Tornado Alley

Tornado Alley is a story of a man and a woman who are on a dangerous collision course. Marie Boule is a love-starved young woman who grew up in a small, impoverished town in Pennsylvania, and her one desire is to find a comfortable, easy life. She thinks she is capable of hardening her heart and making any sacrifice necessary to get where she's going. It is only a matter of time before she meets Ben Lunn, a bright and responsible man who thinks he has made his peace with the woman he has married and the demands of being a father and husband. When Ben and Marie meet it is with all the unstoppable quality of a force of nature: at first, they are just pleased with each other's company, a kind of innocent companionship they both crave, but soon they enter into a secret bond. Benn Lunn's life has been marked by gifts, not the least of which is a kind of magical sense about the world. He is the son of a small-town doctor, and in the heat of the place where he grew up, in the scandals of those around him, there is always the constant presence of the effect of passion. His mother ran off to become an actress... his father keeps his own love alive, waiting for her return. Marie has seen, in her own youth, the result of love come to nothing, and she is determined to avoid this at all costs... Tornado Alley is a compelling novel about love and loss, honor and passion, and the mysteries of the human heart. It is told with drama and humor, and its characters are real people dealing with the recognizable problems of life.

Literature & Fiction

NOVA, Craig

Literary

PFP Publishing

  Warren Hodges, head of International Pictures, lives in a house like a Norman castle with a view of the Pacific.   Marta Brooks, blonde and beautiful, takes classified ads for the Romance Advertiser.   Victor Shaw has spent time in Soledad state prison but understands that his future lies in blackmail.     Taylor Hayden, a good hit man, shines his shoes and doesn't ask questions.   Zimba, a performing elephant, is not as reliable as he looks.   This is Hollywood, and Craig Nova makes it seem perfectly logical that these creatures should find themselves in the same cast. In his swift, lyrical prose, comic and moving, Craig Nova weaves disparate lives together into a novel that makes utter beauty out of the gritty and grotesque. This is a story about people who are willing to take the chance they have been waiting for all their lives, men and women trying to live up to their dreams.   The Book of Dreams is also a book about California, that youthful place prematurely aged by the burden of too much longing and desire. And the look of the place, with its heartbreaking, ever receding landscape (seen most often through car windows), haunts this novel. Like a jazz pianist, improvising snatches of other tunes while never straying far from the melody, Nova effortlessly echoes the writers who have helped us see the state in earlier times - Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanial West, all are acknowledged here in graceful, amusing riffs.   "Using a handful of characters from a high-powered studio chief to a neat-freak hitman whose lives all intersect, Nova spins a gorgeous tale that fully rejuvenates in often surprising fashion the tired Hollywood-novel genre. Despite their familiarity, the characters and their backgrounds are marvelously detailed and ...cliche-free (no small feat in this genre). . . . Nova's eighth novel is so good that it reminds one of the great Day of the Locust." - Library Journal   "...These flawed but compelling characters are the walking wounded, limping and cringing with residual pain from their love-starved pasts. A potently visual writer, Nova is also adept at articulating the obtuseness of an obsessed or hopeless mind. His eighth novel, perhaps his best, is enticing, unsettling, and gratifyingly noir...." - Booklist

The Book of Dreams

For Merelene Durham it's been fifteen years of coping, of determination not to lose her purchase on this world: a world that has become almost unendurable since her rakish husband, Mayfield, fled after encephalitis turned their son Roland's mind into a strange, shell-holed country. Blind Tongues is the story of what happens when Mayfield unexpectedly returns, and his conviction that a newly made fortune can make Roland whole again, of a brilliant local attorney whose body bears the scars of aviation heroics in World War II, and finally of Merelene herself, who must choose between these two competitors in love while trying to accept the sweet simplicity of her ageless son. Sterling Watson, author of The Calling and Fighting in the Shade, has created a stunning evocation of a Florida coast town and of the people struggling for love and solace within its borders.

Blind Tongues

Watson, Sterling

Fighting Gravity

Rambach, Peggy

A tapestry of suffering, joy, transcendence...a journey of guilt and hope...In these remarkable short stories by native South African Tony Eprile, men and women play out dramas that echo the tumultuous din of their homeland.  With a particular emphasis on exiles - whether expatriates or those people alienated in their own country - these stories examine a nation breaking apart along the fault lines of race, belief, and circumstance.  With this collection, Mr. Eprile emerges as a brilliant compassionate chronicler of one of the most troubled and troubling landscapes of our world.

Temporary Sojourner: South African Stories

Eprile, Tony

Genre Fiction

Moments of Grace and Beauty: Forty Stories of Kindness, Courage, and Generosity in a Troubled World

Every day around the globe there are billions of acts of kindness, courage, generosity, and grace—but we rarely get to hear much about them.
It is easier to write about the evil in the world than about the good. Writers who focus on violence, greed, ugliness, and hypocrisy can appear more sophisticated, more intelligent, more mature, more aware of the world's true nature. Award-winning author, Roland Merullo recognizes these challenges to humankind as clearly as anyone, but also believes they get more than their share of coverage, and that cargo of bad news can act as an oppressive weight on the mind.
At the start of a recent gray, cold, New England winter, Merullo decided to make a list of some of the remarkable acts he has witnessed, and the generous, kind, and brave people he has had the good fortune to know.
Moments of Grace and Beauty is intended to serve as a counterweight to the abundance of trouble in the news, and is offered as evidence of the goodwill still present on earth.

MERULLO, ROLAND

Religion & Spirituality

In Who Do You Think You Are? Reflections Of A Writer's Life, Joseph Torra, ponders his thirty plus years as a poet, novelist, editor, publisher, and teacher. With both pathos and humor, Torra discusses the challenges he has faced as an author, husband, parent-and, as a person who struggles with bipolar disease. He shares stories and insights on: growing up in a working class Italian-American Boston suburb, literary and other artists who have influenced him, painting, music, addiction, the publishing scene-past and present-as well as the importance of mentorships and community. Who Do You Think You Are?, a courageous and frank portrait of an author, benefits all readers who hope to pursue an artistic career of any form. "Torra's characters speak in an almost poetic cadence," said Boston Magazine. And Charlotte Innes of the Los Angeles Times wrote, Torra "Offers an intricate, sympathetic, sometimes outraged, always graceful commentary on the larger world."

Who Do You Think You Are?

Biographies & Memoirs

JOSEPH TORRA

Memoirs

Driving Jesus to Little Rock

Roland Merullo's Driving Jesus to Little Rock, fits neatly on the shelf with his other beloved, quirky-spiritual books: Golfing with God, American Savior, Vatican Waltz, The Delight of Being Ordinary, and the Buddha trilogy (Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner)-a list that has sold over half a million copies and been widely translated. This time, the narrator, Eddie Valpolicella, is on his way from Massachusetts to Arkansas to give a talk on "his" novel, Breakfast with Buddha, when, not far from home, he picks up a mysterious hitchhiker. Plainly dressed, insisting that he's a fan of the author, the hitchhiker claims to be Jesus, the Jesus, and accompanies Eddie on a five-day road trip that challenges him in an amusing variety of ways. Every night on the way south, Eddie calls home to speak with his wife, and Anna Maria's fiery insistence on choosing trust over suspicion gradually pushes him out of his original cynicism. Jesus plays tricks appearing and disappearing, changing shape, vacillating from stern teacher to affectionate friend-and Eddie, confused, suspicious, and wrestling with his own preconceived notions of spirituality, only very slowly realizes that he's being given precious guidance in the art of living. As he did in his other road trip adventures, Merullo manages to walk a tightrope by raising deep philosophical questions without sounding preachy. The author provokes readers to think about life while also making them laugh and providing them with a boots-on-the-ground view of America. This journey includes wealthy Russian businessmen, poor Appalachian deer hunters, South American spirit guides, and tours of places as seemingly disparate as a therapeutic massage studio in Lower Manhattan, the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and Thomas Merton's Gethsemane monastery in rural Kentucky. Along the way there are meals and drinks, wrong turns and intriguing scenery, all brought into focus beside the book's utterly original yet strangely believable Jesus. Driving Jesus to Little Rock amuses, illuminates, and entertains, ultimately serving as the perfect comfort-food for battered, post-Covid readers.

Dessert with Buddha

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