Fiction. The nine stories in the debut collection, WOLF NOTE, thrust the reader into diverse worlds from San Francisco in the 1940s to the tangled imagination of a delusional adolescent in a contemporary mental ward, introducing characters with compassion, humor, and nuanced psychological insight. The stories capture moments in women's lives as they lose themselves-and find themselves-in love, friendship, music, and madness. An injured ballerina turns to her grandmother's Kodak camera and its 35 millimeter film, which sounds to her "like artillery ammunition," when she can no longer dance. In the title story, the narrator ponders the concept that "certain weaknesses run in families," and she embraces the cello as her brother had clung his violin. "Short story writing is a difficult and demanding craft, and Libby Jacobs clearly has mastered it. Light a fire, curl up, and get set to immerse yourself in the moods and power of WOLF NOTE"-Michael Palmer, author of eleven New York Times Bestsellers, including The Society, Fatal, and The Patient.

Wolf Note

Jacobs, Libby

Literature & Fiction

Rager Media

Fiction. Nothing in John Sokol's stories are as they appear. A visual artist with a Shakespearian bent for understanding the fundamental principles of "reality versus appearance," Sokol exposes moments of human folly and bizarre behavior as if he were exposing tricks of light and shade. The characters are by turn bizarre, pathetic, and sympathetic, and they reveal Sokol's dark sense of humor at its best: Van Gogh, at his most humorously neurotic; a jealous, scheming academic; a Peeping Tom; and a nine-year-old girl who can see into the future. All of which, of course, make for interesting narrative premises-but these characters are so complex and human that they transcend the novelty of their circumstances. This is a gallery of finely-tuned portraits of human disorder and brief moments of clarity. These stories withstand the test of careful critical scrutiny and rereading.

The Problem with Relativity (Ohio Distinguished Authors)

Sokol, John

Contemporary

Fiction. In David Evanier's new collection of stories, THE GREAT KISSER "There is a bloodshot intensity..., a drive to get hold of the world before it all gets lost, the streets, the rooms, the feeling of the times--the 60s and 70s--when personal and public life felt so terribly urgent. Evanier writes a muscular, watchful prose, and again and again he pulls it off, surprising his characters in t heir existential habitat--unsettled, confused, completely caught up in the act of becoming"--Sven Birkerts.

The Great Kisser

Evanier, David

Fiction. AFOOT IN THE GARDEN OF ENCHANTMENTS uncovers the charm of human folly, the hopes and doubts of ordinary individuals, but its revelations unfold amid marvelous, implausible events, which are treated as everyday occurrences by the characters who experience them, whether in the Islands of the Blest or in the larger world discovered by those who passed through the islands on their way to the New World.

Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments

Campbell, Ewing

A Chapbook of poems by Michelle Moore.    The poems in THE DEEPEST BLUE reclaim the confessional and assert that it is not the mode or subject that determine a poem's permanence but the quality of the language, the authority of its tone, and the urgency of its obsessions and passions. These dark, brooding poems will appeal to those who have been to the bottom of "the deepest blue."

The Deepest Blue

Moore, Michelle

Poetry

Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated from the Chinese by David Young and Jiann I. Lin. Du Mu (803-852) is admired among the many gifted poets of the late Tang Dynasty for his immense technical skill--especially his mastery of the short lyric--and for his observant delight in the world around him. In a difficult life and a difficult time, he nevertheless managed to find sensuous joy in birds, wine, flowers, women, seasons, and, not least, China's great river systems, where he traveled both in his official duties and as a poet curious about his world. His poems still brim with life, humor, and wonder, and this generous selection of them is the first full-length volume in English. David Young is well known as both a translator and a poet. Jiann I. Lin is East Asian Librarian at Oberlin College.

Out on the Autumn River: Selected Poems of Du Mu

Mu, Du

Fiction. "After writing piercing and lucid memoirs and poems about his struggles with a neurological disorder, Skloot returns to fiction in his first novel in 10 years [PATIENT 002] to ponder the anguished yet sometimes munificent revelations of illness, while taking a few shots at the pharmaceutical industry. A helicopter pilot in Vietnam and an athletic and fiery opinion analyst in Portland, Oregon, Sam is afflicted with a cruelly marauding virus that is obliterating his physical strength and mental acuity. He signs up for a drug trial, hoping for a miracle cure, as does the hyperchatty Tracy, who seems to be getting better until the program is abruptly aborted by the perhaps speciously named Physicians for Ethical Research. Sam, abetted by Jessica, who is equally skilled in therapeutic massage and computer hacking, decides to fight back. Skloot turns an involving tale of the mind-body puzzle with a magnetic cast of unusual characters into an archly funny caper, infusing this masterfully understated, tender, and shrewd tale of love and healing with insight, compassion, and a touch of righteous indignation."-Donna Seaman, Booklist.

Patient 002

Skloot, Floyd

With each new novel, post-modern legend Jonathan Baumbach subtly reimagines the shape of the wheel. In his latest, YOU, subtitled, Or the Invention of Memory, the narrator remembers or imagines or invents the story of a not easily defined relationship with a complex and variable woman known in the novel only as You. The style will captivate, needing no explanation as to why Baumbach s novels continue to connect with a wide variety of readers. You are warily approaching the first sentence of my new novel, not wanting to be taken unaware, or not wanting to be plunged into something from which there is no perceptible exit or perhaps both at once, separate and inseparable concerns. The opening sentence, with your unspoken consent, has edged its way into the barely remembered past.

You: Or the Invention of Memory

Jonathan Baumbach

A whirling top most of his life, Michael Goldberg's world changes when his dying shrink bequeaths to him the tapes of thirty years of Michael s therapy sessions. The tapes give Michael a second chance in middle age: they unlock his life for him, as a gallery of absurd and touching characters, events and scenes spring out of his past: the shrink who cracks up and reverses roles with Michael when his wife dies and shows him naked pictures of his patients; the gay man who works for Jewish Punchers, a civil rights group, by day and the Harry Reems Defense Committee at night; a first love encountered again in desperate, ravaged middle age; a Communist Party leader who "would rather be a lamppost in Moscow than President of the United States;" a "glistening failure" of a father who is a cheerleader of Michael s defeat ("You can fail, Michael, if you try! I did it, why can t you?"); the fetish porn-drenched world of old Times Square; a Holocaust survivor Michael meets on September 11th who cannot confront his experience; a Hollywood of elderly Jewish moguls, scholarly and bizarre, "who seemed to have been shipped fresh to California like onion bagels or seeded bialys"-- men like Michael s mentor, Julius Birnbach, creator of the cult classic, "The Curse of the Evil Midgets." Entering into a marriage stemming from a suicide, by the end, the marriage turns into a love story as Michael reclaims his life. The Great Kisser becomes a story of gratitude--of many kisses--by its climax.

David Evanier

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Books by Rager Media

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

Wolf Note

The Problem with Relativity (Ohio Distinguished Authors)

The Great Kisser

Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments

The Deepest Blue

Out on the Autumn River: Selected Poems of Du Mu

Patient 002

You: Or the Invention of Memory

The Great Kisser