The Megabuilders of Queenston Park, acclaimed author Edmund Keeley's eighth novel, opens in present-day Princeton, New Jersey, as the quaint college town faces mounting changes in its architectural and cultural landscape. Ambitious builders roam the neighborhoods in search of modest postwar houses to tear down and replace with McMansions, forcing out the community's middle-class residents. Cassie and Nick Mandeville, nearing retirement and protective of their privacy, are thrust into the fray of local politics as they fight against the destruction of their neighborhood by father-and-son builders who plan to erect yet another McMansion next door and to induce the Mandevilles to sell their home as a teardown. While Nick and Cassie navigate the maze of community zoning, they discover an insensitive and possibly corrupt political system, a microcosm of the national political scene during the Bush years. What is the true value of a house, a home, and the stability, affection, and familial loyalty it nurtures and shelters? Can we protect what and whom we love most? Keeley examines these issues with grace and wicked humor in The Megabuilders of Queenston Park.

The Megabuilders of Queenston Park

Literature & Fiction

Keeley, Edmund

Literary

Wild River Consulting & Publishing, LLC

Descansos - resting places - are intimate memorials we glimpse at the edge of highways and rural roads that mark a place and moment of profound loss. They are also testaments to what survives. In his vibrant collection of stories, "Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines," Mark Lyons builds narrative shrines that redeem what is lost to misfortune and time. A snake-handling preacher - cast out and lost on the highway - finds faith in a junkyard. A hitchhiker feasts on roadkill with a hobo on the Great Plains and discovers the Cosmos. A Mexican-American Border Patrol officer arrests a mojado - a wetback - who asks him a question that makes him confront his own history. An artist whose paintings are rendered colorless by her abusive husband commits an act of vengeance and deliverance. A soldier returns from Iraq and meditates on the fate of the tumbler pigeon he left behind. "Brief Eulogies" are stories about communities - people finding ways to survive their histories, addictions, fears - hoping to reach a better place. Will this be their last home, their last stop on the line; or can they turn to each other and find redemption? A mesmerizing storyteller, Mark Lyons, Director of the Philadelphia Storytelling Project, weaves a collection of stories that reminds us how our lives can change in an instant, usually when we're not looking.

Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines

Lyons, Mark

Short Stories & Anthologies

"I first caught fire in high school and burned with an embarrassing adolescent passion for poetry through the works of Lao Tze and Dylan Thomas; and then, as a sophomore, in college for Gerard Manly Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and the octosyllabic ballad meditations on place of Frederico Garcia Lorca and Kenneth Rexroth. In the fifties, Rexroth's The Phoenix and the Tortoise meant far more to me than Ginsberg and the Beats. Now, after having written poetry for sixty years, I can see that I am still held in thrall by the Romantic genre of poems of description and meditation. But instead of trying to be a Wordsworth inscribing his poem into the living rock in the Lakes Country, I have tried to win the right to exist by writing myself into the place I happen to be. In this book I have tried to inhabit Portland, Maine through street poems, as before in A Diary of Sorts and Streets (2006) I did with Zurich, New York, Toronto, and Cambridge. But as a wanderer, I am not a native to any place, so the other Goethean twin soul in me has felt a pull into a solitary and mystical companionship with the stars. A Portland Calendar marks my temporary location, but Nightwatch pulls me up and out of my shallow rootedness. I stop-whether I am in the mountains in Crestone, Colorado or looking out of my apartment window in Portland-to see the Pleiades, and realize that at the intersection of time and eternity the light has changed." - William Irwin Thompson

Nightwatch and Dayshift: Poems - Poems 2007-2014

Thompson, William Irwin

Poetry

Toward the end of World War II, as Germany's hold on East Prussia grows increasingly tenuous, a childhood friendship between Manya von Falken, the daughter of an aristocratic family, and Joshi Karas, a Romani doctor, blossoms into unlikely love. But the young lovers are torn apart.  Captured by Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, Joshi fights for survival, while Manya and her family flee and embark on "The Great Trek" out of East Prussia. Based on true stories passed down to author Marina Gottlieb Sarles from her grandparents, survivors of the trek, The Last Daughter of Prussia also tells the story of the brave Trakehner horses who led their owners across a dangerous frozen lagoon the only open escape route.   Will Joshi and Manya find one another? Gottlieb Sarles creates a tapestry of characters from every corner of East Prussia, shedding light on an untold tragic moment of history.

The Last Daughter of Prussia

Gottlieb Sarles, Marina

Contemporary

Surprise Encounters with Artists and Scientists, Whales and Other Living Things

Surprise Encounters invites readers to engage in provocative encounters with riveting explorers-whether artists or scientists-who have as pioneers, opened new ways for seeing the world and our place in it. Through wide ranging and inspiring stories with internationally famous "path-finders" devoted to transformative change, McVay also reveals the challenge of placing funds strategically, a sacred charge, in education, the arts, critical issues, and the welfare of animals.

Biographies & Memoirs

McVay, Scott

Arts & Literature

In Body and Soul: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Healing, biographer Panthea Reid tells the story of her love affair with her husband, John Fischer, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Jonathan Swift scholar. Until John’s sudden death in 2015, they shared a four-decades-long love affair and literary partnership. Body and Soul unveils their deep romantic bond that began in the halls of Louisiana State University, where Reid and Fischer met in 1974. Two years later, they were married. Reid traces their rich literary partnership and shares their scholarly travels in pursuit of academic research. While Reid wove her way from William Faulkner to Virginia Woolf to Tillie Olsen, John deepened his expertise on his lifelong scholarly subject, Jonathan Swift. Together they built a family with Panthea’s son, Reid, from a previous marriage and their daughter, Hannah. Through the ups and downs of academic life and its attendant politics, Panthea and John’s love for each other, for literature, and for their family deepened and grew. After retiring from their teaching professions, the couple moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Panthea had by now completed biographies of Virginia Woolf and would complete another on Tillie Olsen. John pursued his Swift research, eventually taking up the project of completing the manuscript of Swift’s Word-Book—a dictionary Swift created for a female companion named Esther Johnson. Reid narrates the shock of her husband’s untimely death and shares the painful, sometimes amusing, always heartfelt story of her journey toward healing, during which she began writing again and also took up the task of completing the Word-Book, John’s final, unfinished project, continuing their literary partnership even after his death. With a list of suggested resources, Body and Soul provides a roadmap for those also suffering from loss and grief. Despite the heartbreak, Reid’s story ultimately celebrates life and the power of love.

Body and Soul: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Healing

Reid, Panthea

Memoirs

For the children of our elites, attending college is an expected part of late adolescence, an experience for which they have been groomed since birth. First generation or nontraditional students also enroll in college but generally with far less preparation and support. Award-winning writer and teacher Ned Bachus argues that for our greater society their outcomes matter more.
Bachus began the fall 2011 semester knowing that before the year's end, he must decide if he will take early retirement or remain indefinitely in his dream job at Community College of Philadelphia--where he began his own college studies as a bad student from a working-class single-parent family. Open Admissions interweaves the story of this decision-making semester with the month-long sabbatical residency the following spring when, on a cliff-hugging cottage on the coast of Ireland, he begins to make sense of the previous fall and of a life measured in semesters.
Open Admissions offers an important window into the real lives of community college students and their professors. The memoir sheds much needed light on the barely known and often disrespected institution that serves as a launching pad for people who make a positive difference, from doctors, nurses, and researchers to engineers, entrepreneurs, and creative artists on the world stage. Bachus offers story after story about teaching and learning practices that transform lives. Including his own.

Open Admissions: What Teaching at Community College Taught Me About Learning

Ned Bachus

Would you move a dead body for the sake of your best friend?Ask cha-cha babe Celia Ewing, a sixty-five-year-old widow who has just settled into Boca Pelicano Palms, the Florida retirement community of her dreams. When Celia's best friend Marcy calls her and their friend Deb for help in the middle of the night, they find a naked Marcy trapped under the body of her beau, the community's board president, Melvin. And he's dead. The three friends secretly move Melvin back to his apartment setting off a chain of events that will threaten to tear their community apart and send them to jail. Melvin is one of a number of residents who are dying under suspicious circumstances; and soon Celia becomes an amateur sleuth in an attempt to identify what she suspects is a serial murderer. 
Filled with humorous, witty observations about retirement communities, the realities of getting older, and the promise of new love, the Cha-Cha Babes of Pelican Way celebrates the deep bonds of female friendships, the desire for companionship at any age, and shows us that it's never too late to learn how to cha-cha through life.

The Cha-Cha Babes of Pelican Way

Frances Metzman

Cemeteries have stories to tell, voices to unearth--and lessons from the past that we can draw upon to better shape the future. If These Stones Could Talk brings fresh light to a forgotten corner of American history that begins in a small cemetery in central New Jersey.
Authors of If These Stones Could Talk Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills started their journey through the past as two middle aged African American women with busy but quiet lives. They were both board members of the Stoutsburg Cemetery Association, a cemetery that is nestled in New Jersey's Sourland Mountain region. The cemetery was purchased by three Black men in the early 19th century to bury Blacks with honor and dignity.
When Buck and Mills got an unexpected call for help, what began as a search through the woods for gravestone markers soon had them rummaging through land deeds and making relentless calls to state officials, archeologists and reporters. Their foray into historic preservation work convinced Buck and Mills that they had a lot more work left to do to connect African American history to local and national history books--within which they still felt largely absent from the most visible narratives in United States history.
In warm but unflinching voices authors Buck and Mills offer readers a unique window into our past. These stories, including dozens of oral histories, consecrate the collected lives of a minority Black community in a predominantly White region, a pattern of community that reflects a larger, deeply important but typically overlooked national story in small towns all over the United States.

If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey

History

Elaine Buck

Beverly Mills

Americas

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Books by Wild River Consulting & Publishing, LLC

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

The Megabuilders of Queenston Park

Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines

Nightwatch and Dayshift: Poems - Poems 2007-2014

The Last Daughter of Prussia

Surprise Encounters with Artists and Scientists, Whales and Other Living Things

Surprise Encounters with Artists and Scientists, Whales and Other Living Things

Body and Soul: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Healing

Open Admissions: What Teaching at Community College Taught Me About Learning

The Cha-Cha Babes of Pelican Way

If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey