Poetry. Women's Studies. BREAKFAST WITH ALLEN GINSBERG is a collection of fifty poems, some very funny and others very personal and poignant, written by the author of GOD IS A TREE AND OTHER MIDDLE-AGE PRAYERS (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2008) and The Book Doctor (fiction). Cohen has several poems about writing, but most of them are about her friends and family, about daily observations of life both in New York City and in a small village in the Catskills. These poems will make a reader smile, sometimes laugh, almost always reflect on his or her own daily existence and human interactions.

Breakfast with Allen Ginsberg

Literature & Fiction

Cohen, Esther

Poetry

Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press

Aleixo de Queiroz Ribeiro, a Portuguese sculptor whose remarkable personal and professional trajectories took him to places as diverse as Paris, Lisbon, Sofia, Addis Ababa, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, is My Art and My Stetson's main character. Based on real people and events, the novel is primarily a work of fiction structured between two alternating narratives: the first, based on the final years of the protagonist's life in the United States and the North of Portugal, constructed according to the different, and at times contradictory, viewpoints that swirl around this contentious and paradoxical figure; the second, centered on his formative years in Paris and Lisbon, according to Aleixo's own perceptions. Intrinsic to the narrative itself, the history of the era simultaneously emerges, not as mere background scenery, but rather as it is witnessed and experienced by the actual individuals who lived it: the fall of the Portuguese monarchy and the turbulent early years of the Republic, the Spanish-American War, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, the First World War, etc. From the end of the century Parisian effervescence to his interaction with the high society of Philadelphia and New York, from early artistic devotion and persistence to a certain mature dandyism in the later years, from public recognition to critical derision, from sensibility to pragmatism, and from ambition to disappointment, My Art and My Stetson dramatically conveys the conflicts and yearnings of a charismatic, controversial and misunderstood man, as well as the numerous contradictions inherent to the epoch during which the narrative takes place.

My Art and My Stetson: Between Europe and America, the unique story of a Portuguese artist and dandy

Biographies & Memoirs

de Queiroz, Manuel

Arts & Literature

About the book: Far ranging in its geography, Waypoints is a collection of poems that mark the itinerary of a poet wanderer—in matter and mind—over many years. As he acknowledges in his statement about the book, John often writes about places he has been because, like a GPS system, they reflect the ups and downs, turns and twists (tone and tenor), of the mental and emotional life-journey he has been taking. Believing there is no better teacher and no better resource for the imagination than nature, John is most grounded when he is in some remote place, enjoying the challenge it presents and the adventure it becomes. These poems take the reader to unique locales around the world, from Port Townsend, Washington, where John now lives, to Nepal, Africa, and South America, where he has trekked. In each case, the presence of place informs his themes, such as time, family, and natural world wonder. Placed in the pages’ margins, the addition of latitude/longitude coordinates for the actual settings of the poems adds a more specific geographic level that curious readers may wish to explore on Google Earth. Included with John’s trek to Machu Picchu with his son are the actual photographs he took on their journey that inspired his haiku. Whether formal or not, with rhyme or without, the poems in this volume will challenge the reader to examine his or her own paths and the stops along them that have made the most impression—questioning how and why such experiences enable us to move forward in a reflective and grateful manner. John is the former curator of historic maps at Princeton University. A graduate of Syracuse’s Writing Program in 1976, John offers Waypoints as his first collection. Why did he wait 40 years? Let’s say that life intervened—and a lot of travel.

Waypoints

Delaney, John.

Isaac

On the night of November 6th, 1941, the life of Isaac Gochman, a 16 year old Polish Jew, changes tragically and profoundly. Over 20,000 Jews from Rovno, Poland are marched into the Sosenki Forest by the Nazis, stripped and shot to death, then buried in an endless, unmarked ravine. All of Isaac’s family and friends die in the massacre. But Isaac miraculously survives the slaughter, and so begins his incredible and harrowing journey through the Polish forest, facing unimaginable hardships and the constant threat of death from the Nazis and their sympathizers. To save himself, he adopts a new identity, Sergei, a Russian Christian, and joins the Russian Partisan Brigade, to become a demolition “miracle man.” As a Partisan, he falls passionately in love for the first time in his young life with Ducia, a Russian Nurse. Near the end of the war, with Ducia tragically gone forever, he turns his back on his homeland, heroically saves the lives of American soldiers, and finds a new home in America. Isaac is a true coming-of-age story of miraculous survival, courage and love.

Karmon, Robert

Genre Fiction

Based on Siegfried Kra's own childhood, Twilight in Danzig is an important addition to pre-Holocaust literature and a unique chronicle of European Jewish culture that reads like a thriller. Young Jonas Kruger's parents. are scions of Danzig society, his father a coal merchant, his mother a lovely socialite. But the rise of Hitler in 1933 forces them to examine their identity and make difficult moral choices: Jonas' governess secretly enrolls him in the Nazi Youth; Mr. Kruger buys open tickets on the Queen Mary, but keeps his family in Danzig, hoping the madness will blow over. But soon the anti-Jewish laws will reach Danzig and the Krugers will face the most difficult decision of their lives: whether to try to reform and resist from within, or to flee penniless to a country that doesn't want them, leaving their larger family to an unspeakable fate.

Twilight in Danzig

Siegfried Kra

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Memoir. Short Story. Like the famous Russian literary physician Chekhov, Kra uses storytelling to connect medicine with the human condition, resulting in tales of love and loss, triumph and disillusionment. From post-war France and Switzerland to a modern private cardiology practice, and the teaching hospitals at Yale, Kra diagnoses rare diseases, falls in love, and even survives a plane crash on a frozen lake. An exploration of the Golden Age of Medicine coupled with vivid moments in unusual stories.

Dancer in the Garden

Kra, Siegfried

Parenting & Relationships

NINE LIVES is a sequel to Twilight in Danzig which tells of Siegfried Kra's childhood leading up to WWII, concluding with his family's escape from the Gestapo. Nine Lives begins when Kra's family emigrates to NY by boat. A riches to rags story, Kra picked up various ways to help feed his family when his once successful father in the coal industry was unable to find work. A desire to study medicine led Kra to Toulouse, France, where he became enraptured by studying every nerve ending and valve of the human body, which he drew on his chalkboard-painted walls and ceiling, until they became a part of him. Kra completed his education at Yale, where he later became a Professor of Medicine and practicing cardiologist. Within this novel are intriguing, charming and touching stories of romance, brushes with death and medical cases during the 'Golden Age of Medicine.' Nine Lives is an enchanting look into an older world that no longer exists and will stick with you long after you put it down. This was then...While some of these stories appear within the short stories of Dancer in the Garden, this book narrates a sequential, comprehensive, and more detailed life story. Kra wanted to save lives so that people could continue to live and love. As a ninety year old, Dr. Siegfried Kra is still an associate professor of medicine at Yale and Quinnipiac University Netter School of Medicine.

Nine Lives

Community & Culture

Fiction. A hit and run driver pinwheeled his daughter's car into the waters of Tomales Bay and his life is turned upside down. Then the sheriff's detective tells him he may have found the driver, a rich man who lives nearby. Fueled by his anger and an overwhelming desire for revenge, he plots ways to make his daughter's killer suffer and die. Like the predatory egret, he stalks his victim, waiting for the right moment to strike. Drowning in the sea, rattlesnakes and crude bombs are parts of his obsessive pursuit, leading to the inevitable violence of what he imagines to be the final strike of the egret's sharp beak. "I was so engrossed by THE EGRET that I read it in one straight sitting. It's brilliant, concise, poetic, gritty and deceptively simple with all the dark undercurrents of anger and nostalgia."--Max Jourdan, London filmmaker "In Russell Hill's THE EGRET, a grieving father wreaks vengeance on the hit-and-run driver who caused his daughter to die. This father, never named in the book, begins stalking the uber-rich and conscienceless Earl Anthony Winslow. As the tension escalates, so do the attempts on Winslow's life, moving up from a gunshot to a poisonous snake bite to a Molotov cocktail and even to a hastily assembled IED. Although the book is deadly serious, this escalation of violence is faintly reminiscent of Wile E Coyote's constant attempts to kill the Road Runner. Winslow somehow survives everything the grieving father throws at him, although several bystanders aren't as fortunate. The father sees himself as an egret: patient, and deadly. Finally confronting his daughter's killer, he says, 'There's a bird that is a stalker. It moves silently and when it finds the thing it wants to eat, it remains motionless until the thing is right where it wants it and then it strikes. Right now I have you right where l want you.' It isn't the final act of revenge itself that makes this 161 page novella so fascinating, it's the look deep inside the mind and soul of a man who compares himself to a bird...In this deftly handled novel, an egret delivers a lesson on how to kill."--Betty Webb, Mystery Scene magazine "In his novella, THE EGRET, science fiction writer turns to realistic--all too realistic--fiction. In this suspense tale, Hill writes in a lean, mean prose style that I associate with some of my favorite writers, including those household names of fame, Chandler and Hemingway...I also admire Hill's use of a daring device--1st person POV, where it becomes ominously more and more clear the narrator, who has suffered what he believes is a terrible injustice, may not survive his obsession with revenge, that his elaborate plans to get even may end in ways he did not foresee."--Edward Harkness

The Egret

Hill, Russell

United States

Goodbye to Tenth Street is the first novel written by Irving Sandler, one of America’s finest and most acclaimed art critics. Sandler vividly portrays the New York art world from the death of Jackson Pollock in 1956 to the emergence of Andy Warhol in 1962. Goodbye to Tenth Street explores the business and the culture of Abstract Expressionism, including the soul-searching quest for artistic authenticity, the alcohol, the sex, and the intense rivalries among its proponents. Based on Sandler’s personal experiences, the art world of his invention brings to life a tight-knit but deeply competitive community of artists, critics, curators, and gallery owners, where connections are forged and betrayed, ideologies clash, and relationships blossom and implode with dizzying speed. Several of the characters are well known personalities—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, et al.—and others hint at real people or are amalgams of art world denizens that may be identified by the astute reader. Art theory and art history are interwoven throughout the plot of this crisp and sparkling narrative. Sandler paints a dynamic portrait of the Abstract Expressionists and their visual breakthroughs and makes us ponder the pursuit for meaning, emotional honesty, and objectivity via artistic expression. With the arrival of Pop Art as the newest avant-garde, where commercialism supplants emotional expression, Sandler reveals the changing attitudes in the art world, the conflict between the older and younger generation of artists, and the necessity of these periodic upheavals in keeping art relevant to our times. Written from the perspective of a contemporary, Sandler gives a “behind-the-scenes” look at the personalities and events of this important period in American art history.

Goodbye to Tenth Street

Arts & Photography

SANDLER, Irving

History & Criticism

“Make It True meets Medusario brings together poets from divergent languages, cultures, and aesthetics to create a...conversation...a fertile meeting place for ongoing ideas about poetry that might trouble the all too-easy academic labels and the subsequent segregation those aesthetic and political divisions cause within the larger, global poetry community.” -From the book’s introduction by Matthew TreaseThis collaboration, spawned by two previous anthologies, includes the Spanish language poets of the Neobarroco school, as organized by José Kozer, a Cuban Neobarroco poet, together with poets from the Cascadia bioregion, arranged by Paul E Nelson, founder of the Seattle Poetics Lab (SPLAB) and Thomas Walton, editor-in-chief of Pageboy Magazine, Seattle, WA.Translated by Alejandro Carrillo and Dana Nelson; NEOBARROCO (Medusario) poets include: Carmen Berenguer, Marosa Di Giorgio, Roberto Echavarren, Eduardo Espina, Reynaldo Jiménez, Tamara Kamenszain, José Kozer, Pedro Marqués de Armas, Maurizio Medo, Néstor Perlongher, Soleida Ríos, Roger Santiváñeaz, and Raúl Zurita; CASCADIANS (Make It True) poets include: Stephen Collis, Elizabeth Cooperman, Sarah de Leeuw, Claudia Castro Luna, Nadine Maestas, Peter Munro, Paul E Nelson, John Olson, Shin Yu Pai, Clea Roberts, Cedar Sigo, Matthew Trease and Thomas Walton

Make It True Meets Medusario: A Bilingual anthology of Neobarroco & Cascadian Poets (Pleasure Boat Studio)

Kozer, José

Literary

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