"Palm Readings" is a collection of short fiction by seven women in Southern California, edited by Eve La Salle Caram. In addition to short stories these women of vairous cultural backgrounds, "Palm Readings" also contains a detailed chapter of fiction writing exercises and editing techniques which will be of use to educators and beginning writers. The seven women whose stories are collected here have come to Los Angeles from a number of cultures Stel DeLen and Louinn Lota born in the Philippines, Anita Santiago in Venezuela, Mara Amparo Escandn in Mexico; one is a third and another a fifth generation Californian (Susan Lee and Marnell Jameson) and one (Jacqueline Jaffe) did most of her growing up in Los Angeles. Some have written for years and published widely, others have just begun to write. For several, publication in these pages is a first. For all their differences, coming to terms, in fiction and creative non-fiction, with their identity and their values seems a common thread. All but one have taken courses in The Writers Program, UCLA Extension. Mara Amparo Escandn is a teacher in that program, as I am, and Marnell Jameson is a teacher of writing in the Public Relations Program at UCLA Extension.

Palm Readings: Stories from Southern California

Caram, Eve LA Salle

Literature & Fiction

Plain View Pr

This is the story of an ninety-year-old woman, Rena, who happens into a contemporary catastrophe that causes her to integrate the pieces of her life. Rena, a completely open person whose name means rebirth narrates the story from the fishing peer, a posthumous story, one in which she reconciles the conflicts of a long life that spanned and paralleled the conflicts of our century. Gulf wind blows her literarly off the bus, across the street to buy a scarf at Kresss and the story is off. She meets a young man, Renato Santos, who helps her find a fishing pole. Her first husband had liked fishing. He told her in a dream to get on the bus and go to Corpus Christi. She did it. She and Renato become friends which gets her eventually shot by a crack cocaine dealer who turns out to be his twin brother. The troubles of the Santos family parallel the troubles of Renas own family. Their healing is her own. The dialectic of the story is a weaving together of past and present. The narrator is looking back at life, scenes inside of scenes create a continuity that transcends the individual, but is for everyone.

Rena, A Late Journey

Literary

Please, San Antonio! & Melisande in Paris are two delightful novellas written by award-winnng authors about women who journey to Rome and Paris and find creativity, identity, love, and healing. In Eve La Salle Caram's Please, San Antonio!, an emotionally isolated American woman's trip to Rome becomes a powerful quest to find what she has lost: her creativity, identity, and "an open place in her heart." In Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's Melisande in Paris, a young seamstress from the French countryside comes to Paris to assist her dressmaker aunt, and rediscovers her talent, strength, and a precious "feeling of wholeness" in her new lover's arms. Together, Caram's Beatrice and Brainard's Melisande cross geographical borders and borders of the heart with vitality and spirit, and will inspire those who believe in the possibility of heaven on heart.

Please, San Antonio! & Melisande in Paris: Two Novellas, Special International Edition

Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra

PALH

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Books by Caram, Eve LA Salle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Caram, Eve LA Salle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Palm Readings: Stories from Southern California

Rena, A Late Journey

Please, San Antonio! & Melisande in Paris: Two Novellas, Special International Edition