Historical fiction blended with supernatural elements to create a story in which the past impinges on the present and ancient bonds of friendship and loyalty transcends time.
It’s 1936 and Hollywood screenwriter Joe Holliday has a secret. He can see and communicate with ghosts. But because of a difficult childhood, he has long suppressed his ability.
When the mercurial head of Apex Studios tasks him with writing a modern version of a Shakespeare play, Joe gradually regains his ability. Reopening himself to the spirit world brings him into contact with an old acquaintance—someone from his very distant past. This persistent, and very illustrious, spirit has a different writing task for him—some unfinished business the two had embarked upon over 400 years ago.
When these two tasks ultimately come into conflict, Joe is forced to choose. It is a decision that will have far-reaching, life-changing consequences.
All's Fair:
A Jonathan Benjamin Franklin Mystery
David L. Gersh
Why would Pamela Knorrington claim a painting was stolen from a museum that had never heard of it? Is she crazy? Or can a thief make works of art disappear?
In desperation Pamela calls her friend, Mimi Aaron, the billionaire, Simon Aaron’s ex-wife. Her tale arouses Mimi’s curiosity. The weather in New York has been lousy and Mimi is bored silly. Los Angeles looks pretty tempting.
She recruits a reluctant Jonathan Benjamin Franklin to assist her. Jonathan’s wife, Nicole DeSant, is seven months pregnant and Jonathan isn’t about to leave. But Mimi Aaron can be very persuasive indeed. Besides, Nicole has Rufus, her beloved pug, to watch over her. And while Jonathan is a dear, he does tend to hover a bit too much.
In the wilds of Bel Air, working night and day, Mimi and Jonathan seek to unravel the mystery. And they discover … nothing. Then Pamela Knorrington disappears.
Jonathan is once again in over his head. Maybe he just should stop digging. Particularly since a Columbian drug lord would like to bury him.
Quantum Voices
Stephen Spotte
Anax Grayson, a neuroscientist and physicist, enlists in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and is assigned to an undermanned reconnaissance team. One member, Skeeter Hatfield, came of age in a southern West Virginia coal camp and suffered since childhood from a rare malady known as heautoscopic hallucinations during which he sees ghostly, extra-corporeal projections of his dead twin brother. In a journal Grayson records life as a field Marine, his observations of Hatfield’s neurological condition, and speculates about matter and time. Hatfield survives a mortar attack and returns home with debilitating wounds. He marries a childhood acquaintance and with her help tries to overcome the terrifying hallucinations of his antagonistic Other. Spotte’s narrative mosaic juxtaposes the dysfunctional, barely literate Hatfield family against Grayson’s sympathetic erudition, weaving a mesmerizing disquisition on friendship, love, notions of time and space, neuroscience, quantum physics, consciousness, and the myths of agency and selfhood.
The Novels of John E. Espy
One of 28 typical multi-star Amazon reviews:
Amber
5.0 out of 5 stars
Addicting, couldn’t put it down
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2018
It’s been a long time since I was able to read a book all the way through. I will start a book out it down and forget about it. NOT this one. I could stop reading. In fact I finished it the same day I started it. It made me laugh, it made me cry. I wanted more. I was sad that it was over but happy that I got to read it and that I got a glimpse into a story, a true love story that wasn’t just all rainbows. I loved the way the chapters were set up, I felt that it kept the book going and interesting because it went back and forth between the two main characters. I suggest this book to anyone who is looking for a good read. Excellent job. I hope that this author will write more soon!!
Piecing together the fabric of a family's loss.
For precocious eight-year-old Kate Nichols, life in suburban New York seems pretty ordinary for the late 1960s. There are ballet classes, pet bunnies and air raid drills, outings to grandparents’ homes and humiliating boys in chino pants. She derives strength from the surgeon father she idolizes and her family’s lineage of dressmakers, all of them sewers who plan and execute with precision.
But Kate’s understanding of her world is shattered when her mother announces that she had an older brother who died inexplicably in the hospital just days after his birth. As she navigates adolescence, she must choose whether to crack open the mystery or acquiesce to the family’s established pattern of secrecy and repression. It’s not until she is a single mother that her own feelings of loss trigger a search into the past, revealing a tale of generational trauma, maternal strength and how far we’ll go to protect the people we love.
And Then You Apply Ice is a collection of twenty-one poignant and humorous short stories by Pamela Gwyn Kripke, author of the Open Books novel, At The Seams.
An eight-year-old beauty pageant winner experiences objectification on a summer camp stage. A middle-aged single mother watches her boyfriend, a cosmetic surgeon, suction liquid fat out of a patient, confronting her own insecurities about appearance, worth and love. Through a slit in a door, an eyeball tracks the comings and goings of its neighbor, a young interior designer who is robbed in the walkup apartment across the hall. A Dixie Mafia don pushes a television reporter to question her ethics. Two dogs discover intertwined feet under a dinner party table and struggle to reveal the infidelity to their preferred human parent.
The women and girls in these twenty-one stories encounter hurt—to their emotions, bodies, beliefs and ideas—confronting who they are or will become. Their predicaments reveal the subtleties of human interaction, the power in one's decisions and ultimately, the complex resilience that imbues women's lives. A captivating look at managing transgression, the collection is an honest, funny and astute portrayal of the female experience.
Bright College Years
Andrew Pessin
Coming of age doesn't only happen to the young.
When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened—only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself.
By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Coming of age doesn't only happen to the young.
When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened—only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself.
By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life.
The contemporary novels of Andrew Pessin
Fiction Backlist
college administration to issue a blanket policy requiring the installation of "trigger warnings" in all syllabi.
T, believing that this would constrain his teaching, refuses to comply, even after one of his own students lodges a complaint about something T said during the course of a genetics lecture. The administration's judgment is swift: T will be terminated at semester's end for insubordination.
What recourse, if any, does T have to save his position? And what will he do when he learns the higher-ups knew, early on, that the student who lodged the complaint against him is actually a threat to the school?
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Quantum Voices
by Stephen Spotte
Anax Grayson, a neuroscientist and physicist, enlists in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and is assigned to an undermanned reconnaissance team. One member, Skeeter Hatfield, came of age in a southern West Virginia coal camp and suffered since childhood from a rare malady known as heautoscopic
hallucinations during which he sees ghostly, extra-corporeal projections of his dead twin brother. In a journal Grayson records life as a field Marine, his observations of Hatfield’s neurological condition, and speculates about matter and time. Hatfield survives a mortar attack and returns home with debilitating wounds. He marries a childhood acquaintance and with her help tries to overcome the terrifying hallucinations of his antagonistic Other. Spotte’s narrative mosaic juxtaposes the dysfunctional, barely literate Hatfield family against Grayson’s sympathetic erudition, weaving a mesmerizing disquisition on friendship, love, notions of time and space, neuroscience, quantum physics, consciousness, and the myths of agency and selfhood.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Surviving The Warming: Strategies for Americans
Lorin R. Robinson
THE ONE BOOK TO READ ABOUT
PREPARING FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Surviving the coming world of the warming will pose significant challenges for the world’s eight billion people. And, despite America’s status as the world's richest, most technologically advanced country, Americans will fare no better than others.
Elevated temperatures, rising ocean levels, and more numerous damaging storms will, within several decades, render large portions of the United States inhospitable to human habitation and bring with it economic and social chaos.
While continued efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are laudable, they are too little, too late. As he demonstrates, we are already long past the tipping point after which the worst of the warming cannot be avoided. It has become baked in—irreversible. Instead, we need to increase our focus on how to adapt and survive the developing long-term climate calamity.
The book explores coming changes in housing, the economy, family finances, food, water, employment, energy, healthcare, safety and security and suggests ways in which families can prepare for them—starting now!
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Children of Saturn is a literary novel of the French Revolution. Continuing the literary tradition advanced by Hilary Mantel, Children of Saturn is a revisionist historical novel rooted in deep research, which dramatizes the past in order to speak to the present—the ambition, idealism, corruption, and social unrest of the French Revolution highlighting contradictions that still haunt us today. Children of Saturn dramatizes historical figures who were ahead of their time, hewing close to the bones of history while vividly imagining the inner lives of its cast.
Children of Saturn is told through the fates of three contrasting real-life historical figures—the English/American political activist Thomas Paine; the French Revolution’s leading radical journalist Camille Desmoulins; and the Machiavellian politician Joseph Fouché. In stark contrast to his triumph during the American Revolution, Paine’s dreams for global democracy are tested to the limit by the dark realities of revolutionary Paris. Meanwhile, Camille finds himself hunted by the very political hysteria he helps to incite with his incendiary newspaper. And Fouché discovers a talent for ruthlessness and treachery both in the halls of government and on the field of battle. Finally, vexing and beguiling them all is the charismatic Marguerite Brazier, a lover to both Paine and Camille, a fierce advocate for the rights of women, and a character who is never quite who she seems.
Click here to learn more about the book and the author, read reviews, and order your copy.
Books 1 & 2 of The Red Wolf Chronicles
Seventeen-year-old Sam Robel knows about loss. After the death of his older brother, his family bought Noquebay Resort in Northern Wisconsin to escape their grief.
Sam's friends Max and Diane also know about loss. Max's mother died long ago and his father's mysterious wealth and trophy wife are the talk of Walnut Creek; and six years ago, Diane's sister Jean disappeared without a trace.
One day while fishing with Max, Sam's line snags something from the bottom of Red Wolf Lake, and the discovery sets off a series of events that not only involves the three teenagers but also their friends and families, the sheriff's department, the other citizens of Walnut Creek, and, last but not least, a ruthlessly powerful small-town family, the Manticores, who seem intent on taking Noquebay Resort from Sam's family, no matter what the cost.
The Novels of Arthur Kevin Rein
Books 1&2 of The Red Wolf Chronicles
* Book 3: Witness No More
Upcoming Title
The Humorous Mysteries of David L. Gersh
Upcomiing in Fall 2024
The novels of Micah Thorp
Navigating the loss of a Colorado home.
Jill Carstens developed her identity as a child running through the vacant fields of the neighborhood where her parents built their house on Vivian Street within a stone’s throw of Colorado’s front range.
It was an unspoken assumption that they would live happily on Vivian Street forever. But it is lost and so is she, at the age of 16, by an ugly divorce. Carstens and her brother are evicted from the only life they know, displaced on unexpected detours.
“Soon the only role my brother and I seem to have is to stretch ourselves, impossibly, like tightropes, spanning the frustrating distance between our parents’ new houses.”
Yet if it weren’t for that exodus, she might not have set off to find new places of belonging. Her searching validates her notion that place does matter. And that finding a community within those places is vital. As Carstens’ journey evolves, she faces continued loss while Denver goes through a disruptive gentrification.
Eventually, through milestones and adventures, using her lens of perpetual self-reflection, she will discover unlikely coordinates, places that begin to connect, creating junctions leading to a new life-map.
One constant in Fred’s life is his dog, GB. Nobody listens to Fred as well as GB. But when GB’s health starts to decline, Fred realizes he has to start talking to some0ne one else.
Fred and his best friend Henry, who has ADHD, attend Mrs. Hogan’s resource class where she teaches them what LD and ADHD mean, and more importantly, what role the disorders will play in their lives.
As Fred navigates four years of high school—confronting bullies, struggling with homework and tests, losing his shoes, and trying to answer the question, Who are you, Fred?—readers will gain an understanding about the complexities of learning disabilities.
