Grass Grows Inward

Literature & Fiction

neeser, Andreas

Poetry

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

Hers is the most authentic voice I’ve heard from the expat fifties. She brings to life a seminal decade in literary and sexual history, one that she and her fellow expats, coming home, passed on to the next generation of Americans who thought that they had invented the Sexual Revolution. This is an essential book. And a damn good story as well! Edward Field, author of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era 
 A well-observed account of the texture of life for those resistant spirits who actively held out against the cultural norms of 1950’s America. To read Abroad is to take a wander down the pleasure path of a sadly bygone era. Moe Angeles, Performer/Playwright, Creator of the theater piece Sontag: Reborn 
 Abroad is a beautifully felt and rendered story of a fascinating woman in a fascinating time. Harriet Zwerling’s account of her life in Paris in the fifties is entertaining and important. Don’t miss this wonderful book. Mary Dearborn, author of Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim 
 Abroad, and how! We see in this diary a beautiful, brave young woman escape Cold War America’s stifling paranoias to conduct her own intimate search for the truth of desire. Bravely, she questions pleasure itself: Where is it most to be found? In encounters with men or with women? What are its costs? How does it challenge emotional, mental, and physical well-being? A reader marvels at the vitality with which Harriet Sohmers Zwerling meets those challenges, the honesty with which she records her experience, and the generosity with which she offers the record to us today. Sarah White, author of Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson and Alice Ages and Ages

Abroad: An Expatriate’s Diaries 1950-1959

Zwerling, Harriet Sohmers

Biographies & Memoirs

I’ve always loved Bill Evans’ poems and the work in Modern Adventures is both timeless and hilarious. The loving regard for all of our weakness and the muscular rhythms of these poems knock me out every time. Ever hip, ever hopeful, Bill Evans is the poet we’ve been waiting for. —David St. John  Here’s a nice thing. Bill Evans walked into the dark night of the soul for you, caught a wave there and emerged with a poetic voice that is a present for anyone who would like to know what it is like to be alive. Or maybe he was locked in a Mexican standoff with desire and neither one budged, so they just started singing. Part teen idol, part pirate, part philosopher, as if Rumi were a carnival barker whose promises turned out to be true. Adjectives? Seductive, moving, funny, transgressive, wonder-full and achingly human come to mind. Bill’s poetry is not just craft; it is a human voice that knows things, and I want to hear them.  —Peter Catapano, editor of the New York Times series The Stone and Anxiety.  These are the poems of an urban man and a little sad a touch bitter but it’s raining out tonight and from where I am I notice Bill often likes to break into a little dance. I want to say that these are moral poems because in the hands of Bill Evans morality means feeling and whether he’s listing the parts of a “little pilgrim” (“we’re so/ proud of you”) or snapping a joke what chiefly is holding his poetic together is heart which makes his work dangerous and rare in this disparate and deeply informed moment in time. We need his poems because he feels and so I kept reading and wanting more. These are the heartbeats of an ancient man looking at history from left to right and now staring us right in the eye. We are not alone. —Eileen Myles, author of Inferno (a poet’s novel).

Modern Adventures

Evans, Bill

Ruth, a bored and frustrated young mother in the Chicago suburbs, is haunted by the letters she receives from her own mother, who has been dead for several years. Ruth hires Lamb, whose investigation traces the letters to Europe and ultimately to Gustave, who tells the story of his equivocal love affair with a beautiful American girl during the student rebellion in Paris in 1968. But this girl is less carefree than she seems; she is an American haunted by her own half-lit memories of the unnarratable horrors of European history, and she may turn out to be Ruth’s mother, if not Ruth’s second self. 
 Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself. 
 This powerful novel, which pays out its rewards gradually, carefully, but also crisply, dare I say electrically, may be Joshua Corey’s first, but it feels exactly like the highly satisfying product of the fully formed imagination that birthed it. All of Corey’s hard-earned skill as a poet is put here to useful work. The push-pull between stunning language and inventive narrative is pure pleasure. Laird Hunt 
 Joshua Corey’s Beautiful Soul offers a swirling, shadowy cosmos lit by intelligence, urgency, and heart. Its swirl is cinematic—“estranged and operatic”—but never at the expense of the body, be it the bitten nipple, or the “bloody middle” of history. I especially admire Corey’s conjuring of Ruth: fulcrum of readerly empathy, inheritor of mysterious and difficult histories, navigator of the present’s strata, honorary “new reader.” Go on her journey with her; “the book is waiting.” Maggie Nelson 
 All the beauty of the world is in the flow of each living person’s narrative, from moment to moment, and the way these stories also encompass the ghosts of the past—this is the angle of incidence Joshua Corey is attempting to recreate in a novel as precisely defined as the images in a mirror and as diffuse as the colors and shadings in a prism. Beautiful Soul, with its ever-shifting parameters, from periphery to center and back again, is a testament to the infinite longing for something or someone who isn’t there, the last word on a world where everything matters. Lewis Warsh

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

Corey, Joshua

Contemporary

In this follow up to the 2008 bestselling Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Experimental Prose by Contemporary Women Writers, 29 contributors use different styles and language genres, their tools at hand, to illustrate moments of conflict, amusement, bafflement and joy that make up a day, a year, an individual life or a collective history. Held up to the light or inspected under a microscope, set in locales real, virtual, mythic, and imaginary, characters bump into and move through events, leaving readers with the humorous, sad, sexy and playful ambiguities of what it means to be alive. This anthology provides a much needed venue to spotlight women writers engaged in serious creative writing projects chronicling and responding to our current culture. 
 "Were this book published by St. Martin’s or Norton, they would have slapped its contents on wider margins and packaged it for the college market at twice the cost. Except Norton or St. Martin’s would never publish this book—it’s too dangerous, wild, and singular. Wreckage of Reason gives us three dozen women authors beyond any easily marketable definition; by any description, it’s an anthology worthy of an audience and acclaim.” Ted Pelton, from The Brooklyn Rail (writing about Wreckage of Reason I) 
 Barbara Baer Holly Anderson Brooke Wonders Anna Mockler E. C. Bachner Lillian Ann Slugocki Nicolle Elizabeth Aimee Parkison Melanie Page Cynthia Reeves Karen Lillis Carmen Firan Martha King Lorraine Schein Stephanie Dickinson Karen Brennan Alexandra Chasin Kathe Burkhart Lynda Schor Andrea Scrima Robin Martin Theresa O’Donnell Donna Wyszomierski Geri Lipschultz Joanna Sit Snezana Zabic Tsipi Keller Lyndee Yamshon Margarita Meklina Laynie Browne Alicita Rodriguez Danielle Alexander Debra Di Blasi

Wreckage of Reason II: Back To The Drawing Board

United States

It all started one night when five energetic boy cousins got together for a sleepover. As I was trying to get them to wind down and relax in their sleeping spots, one of them said, "Hey uncle Gary how about telling us a scary story " "Alright" I said, "I'll tell you My Scary Camp Story." Now I had to come up with something... This book is meant to be read out-loud. SO get animated as you read and the kids will love you for it

My Scary Camp Story

Children's Books

Ray Bugarcic, Gary

Comics & Graphic Novels

Elsa is the final psychological portrait in Keller’s trilogy (after Maggie in Jackpot, and Sally in Retelling). In this novel, Elsa—and the reader along with her—is caught in a labyrinth of deceit and obsession. Her fears become ours as she questions and doubts them with escalating intensity.    Fusing Patricia Highsmith’s gift for sociopathic portraits with Jean Rhys’s woman-in-a-jam claustrophobia, the first two novels of Tsipi Keller’s trilogy-in-progress offer front-row views of obsessive characters who somehow manage to be scary and wildly engaging at the same time.     Michael Miller (TimeOut)  From Publishers Weekly (on Retelling) The mystery of who butchered ethereally beautiful and pregnant Elsbeth is at the heart of Keller’s elegant and spooky second novel … Keller flirts with the answer as her novel slips back and forth through time to depict tantalizing glimpses of possible truths filtered through Sally’s uncertain memories … This opaque yet beguiling novel showcases the work of a talented and original writer.    From Publishers Weekly (on Jackpot) A Bahamian vacation turns into a nightmarish dreamworld in Tsipi Keller’s smart, sly Jackpot ... Keller expertly charts Maggie’s transformation in this accomplished and oddly gripping novel.

Elsa

Keller, Tsipi

Genre Fiction

These poems exude from an intimacy with natural forms, sidestepping or sideswiping the abuse of a Nature that our science—having thoughtlessly cast magic to its margins—unfecundly abjures. That and the matrix of magic’s interstices with language. Magic cannot do without poetry as poetry without magic dwindles to the sad reinforcement of consensual norms. No consensus here, but an authority whose writ is southern earth and hidden fire and stone. Charles Stein 
 Robert Podgurski is a magus and these poems cast spells. This is not a metaphor—it’s a warning. Peter Lamborn Wilson 
 Sufi-dancing at the center of an elemental hora, Podgurski is at that fortunate crossroads where one does not have to choose yet between the agora and the desert. His senses gather full tilt the juicy and aromatic effluence of eros, all conjunctions appear in the rich light of germination. The poetry that his eros presents in a lovely series of ladders is filled with the muscular ease of youth promising to his readers the flickering seduction of agape, love supreme. Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2012

Wandering On Course: (Would Be Wands)

Podgurski, Robert

The implicit heart of Gavronsky’s imaginary meditation lies in the daunting similarity of the dialogues on the two fronts of the war between terror and authority. Harold Bloom, from the preface “On Gavronsky” 
 A Rip-roaring read. Somewhere between Apollinaire, The Cantos, and Reznikoff. Fresh. Fast. Full of pep and Wit. The language is young even though the memories be old. Richard Sieburth 
 Carefully incised to appear cut up and even occasionaily chaotic, Serge Gavronsky’s Silence of Memory reassembles the disastrous treatment history delivers to memory. “Let me tell you a story if I can remember it correctly.” Gavronsky’s honest, concentric reminiscences, however, don’t provide the usual reassurance that our world is ultimately supportive. Rather, the reality principle that he invokes from many perspectives invites the reader, during the reading and as long as she remembers correctly, to stay on her toes or else. On the other hand, Gavronsky’s wonderful vocabulary and syntactic acrobatics provide more than a little comfort about human potential. His ability to treat displacement not as human frailty but as a coping mechanism show how inside and outside, near and far, link indissolubly toward helping to understand his dour vision. James Sherry

Silence of Memory

Gavronsky, Serge

Literary

According to Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman, it is the work of the soul to create meaningful experience out of the facts of one’s life. In Martha’s Mandala, Oliver-Smith entwines strands of her own personal journey of self-discovery with an imaginative accounting of her grandmother’s life-work: to give beauty and coherence to the dark and mysterious voices that shattered Martha Bacon’s psyche as a young mother; to find a quiet center and create a peaceful “home” amidst the tumult of an extraverted lifestyle of uncertain privilege and patriarchy; and to proceed throughout all of her life’s circumstances with a private diligence and faithfulness to her own Truth. Jennifer A. Fendya, PhD, Psychologist, Curator of Art, CG Jung Center, Buffalo Parsing the complexity of a family influenced by mental illness, Martha Oliver-Smith subtly weaves her grandmother’s story into her own as both women work to solve the perplexing problem of the split self. Her grandmother’s symbolic watercolors “made out of her darkness” evolve beautifully in the telling as talismans of solace and balance. Kathryn Abajian, author of First Sight of the Desert: Discovery of the Art of Ella Peacock This history and reflection stands on its own as a rich psychological biography. Of greater value is the chance it may open doors for each of us to personal and archetypal elements that determine our lives, relationships, and our connection to that which is present “called or not called.” Frances M. Parks, Ph.D., ABPP, Graduate, C.G. Jung, Zürich The limitations upon the creativity of women—both imposed and self-imposed—chronicled in Martha’s Mandala, is genuinely heartbreaking. Here we glimpse some of the 20th century’s most important figures—notably Carl Jung—who the reader must re-evaluate in light of this story of family privilege, patriarchy, and downfall. Martha’s Mandalas—beautifully written as text and elegantly produced as object—offers us a glimpse of the author’s grandmother—a member of the American aristocracy, a witness to history—and what might have been, had her considerable artistic and intellectual talents been recognized by the influential men around her, which they were not. This concise and insightful memoir makes us take stock of the “progress” women—especially creative women—have, or have perhaps not, gained. Read this and get (retro-)actively outraged. Read this, and appreciate the work of this author who is now the important voice of the women in her family, now telling her grandmother’s story. Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew

Martha's Mandala: Figures in a Family Circle

Oliver-Smith, Martha

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