Open Books Newsletter
Spring 2025
Click logo
to listen to podcast
Click image to enlarge
New Books, New Authors, New Year!
Reviews, Interviews,
Excerpts & more...
Featured Books
Arthur Kevin Rein is back with the third and final book of the Red Wolf Trilogy.
Witness No More
follows
Rolling in the Deep & A Flame Worth the Candle
Pamela Gwyn Kripke is a journalist and author whose stories have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Huffington Post, Slate, Salon, Medium, New York Magazine, Parenting, Elle, D Magazine, Creators Syndicate, Gannett Newspapers and McClatchy. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in Folio, The Concrete Desert Review, The Barcelona Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Book of Matches, The MacGuffin, Meet Me At 19th, The Woven Tale Press, Underwired, Doubleback Review and Round Table Literary Journal.
Her novel, At the Seams, received the Arch Street Press First Chapter Award and was excerpted in Embark and West Trade Review.
Robert Klose teaches at the University of Maine and is the single father of sons adopted from Russia and Ukraine. He is a regular contributor of essays to The Christian Science Monitor. His work has also appeared in Newsweek, The Boston Globe, and various literary magazines. His books include the memoirs, Adopting Alyosha — A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia and Adopting Anton — A Single Man Seeks a Son in Ukraine; the essay collections Small Worlds — Adopted Sons, Pet Piranhas and Other Mortal Concerns and The Three-Legged Woman & Other Excursions in Teaching; and the novels, Long Live Grover Cleveland, which won a 2016 Ben Franklin Literary Award and a USA BookNews Award, and Life on Mars, which was a Finalist for a 2019 Best Book Award sponsored by American Book Fest and was also a Finalist in the International Book Awards and American Fiction Awards.
He is also a four-time winner of a Maine Press Association award for Opinion writing.
Dr. Eileen Ryan has taught in a variety of educational environments from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana to the urban and suburban schools of Chicago.
Developing resource programs at three private high schools motivated Dr. Ryan to pursue a PhD in special education from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Throughout her career she also taught graduate and undergraduate level courses and provided professional development in special education to a variety of schools.
Dr. Ryan’s quick wit and wisdom are greatly admired by colleagues, friends and family, and her husband, children, and grandchildren will testify under oath that she makes the best Chritmas fudge anywhere.
A collection of twenty-one poignant and humorous short stories by Pamela Gwyn Kripke.
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 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.
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, has 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 his observations of Hatfield’s neurological condition, and speculates about friendship, love, notions of time and space, neuroscience, consciousness, and the myths of agency and selfhood.
Andrew Pessin is Professor of Philosophy at Connecticut College, with degrees from Yale and Columbia—though he is perhaps most recognized for his appearances years ago as “The Genius” on the Late Show with David Letterman. Author of four philosophy books, and one textbook. His book, Uncommon Sense: The Strangest Ideas from the Smartest Philosophers, was named an “Outstanding Academic Title of 2013” by Choice. His first novel, The Second Daughter, written under the pen name J. Jeffrey was a Semi-Finalist in Literary Fiction at The Kindle Book Review Book Awards. In his spare time he composes and performs amusing philosophy songs.
Stephen Spotte, a marine scientist, was born and raised in West Virginia. He has published 19 books, including three volumes of fiction, a memoir, and a work of cultural theory. He is a Certified Wildlife Biologist of The Wildlife Society and also holds a U.S. Merchant Marine officer's license.
Dr. Spotte now lives and writes from his home in Longboat Key, Florida.
Witness No More
by Arthur Kevin Rein
Ten months have passed since Max Cherhasky, his father J. Roman, and step-mother Nadine disappeared from their lakeside mansion in Walnut Creek, Wisconsin. Roman's testimony against the Chicago Mob has placed the family in mortal danger. The Witness Protection Program has changed their names, uprooted their lives, and dragged them to a small town in South Dakota.
Max meets Leah, a beautiful artist who possesses a vision for color beyond his understanding, and falls in love. Beyond her, there is no happiness in his new home. As Max's high school graduation nears, he makes plans to escape his family, the town, and the WPP. But the Cherhaskys are hiding from more than the Mob. Back in Wisconsin, a warrant is issued for the murder of Max's mother, Madeline, dead twelve years.
What happens when a murder suspect is under federal protection? Witness No More, the final volume in the Red Wolf Chronicles trilogy, follows Max as he goes off the grid with a partner he has always disdained. But can he forget Leah so easily? And what about the truth he can never leave behind?
Arthur Kevin Rein grew up on a resort (with five siblings and four cousins) much like the one described in Rolling in the Deep and A Flame Worth the Candle. Since then, Rein has graduated magna cum laude from the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh, obtained a medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin, and practiced Internal Medicine for forty years. He has published short stories and non-fiction works. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife.
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.
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.
Why can't Fred find his shoes?
Ready to pull the Trigger?
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 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?
Upcoming in Spring 2025
Favorites from Familiar Writers and a Few Fresh Faces
Ambition. Idealism. Corruption. Blood.
An epic historical novel of the French Revolution, Children of Saturn vividly chronicles the dramatic conflict of social unrest that haunts France—and the world—to this day. Rooted in deep research and told through the fates of three 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—Children of Saturn continues the literary tradition advanced by Hilary Mantel, promising readers a thrilling ride and an all-encompassing understanding of one of the most important watershed events in world history.
John Neeleman's second novel, Children of Saturn, is a revisionist historical novel of the French Revolution rooted in deep research, which dramatizes the past in order to speak to the present.
John's first novel, Logos, dramatizing Christianity’s origin, approached first century Palestine and Europe with a revisionist eye. Logos won both the 2016 Utah Book Award for fiction and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal for Religious Fiction.
In the print edition of Kirkus Reviews, Logos was described as
“a staggeringly impressive feat: a rigorously researched historical novel that carries its scholarliness lightly and grips the reader with personal drama.”
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.
The author maintains that the heat of the warming will crack, blister and peel away what has always been the thin veneer of civilization—leading over time to the demise of civil society and the collapse of major institutions.
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.
Surviving the Warming 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!
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.
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 cliches. 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.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence!
Outcasts of Essex
by Jane Hulse
Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775.
Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she’s the unwilling apprentice to the town’s only midwife—her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father who publishes the weekly Essex Journal.
As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial vaccination.
Sarah finds herself questioning everything: the fight for independence, her father’s judgment, her own failings, and more to the point, why it’s considered unthinkable for a young woman to write for a newspaper.
When she learns the redcoats and the patriots will soon clash over a stockpile of munitions in Essex, she comes up with a risky plan to thwart the bloodbath.
A comprehensive guide to successfully navigating culture, traditions, psychology, and business practices
within a diverse region
