2018
An Englishman in Texas: A Memoir
by Ron Kenney
978 - 1 - 948692 - 02 - 1 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 03 - 8 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, 144 pp.
Memoir
August 2018
An Englishman in Texas is a memoir by Ron Kenney, an English jockey who came to the United States in 1960. His autobiographical account begins with his childhood in the northeast of England during WWII. He goes on to describe how, with no knowledge of horses, he was sent four hundred miles from home at 14 years of age to apprentice as a jockey. He’d been turned away by the foreman at the coal mine because he was too small. The story follows Kenney through his coming of age to his coming to America when he was 30. It follows his fortunes in pursuit of the American Dream. Kenney tells of riding horses for some of the wealthiest and most famous horse trainers in Texas. He tells of his loves and his betrayals, and he introduces the people who helped him along the way.
Ron Kenney is a man short in stature, but tall in tales.
Dr. Barbara Hayes DNP, FNP-C
Gunsho t, Peacock, Dog
Poetry by Rick Campbell
978 - 1 - 948692 - 04 - 5 paper 15.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 05 - 2 ebook 9.99
6×9, 80 pp.
Poetry
September 2018
Rick Campbell’s latest collection reads like an extended elegy for the poet himself, for his lost loved ones, and for the changes in the wider world. In this way, it is reminiscent of Hardy. This is the work of a man wise in the ways of the world and not afraid to be what we all are: flawed. His voice is personal and vulnerable . . . The book consists of very detailed and compressed poems, both focused on the natural world and on an inner landscape described with a consistent tone and voice throughout. George Drew, author of Fancy’s Orphan, Pastoral Habits, and Down and Dirty
These poems are crafted from the raw material of experience, from a life lived deeply and without varnish, and each poem sparks and flares with hard-earned wisdom. Brian Turner, author of Here Bullet, Phantom Noise, and My Life as a Foreign Country, a Memoir
Rick Campbell has published five previous collections of poetry and numerous poems and essays. He teaches in the Sierra Nevada College Low Residency MFA Program and at Florida A&M University. He lives on Alligator Point in Florida’s Panhandle.
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Sisypha Larvata Prodeat (Sisypha Wearing a Mask Advances)
薛西法 假面 潛行
Poetry by Jan Cole, Art by Adelina Moya
Translated by Angela Liu
978 - 1 - 948692 - 00 - 7 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 01 - 4 ebook 9.99
6×9, 128 pp.
November 2018
This poetry collection was first published in 1987 when Jan Cole lived and worked in San Francisco, but the poems were written over the course of many years, beginning with her time in university at the Newcomb College of Tulane University and at the Sorbonne. Many of the poems are set in the town of Huntsville, Texas, where Jan was raised and lives today. Still others reference friends Jan has known and worked with around the world. This edition includes the striking art of Mexican artist, Adelina Moya and Chinese translations by Angela Liu. Finally, the project would never have taken place if not for the editorial oversight of Lorrie Lo Wagamon.
Here is what people are saying about this unique collection:
These poems are about life, love, friendship, and masks. The rhythmic lines carry quick movements of life . . . They are witt y and thought - provoking, funny, agonizing with suggestions of human struggles, and [they are] freshly imagistic 薛西法假面潛行」是本有關生命，友誼與面具的詩集。韻律十足的詩句帶動了生命與思 想的快節奏。它們機智且引人深思， 有趣，有暗示人類掙扎的痛苦，也有將憂鬱與蛋重疊 的鮮活意象。大部分的詩都很短，但它們令人有瞬間領悟的時刻。 Dr. Jianqing Zheng (鄭建青英美文學博士) These poems have given me greater insight into this remarkably talented woman whose low, soft voice and extreme modesty belie an active and passionate inner voice one which can express universal truths while telling her personal story.
這些詩也助我更深入的領會到， 這個有著非凡天賦的女人，其實在她輕柔，低沉，且極 端謙虛的言語之下， 還有一道激情活躍的聲響 在敘述自身故事的同時，還能表達普 世真理的一道聲音。
Dr. Ralph Pease (洛夫．皮士英美文學博士)
Poet, Jan Cole, seated, Kimberly Davis, Jacqueline Davis, Lorrie Lo (editor), and Joy Pan (publicist) at the book launch party for Sisypha Larvata Prodeat (Sisypha Wearing a Mask Advances). Photo by L inda Pease at the Wynne Home Arts Center in Huntsville, Texas. This project was supported in part by a grant from the Huntsville Arts Commission, in Huntsville, Texas.
Jan Cole is best known as a musician, composer, linguist and teacher. Studying music at the Paris Conservatory with Jean Pierre Rampal and Franciso LaGoya, among other musical legends, fueled Cole’s love of language as well as music. She performs on many instruments including flute, recorder, krummhorn, fife, penny whistle, guitar, ukulele, mandolin, tenor banjo, 5-string banjo, psaltery, guitarrón, keyboard, folk harp, and dulcimer. One of her greatest joys is seeing the professional successes of her flute and guitar students.
Adelina Moya’s art is displayed in galleries around Mexico and Texas. She teaches porcelain, ceramic, watercolor, wood-burning, oil, acrylic and wash techniques.
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No Evil is Wide
A Novella by Randall
Watson
978 - 1 - 948692 - 06 - 9 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 05 - 2 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, 144 pp.
Fiction
November 2018 (graphic novel coming in 2023!)
No Evil is Wide is the linear and violent story of an unnamed narrator, the prostitute he is tasked to “find,” and Carpenter Wells, the man that makes that return impossible. The remembrances of the narrator revolve around sexual awakening, family distance and dissolution how they crumble to common and inevitable animalism. It is filled with philosophical epistles to the reader that concretize the themes of the work. The narrative that allows the reader purchase within the text begins with the narrator locating the unnamed girl while the world devolves into a chaotic madness of bombings and destruction not dissimilar to contemporary existence. This chaos serves as an uncanny reminder of the everyday violence we overlook.
Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide, (Madville Publishing), which received the Quarterly West prize in the novella, The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes, The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University, (currently available through Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Las Delaciones del Sueño, translated by Antonio Saborit with an Introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. His website is https://randallwatsonauthor.com
just read [this] novella and loved it. gorgeous sentences. so lush even for all its darkness. something sort of noir-ish about it. i was so touched
Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner, Book of No Ledge, and Pacific Walkers
I would not have picked the winner I have were anyone to try and tell me what it was about, what it was like, what it was. And in a way I am still struggling to figure out how to describe [it] except to say it is a work of art. Sometimes reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, sometimes Kem Nunn, there is to this work the kind of ambition, the sort of bravery and insight and quality of writing and mind behind it that all defy easy summation. The language to this, its pace, its architecture, its audacity and cruel bone-jarring brutality and the cold and loving and miserable and strong-hearted vision of it just blew me a way. Period. This was a meaningful, powerful, flat-out, go-for-the-throat read on all fronts. And what makes it especially strong is that throughout this dark dark dark story there is a strand of hope, unbeatable, undeniable, unquenchable hope, despite the ugly and graphic and deadly world the story inhabits.
Brett Lott, former editor of Quarterly West and of Crazy Horse
This is a fascinating read. The poetry of this book is astounding. It reads like a glorious symphony of sounds, even triumphing over the cruelness of the world depicted within. The story is complex and not for the fan of light reading, for this reads much more like classical literature. Watson’s story centers around an unnamed narrator and his obsession with a prostitute in a world filled with evil. In-between the story of finding her, the author weaves the philosophy and beliefs of the narrator. The book will challenge you at every turn.
Julia Picks 1
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The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean
A Novel by A. Rooney
978 - 1 - 948692 - 08 - 3 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 09 - 0 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, 216 pp.
Fiction
February 2019
The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein: The Last Promethean is a hell of a story about the last imagined descendant of Dr. Frankenstein’s wretch the spurned monster. It offers struggle and pathos, pain and absolution, deception and deliverance. Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Shadow Moon from American Gods, Francis Stein is a slow thinking giant of a man who attracts attention wherever he goes. Stein seems cursed with bad luck, and trouble waits for him around every turn in spite of his good intentions.
Mix Blue Velvet with a dash of True Romance, add some gothic and some noir, flavor with firebear and Pho and enter the engaging, shifting, transforming, surreal vision of Francis, offspring of one of literature’s most famous creations . . .
Randall Watson, author of No Evil is Wide and The Geometry of Wishes
Rooney’s title character is a superb creation and, like Mary Shelley’s original, a compelling chronicler of life as a monstrous outsider, as terminally unique, “dependent on none and related to none” (to borrow Shelley’s phrase). Yet, driven by the police and other wouldbe destroyers high into the Colorado Rockies, Francis Stein manages to forge tenuous friendships: fragile connections with others that offer the possibility of redemption, of a second chance, of learning what it means to be genuinely human. Sharply written, with flashes of dark comedy and lyric evocations of the 21st-century American West, The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein gives us a beautiful monster for our time and place as Shelley did for hers.
Thomas
A. Rooney is an associate professor who teaches writing at Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India when not in Denver, Colorado. He has published a collection of stories, The Colorado Motet (Ghost Road Press) and a novella, Fall of the Rock Dove (Main Street Rag). His stories and poems have appeared in journals, magazines and websites all over the world. A linked collection, The Indian Motel Stories is forthcoming from Bombaykala Press.
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2019
H. Schmid, author of Fools of Time
Fairview Chronicles
A novel by Jonathan Paul with illustrations by Andrew Dunn
978 - 1 - 948692 - 10 - 6 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 11 - 3 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, ~208 pp.
Fiction
March 2019
With a peculiar and creative blend of mystical horror and science fiction, Fairview Chronicles takes us into the mind of lonely college professor Randall Covington as he uncovers the dark and magical secrets of the town of Fairview. The series of connected stories and journal entries centers around a secret society known as the Order of the Red Moon and the sinister Necromancer they serve. Slowly, but assuredly Randall begins to uncover the spectral demon’s plot. The only question that remains is, will he be able to maintain his sanity until the end?
Johnathan Paul is an award-winning Texas filmmaker, screenwriter and artist. His work as a freelance illustrator and concept artist led him to experimental film, 3D animation, and documentary film making. Johnathan wrote the first story set in the fictional town of Fairview in 1998 and has quietly expanded that world ever since. Fairview Chronicles is the first of many titles set in this fantastic universe filled with mystical horrors. He is a Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches film production, visual effects and screenwriting. He has a long history as a journalist and op-ed writer for various film industry websites. Among his greatest influences are Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Terry Gilliam.
By the Light of a Neon Moon: Poetry out of Dancehalls,
Honky Tonks, Music Halls & Clu bs
edited by Janet Lowery
978 - 1 - 948692 - 12 - 0 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 13 - 7 ebook 9.99
6x9, ~256 pp.
Poetry
March 2019
If, as Philip Larkin says, poetry preserves the memory of the human race, we believe that sweet, smoky, gritty memories of scooting boots across dusty dancefloors in honkey tonks deserve to be part of that record. This collection offers memories of love found and of love lost. There are verses about line dancing and mechanical bulls, crusty bartenders and jukeboxes whining out two-stepping songs full of pedalsteel guitar. And, of course, the collection won’t be complete without a few cryingin-your-beer poems too.
Janet Lowery’s poetry has been published in journals such as Poetry East, Greensboro Review, Concho River Review, and in anthologies such as Mutabilies Press’s 2015 Untameable City and the 2011 Improbable Worlds (edited by Martha Serpas); Texas in Poetry 2 (TCU Press, 2002), the Poetry East collection Who Are the Rich and Where Do They Live? (2000), and Women’s Blood (Continuing Saga Press, 1981).
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The World Was My Garden, Too
by Sam Pickering
978 - 1 - 948692 - 14 - 4 paper 19.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 15 - 1 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, 304 pp.
Familiar Essays
May 2019
The World Was My Garden, Too is a collection of familiar essays in which Sam Pickering wanders the blooming world. He roams New England, Arkansas, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and the familiar and odd plots of mind and thought. He explores shorelines and climbs “hillish” mountains. He sits on porches and talks to passersby and their dogs. He meets strange and delightful people, most of whom are real.
“Reading Pickering,” a reviewer wrote in The Smithsonian decades ago, “is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend.” “Now,” Pickering says, “I am old, and the friends who thought me witty have fallen off the perch. But that’s okay. What I write makes me smile and mutter, ‘What a guy.’” And what wonderful essays these are pages that awaken the affections and make readers smile and embrace the beauty of this bruised world.
Sam Pickering grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He spent 67 years in classrooms learning and teaching and has long been a rummager and writer wandering New England and the South, the Mid-East, Britain, Australia, and Canada. He has written some thirty books and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
A Third Place: Notes in Nature
by Bob Kunzinger
978 - 1 - 948692 - 16 - 8 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 17 - 5 ebook 9.99
5 ½ x8 ½ , 144 pp.
Familiar Essays
August 2019
A Third Place exists in the extremes, pinpointing the details in nature which demand attention, and finding within those details our place in the bigger picture. Set in a series of observations and experiences, A Third Place on the one hand brings us all closer to nature through the eyes of the author yet makes us wonder if he has been following us around on our afternoon walks .
Bob Kunzinger is the author of eight collections of non-fiction, and has been widely published in publications such as World War Two History, Southern Humanities Review, the Washington Post, St Anthony Messenger, and more, including notations for essays in Best American Essays. He lives and writes in Virginia.
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A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being
by Jeff Hardin
978 - 1 - 948692 - 18 - 2 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 19 - 9 ebook 9.99
6×9, 72 pp.
Poetry
September 2019
If the taste of the eternal “is increasingly absent in our words,” then Jeff Hardin’s sixth collection, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, attempts to behold language anew, to listen in on its “preview of eternity.” Aware of ambiguities that plague our lives and given to swerves of logic and dislocations, to echoes and reverberations “too numerous to see in some totality,” his poems nonetheless speak openly to existence, to the mind’s “attempts/to console itself,” and to the “intoxication of incoherence” existence so often feels like. Here in a postmodern world, is it still possible to step boldly into certainty, into clarity, to find a sacred and shared space where “all moments blaze up with a speaking/voice”? Hardin listens intently, discovering more and more how “wanderingly vast” enchantment still might be. In the presence of so many options for understanding, he chooses to believe “a new/parable unfolding, still instructive,” pointing him toward a fellowship with others who likewise “lean toward thinking some healing is already/underway.”
Jeff Hardin is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently Small Revolution and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Hudson Review, North American Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. He is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee. Visit his website at www.jeffhardin.weebly.com
One House Down
by Gianna Russo
978 - 1 - 948692 - 20 - 5 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 21 - 2 ebook 9.99
6x9, 72 pp.
Poetry
October 2019
The candid poems in Gianna Russo’s One House Down are grounded in experiences of ambivalence and oneness, not unlike those we sometimes find in true love. Russo ruminates on the past and scrutinizes the present in her hometown of Tampa with honest affection, concern, anger and delight. She asks an essential question: How can we treasure a place whose history and values have sometimes supported injustice? And if those wrongs are still evident today then what? With family roots in Tampa that go back over a century, Russo skillfully pursues an answer in these inventive, surprising poems.
Gianna Russo, a third generation Floridian, is the author of the award-winning collection, Moonflower. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had publications in Ekphrasis, Crab Orchard Review, and Calyx, among many others. She is founding editor of the Florida poetry chapbook publisher YellowJacket Press, yellowjacketpress.org. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tampa, and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University where she directs the Sandhill Writers Retreat.
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2020
Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping
Prose Poems by Gerry LaFemina
978 - 1 - 948692 - 24 - 3 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 25 - 0 ebook 9.99
6x9, 72 pp.
Poetry
February 2020
Anyone in the mood to be enchanted by a collection of prose poems that celebrate the quotidian, the commonplace, the ordinary things of this world those “dumb beautiful messengers,” as Walt Whitman famously referred to them in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”? Then you best pick up a copy of Gerry LaFemina’s book Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping…. [LaFemina offers a] kind of precision with language making a “place” into a “thing” and conveying its feel, look, and impression on the soul with such searing clarity…. [his poems] enchant the senses and succeed in stopping time . . . so that we might examine the things of this world with love and intelligence, so that we might hear them speak to us again.
Janet Lowery, editor of By the Light of a Neon Moon
Gerry LaFemina’s poetry collections include The Story of Ash and Little Heretic His essays on prosody, Palpable Magic, came out in 2015 and Kendall Hunt recently released his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the Carlow University MFA Program. gerrylafemina.com
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Runaway : An Anthology
edited by Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, & Lee Zacharias
978 - 1 - 948692 - 26 - 7 paper 22.95
978
- 1 - 948692 - 27 - 4 ebook 9.99
6x9, 300 pp.
fiction anthology
March 2020
What follows in this anthology is a collection of stories, real or imagined, that have been carefully crafted into works of art on the theme of running away. . . . In many of them absence becomes presence the absences created for those left behind or the absences created within those who leave, or even think about leaving, others behind. In every one of these stories something is missing, a parent, a feeling, or some essential part of the self.
It is no surprise that many of these stories are motivated by abuse. . . . In one case a teen mother sacrifices herself by returning to an abusive father to let her baby daughter go for what she hopes is essential medical care. Not many of us know where or even how to run, and though a few characters run to, most of them run from. But to or from, one thing comes clear to them and to the reader: you can run from yourself, but no one ever completely escapes.
The two prize-winning stories1 both involve rituals, one mysteriously invented, the other ill-conceived. And though both of the honorable mentions 2 begin with young women barely into adolescence hanging out with friends, the tone and atmosphere of those tales diverge. That these are all such different stories should give everyone heart. . . . No one’s running away story is quite like anyone else’s. Perhaps no one’s circumstances are quite like anyone else’s. Memory and imagination never spin exactly the same way. More importantly, the art one creates from such circumstances, or the circumstances imagination creates, is unique. These fully realized stories speak in diverse ways to a nearly universal desire. Who has never wanted to run away from something? Every one of these stories has been selected because it contributes to a larger narrative. Every one of them speaks to the questions that belong to that larger narrative. Who are we if we refuse to be shaped by our pasts? Who are we if we choose no longer to be ourselves? Who are we, whether we are left behind or gone?
from the forward by Lee Zacharias
CONTRIBUTORS:
Jodi Angel – Emily Chiles – Aden Albert – Richard Jay Goldstein – Bradford Philen – Misty Skaggs – Maureen O’Brien – Louise Marburg – Emily Hoover – Erica Soon Olsen – Jeffrey Byrem – Michael Simpson – Deborah Johnstone – Marisol Cortez – K.B. Carle – Bobby Horecka – Merrill Gray – Shelbi Carpenter – Rick Campbell – Lou Morrison – Maurice Carlos Ruffin – Brett Riley – Melanie Rae Thon –Randall Watson – By Bonnie Jo Campbell
Roseville to Kansas City, Jamaica Plains to Lubbock, the characters in Runaway find new lives. These exciting stories find transformation via spirit, heart, loss, hope and emptiness. Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, and Lee Zacharias have crafted a collection that is at once devastating and utterly magical. This is a collection to be read and re-read, shared in writing workshops and savored.
Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance
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1 "Ritual" by Aden Albert and "Willie's Crucifixion" by Rick Campbell are the winners. 2 "Neighbor Boys and Cousins" by Jodi Angel and "Nothing to Light Our Way" by Emily Hoover" are the honorable mentions.
Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies
by Bobby Horecka
978 - 1 - 948692 - 28 - 1 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 29 - 8 ebook 9.99
5½x8½, 200 pp. fiction
March 2020
FINALIST for 2021 Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction
You might’ve just started out or reached the jumping off spot. Maybe you’re the rainyday saver who never left anyplace without charting a precise destination and itinerary first, or you’re plumb astounded you got where you’re at and couldn’t tell me what happened last night much less what’s in store six weeks from now. You might have a working man’s callused hands, the callused soul that only the mistreated know or the callused heart that comes with having yours shattered too many times. Everybody needs to catch an occasional break, or they risk becoming Long Gone & Lost…
What people are saying about Bobby Horecka’s Long Gone & Lost : Wow! This guy is a master story teller.... I chuckled, I felt sympathy, I sometimes howled at what he had written. Anyone who has spent time in Lavaca County, as Mr. Horecka has, will have been exposed to gobs of raw material, and I mean raw.... The author throws a shovelful of hyperbole onto an ordinary situation and nurtures it into a riotously funny story. In all the stories, the author thoroughly describes his characters, and keeps painting layer after layer onto the subject as the story proceeds, until the reader can almost see the person. He sets the scene in detail and carefully builds the mood.
Bob Zumwaldt, author of Trapped by a Mouse: And Other Stories
Read this one you’re gonna like it! Bobby’s stories grabbed us right from the start. It’s the “true and otherwise” part that stops us in our tracks. There is a heavy dollop of truth in every story. We applaud the man who grew up, through these very hard times, to be someone with gritty, wonderful, integrity. And we congratulate him on being shortlisted for a Texas Institute of Letters first work of fiction award.
Kimberly Davis, director of Madville Publishing
Horecka’s Long Gone & Lost is a melange, a mix of writing including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by a longtime journalist who knows how to whip sentences into shape. Perfect for post-virus reading at inland beaches.
A. Rooney, author of The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein I'm hooked. It's like he's sitting with you telling you the story. I honestly got lost in the first few pages ... Bobby Horecka's writing allows the story to play out in your mind. You'll feel like you're there.
Katherine Stulting Gillett, owner of Design 4 Me
Bobby Horecka holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston Victoria, and taught at Victoria College. He has numerous works of short fiction, prose and poetry, published in literary magazines and anthologies like Amarillo Bay, Bluestem Magazine, Scribe, and The Ocotillo Review Horecka spent 25 years in print journalism, working newsrooms large and small across Texas.
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Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
What Magick May Not Alter
by JC Reilly
978 - 1 - 948692 - 30 - 4 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 31 - 1 ebook 9.99
6x9, 144 pp.
Poetry
April 2020
Read What Magick May Not Alter on a porch swing by a live oak if you can. This layered Southern fantasy is unlike any you’ve read before. Real-world issues like the prevalence of the KKK, sexual assault, manslaughter, alcoholism, and complex family dynamics move the plot into emotionally treacherous and painfully real places. Twin sisters Lulah and Vi anchor this story of a magically gifted family told through poetry. Set in early nineteen-hundreds Louisiana, the choice to tell this story in verse sets it apart, making it feel like a spell book or a manifesto at times. Emotion sings through it clear and strong, as in this pivotal passage when Talulah visits Vidalia:
She smiles as she slips the doll in a pocket and begins a song in a language that hovers somewhere between the voices of flowers and the timbre of wind. Lulah joins in then, in made-up words of her own.
A Louisiana writer living in Atlanta, Georgia, JC Reilly writes across genres and has received Pushcart and Wigleaf nominations for her work, as well as awards from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, the Georgia Poetry Society, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. She is the author of the chapbook La Petite Mort and a contributing author to an anthology of occasional verse, On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year. Follow her @aishatonu.
Mistakes by the Lake : Stories
978-1-948692-94-6 hardcover 26.95
978-1-948692-32-8 paper 19.95
978-1-948692-33-5 ebook 9.99
5½x8½ , 256 pp.
May 2020
by Brian Petkash
Set in Cleveland, Ohio, from its earliest beginnings as a forested frontier to the urban blight of modern times, Mistakes by the Lake is a collection of ten thematically-linked stories spanning the many faces of the city’s history: A motorman navigates his 1920’s back-andforth trolley until he snaps; A stockyards knocker encounters the Virgin Mary during the 1954 World Series; A wannabe wrestles his unruly mind along the flammable 1960’s Cuyahoga River; In a reinvention of Henry IV, a young man must either stick with his bumbling criminal crew or uncover legit ways to support his mother and transgender Gramps.
This collection and its stories have garnered numerous accolades: Finalist: Nilsen Prize (Southeast Missouri State University); Winner: The Lake Prize in Fiction (Midwestern Gothic); Shortlisted: The Novella Award (Liverpool John Moores University); Shortlisted: Munster Literature Centre’s Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition; Honorable Mention: Family Matters Contest (Glimmer Train). Praise for the novella, Mistakes by the Lake: “Full of action, movement, tension and shocks. The world of the Cleveland stockyards and its denizens is brought to life with verve, skill and command” (Vulpes Libris).
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PRAISE FOR MISTAKES BY THE LAKE
“In Mistakes by the Lake, Brian Petkash writes, ‘I learned then, and I know now, that there is no insulation from tragedy.’ Part adventure narrative, part love letter to Cleveland, this collection uses history to illuminate and elevate trailblazers, troublemakers, and tinkerers. This book is a tribute to the American experience.”
Tasha Cotter, author of Astonishments
“With a tender and transportive love note to a city with shades of Richard Powers’s feel for people and land, spiked by flashes of the odd experimentalism of underground poet d.a. levy Brian Petkash has written a muscular, inventive, and engrossing novel in stories, each one set in a different Cleveland decade. From 1796 to 2013, we travel from wilderness to street car, from the day a steer escapes the stockyards to the awful day a star little leaguer disappears. Each chapter about this city in Ohio throbs with love, intensity, devotion, and creativity. Epic, ambitious, gorgeous, and deeply felt, all of the stories in Mistakes by the Lake add up to a book at least as old, important, and beautiful as the grand old city of Cleveland itself.”
Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb and frequent Los Angeles Times book critic “Evidently, Brian Petkash was somebody’s big secret until now. I don’t know how they kept him from us. No one writes this good the first time out, do they? Well, secret no more, folks: this genie’s out of the bottle. Brian Petkash’s Mistakes by the Lake is a stunning literary achievement. The prose is luminous and compassionate, the themes are complex and resonant, the characters are riveting and heroic. You won’t soon forget them, and you won’t want to. They’ll haunt your dreams. This is not a book that you can put down until it’s through with you. Yes, it’s that good, and you’re going to thank me for telling you about Mistakes by the Lake. Buy it now.”
John Dufresne, author of I Don’t Like Where This Is Going
“In this remarkable debut, Brian Petkash immerses his reader with textured prose that is as beautifully nuanced as it is brutally honest. The settings of these stories are authentically Cleveland, but the terrain is the full range of human emotion. From a trolley driver searching the tracks for purpose to a war veteran wounded by the loss of his wife, Petkash binds together a disparate cast of characters with threads of hope and humanity. Mistakes by the Lake is a collection that resonates long after the read, and Petkash is an author to be watched.”
R. Dean Johnson, author of Californium
“Cleveland, in American history and minds, has never been the main attraction. Brian Petkash’s achievement is to save the city from its position of rarely used utility outfielder and lend beauty, urgency, and grit to centuries of playing in the minors. [Petkash] makes us feel the acute and sepiatoned pain of what could have been. What we could have been.”
Stefan Kiesbye, author of Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone and Berlingeles
“Brian Petkash is the Bard of Cleveland. He’s a perceptive teller of poignant tales that are both regional and universal. That’s a compelling combination.”
Tony Macklin, film critic and author of Palestra
“The Cleveland depicted here is at once mythic and pedestrian. There’s the familiar stuff the stockyards, the Cuyahoga, Lebron but there’s also a werewolf (of sorts), a skywoman, and a remarkable Shakespearean duo known as Hal and Fal. Call it historical fiction if you must, but Petkash forges from the fire of a burning river a new view on the American city everyone loves to hate and hate on. Mistakes by the Lake is a fictional tour de force.”
Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman
Brian Petkash was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Tampa and his stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Southword, among other publications. He currently lives in Tampa, Florida, where he remains an avid fan of Cleveland sports.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Drumming Armageddon
by George Drew
978-1-948692-34-2 paper 18.95
978-1-948692-35-9
6x9, 144 pp.
Poetry
June 2020
ebook 9.99
Often it is said of contemporary music that it’s the soundtrack of our lives. If so, Drumming Armageddon is a poetic rendering of that soundtrack: Rock, Country, Jazz, Pop, Folk, The Blues they’re the genres comprising it, and they all are present in this collection. The poems pay homage to the artists Dylan, Clapton, Lennon, Crow, The Beatles, Elvis and track the poet’s personal musical biography: his experiences and memories the music both relates to and marks. The poems, like the music, have plenty of swagger. Finally, though, they remind us that, at their best, poetry is music, music poetry.
Studio drummers use the phrase “In the Pocket” when they want to talk about being in that sweet spot right on the beat and tucked straight away into a song. That is exactly where you’ll find George Drew’s voice in the poems of Drumming Armageddon. Drew spins his turntable through the history of electric music from rockn-roll icons like Chuck Berry, Elvis, the Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, to blues giants like Stevie Ray Vaughn. The poems render these characters much better than any history book could, and what’s even more impressive, the lines ride the melodies of the music in and out of personal narratives deftly telling family stories and offering tributes to friends who’ve passed away. This book rocks like a greatest hits album, and this poet turns in a performance as memorable as any front man could.
Jack B. Bedell, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019
Surely all good poets, especially the ones born in Mississippi, think of their poetry as a sort of blues. George Drew’s Drumming Armageddon is, without question, not merely a celebration of the blues, but the blues in fact. Oh, he channels such heavyweights as Chuck Berry, Gladys Knight, Elvis, Jerry Lee, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Aretha, Roy Orbison and so on, but Drew knows the blues are love, how you somehow keep going and keep caring in spite of a world that seems always just a breath away from Armageddon, a terrible world of anger and pain and death. Aptly, he leaves us with Charlie Parker blowing his sax on a lonely country road, playing to a cow. He leaves us wrung out and worn out and whole, putting our envies and sins aside for a little while and saying, Lord have mercy, that boy can sing.
Jack Butler, Author of Broken Hallelujah
George Drew is the author of Fancy’s Orphan (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press, which also published his Down & Dirty (2015) and his New & Selected, Pastoral Habits (2016), winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Poetry Book, and a finalist for the Lascaux Review’s Poetry Book Prize.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
The World Out There
by John Talbird
978-1-948692-95-3 hardcover 26.95
978-1-948692-36-6 paper 20.95
978-1-948692-37-3 ebook 9.99
5½x8½ , 296 pp.
Fiction
July 2020
Cover art by Melinda Yale.
The World Out There is set in Gainesville, FL during the early nineteen-nineties and its NorthCentral Florida setting is important as both physical and psychological space. In addition to Spanish moss, heat-radiating highways, and palmettos, the novel explores the violence beneath the glittering surface of the “Sunshine State”: racial tensions, neo-fascist violence against “others,” and a string of serial murders acts as an ominous backdrop for the action. The car wreck into Lake Walters, coming within the first pages, is a catalyst for action the concentric waves radiating from the car dropping through that lake surface like danger reverberating throughout the book. The story follows the lives of three people Jan, William, and Ray with the action centered around a used bookstore.Each of these Gen-Xers came to Gainesville to get college degrees and then never left. Each watches his or her grandiose ideas of “success” drift away as they pass through their thirties, replaced with a vagueness of purpose, a nagging anxiety that there is something else they’re supposed to be doing.
In one of the (many) compelling and memorable scenes in John Talbird’s debut novel, The World Out There, Jan responds to her fear of an at-large serial killer who’s terrorizing the town. Most of the victims are “petite brunettes with shoulder-length hair,” Jan tells her boss and lover, William, when she asks him to crop her long, dark hair that she then dyes bright yellow. After William runs his fingers through Jan’s short hair, he has her shave his head. The dramatic tension and the sensuality of this moment amplify the reader’s awareness that these are people disguising themselves even as they seek their true identities. Talbird vividly creates the multiple perspectives of contradictory characters and earns sympathy for imperfect men and women struggling to make connection and find love in a violent and unpredictable world.
Allen Wier, author of Late Night, Early Morning and Tehano
The World Out There is the world we occupy full of chaos, love, longing, and despair. Talbird takes us to the Florida of the early nineties, a landscape that pulses with violence under the skin of all encounters, and where danger makes itself intimately known. Each of these characters is haunted by their mistakes and the mistakes of others, and by the daily perils of simply being human. It made my heart hurt with the reminder of how hard it is to grow the hell up.
Erin Flanagan, author of The Usual Mistakes and It’s Not Going to
Kill You and Other Stories
John Talbird’s The World Out There thrums with electric energy. Talbird mines and displays our deepest fears, desires, and heartbreaks through his mismatched couple, Jan and William. It’s the swampy 90s and the world hasn’t yet tipped to technology. The World Out There dwells in the loneliness of the indie bookstore, the awkward hipness of the indie record store, the solace of the second-run movie theater, and the futility of the won’t-ever-make-it band playing a nowhere bar. Mainly, it looks fear right in the eyes. Dig in. You’ll crawl out of this book a changed person.
Sherrie
Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc.
John Talbird is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Grain, Juked, The Literary Review, Ambit, Potomac Review and many others. He is on the Editorial Board of Green Hills Literary Lantern and a frequent contributor to Film International. An English professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives in New York City with his wife, Melinda Yale.
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The Asthmatic Kid & O ther Stories
by Mark Tulin
978-1-948692-46-5 paper 18.95
978-1-948692-47-2 ebook 9.99
5½x8½ , 203 pp.
Short Fiction
August 2020
The Asthmatic Kid & Other Stories is a collection of narratives that chronicle the life of a young man trying to survive his childhood. These stories take place in the 60s and 70s featuring compelling characters that often have conflicting interests, get a few bumps and bruises, but discover what is truly important. Mark Tulin’s quirky stories speak of freedom, love, and the joys of youthful mischief. “Crazy Grandpa,” “Into the Blue Suburban Sky,” “Dark Clouds Over Baseball” and others in this collection will make trauma not seem so scary and, in many cases, quite amusing.
PRAISE FOR THE ASTHMATIC KID & OTHER STORIES
With sensitivity and lyrical sentimentality, Mark Tulin zooms in on what it’s like to grow up. His characters exist in a gentler version of urban America. An America that’s lost to the past as they experience their first road trip, first sex, first experiments with drugs our heart flutters along with theirs. These stories will transport you to when you were sneaking away from your parents for the night, fumbling your first kiss, or listening to the record that blew your heart wide open.
Charlie Fish, screenwriter and short story writer.
Mark Tulin picks up the torch left by Philip Roth, and The Asthmatic Kid doesn’t try to pretend that real life is always pretty. The book’s filled with gritty writing that leaves stains on the sidewalk. However, Tulin’s skill lies in raising his central characters ab ove everything that surrounds them. The Asthmatic Kid is literature that entertains, challenges, and uplifts all at once.
Gordon Lawrie, editor of Friday Flash Fiction and author of The Blogger Who Came in from the Cold. Mark Tulin’s darkly hilarious stories have graced the pages of Smokebox.net since April 2016, when we published his beautifully stark, Room Full of Strangers. Inner demons, unsettled familial scores, and brutally honest appraisals of human frailties are employed deftly by Tulin in The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories. If the title story is any indication, with its cast of hopelessly damaged ne’er-do-wells and sweetly fragile personal growth, Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories promises to provide an expertly guided journey through the highs and lows of life’s headlong course.
Marcus Covert, associate editor, Smokebox.net
Mark Tulin’s formative years were spent in Philadelphia playing baseball and getting into mischief with his friends. He parlayed his experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family to become a successful marriage and family therapist. Once he retired and relocated to California, his interest in creative writing flourished. His stories have appeared in anthologies, journals, and podcasts. He has published in Page & Spine, Cabinet of the Heed, and Fiction on the Web, among others. His poetry chapbook, Magical Yogis, was published by Prolific Press in 2017. Follow Mark at www.crowonthewire.com
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What a Wonderful World This Could Be
by Lee Zacharias
978-1-948692-50-2
978-1-948692-51-9
6x9, 312 pp.
Fiction
June 2021
paper 19.95
ebook 9.99
What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.
Lee Zacharias is the author of three previous novels, Lessons, At Random, and Across the Great Lake, a 2019 Notable Michigan Book, as well as a collection of stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, and a collection of essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received two silver medals from the Independent Book Publisher Awards, won North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has been reprinted and frequently cited in the annual volumes of The Best American Essays. You can read more about her at www.leezacharias.com
PRAISE FOR WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD THIS COULD BE
Lee Zacharias brings the 1960’s and 80’s to life with a poet’s precision and a novelist’s sense of drama in this luminous, riveting story. Spare, unflinching, and deeply compassionate, What a Wonderful World This Could Be is both a historical novel about political, artistic, and sexual awakening (and re-awakening), and a powerful mirror for our own time. I was gripped from the first page to the last. Alex’s journey from brilliant, neglected teen to mature artist broke my heart and renewed my faith in humanity in equal measure. This novel is a gift.
Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones
What a Wonderful World It Would Be, Lee Zacharias’s incantatory novel, is a complex, generous, unflinching portrait of Alex a romantically conflicted, artistically gifted young woman who comes of age during the tumultuous sixties. Reading it is like hearing Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, but for the first time. There isn’t a smidgeon of nostalgia or sentimentality here. In fact, the world it invites us into couldn’t feel more timely or more true. It’s about loss and love and about how we can’t know one without the other.
Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine
“At the center of every art is a question of allegiance,” Lee Zacharias writes in What a Wonderful World This Could Be, a riveting novel that foregrounds the personal fallout of the political maelstrom that was the American Radical Left in the 1960s and ’70s. Zacharias’s allegiance is to a narrative that refuses compromise in its revelations of the highs and lows of fighting for a just cause in an unjust world, and the price photographer Alex pays for seeing clearly what others around her will not: in life, as in politics, actions have consequences, many of them irreparable.
Kat Meads, author of For You, Madam Lenin
One of our finest novelists and a first-rate photographer, Lee Zacharias weds visceral language with lush visual imagery as she modulates main character Alex’s voice to match shifts in time that dramatically render her unforgettable experiences as a 15-year-old who falls in love with a 27-yearold photographer, as the wife of a 60’s New Left activist, and as a photography professor who, in 1981, reconnects with her first love. What a Wonderful World this Could Be is about art, it is about political change, but most of all it is about enduring love.
Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning
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Sonju
by Wondra Chang
978 - 1 - 956440 - 20 - 1 hardcover 26.95s
978 - 1 - 948692 - 58 - 8 paper 19.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 59 - 5 ebook 9.99
5½ x 8½, 290 pp. | Fiction | July 2021
After she defies the rigid, oppressive Confucian tradition of order and conformity, Sonju descends from an aristocratic upbringing to working at a men’s club. In spite of social condemnations and personal tragedies, her determination to be her own person never wavers.
Sonju’s life takes a turn when her mother marries her off to a man from a wealthy farming clan rather than allowing her to marry the man she loves. Set against the historical background of the humiliating Japanese occupation and the horrors of the Korean War, Sonju portrays one woman’s journey to personal liberation.
Wondra Chang was born in South Korea and has lived in the U.S. since 1970. Her writing discipline began at age ten, writing five short stories a day under the tutelage of a writing teacher. She won first place in a province-wide inperson writing competition. She studied journalism at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, where she lives with her husband, Bernard Rauch.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT SONJU :
A well-crafted tale of a person who forges ahead amid heartbreak and war. Kirkus Starred Review
This revealing, passionate account of a young woman’s coming of age, achievement of maturity, and discovery of emancipation is written from the heart. More than merely a story of love and betrayal, loss and sacrifice, it also offers an allegory for the emergence of South Korea as a significant player in the game of nations. Sonju’s “flowering,” in a sense, her journey of self-discovery is watered by the tears of pain and the gut-wrenching experience as she is dragged almost physically from a primitive world of repressive tradition and subjugation, a prescribed life deeply rooted in antiquity into a bewildering world of rapidly evolving modernity and change. Her story is, in a way, Korea’s story, and her pain, in so many ways, reflects Korea’s pain as a nation divided by artificial lines and fiercely debated social and political convictions, as it struggles to protect its identity, its values –Clay Reynolds, author of The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin’s Crossing, Ars Poetica, and The Tentmaker
Chang gifts us with an epic pulsing with life, fevered with longing, brimming with hope, and coursing with humanity. It’s the kind of writing and storytelling that will settle into your heart, your soul, your very bones Brian Petkash, author of Mistakes by the Lake
Wondra Chang offers an insightful exploration into post-WWII South Korean life through her portrayal of Yu Sonju, a miscast woman who comes of age at a time when her family and others of her class cling to a culture that suppresses women’s dreams and ambitions. Chang, a former psychotherapist, takes us to a place in the world that has recently become more visible to Western audiences due to the success of South Korean films such as the award-winning Parasite and Cho Nam-Joo’s bestselling novel, Kim JiYoung, Born 1982. Chang, however, in a story largely set in Seoul, provides a vivid picture of South Korea as it once was and a place well on its way to becoming the country we know today, rendered through the perspective of a woman who struggles to find a place for herself in her native land. Despite the suffering she endures, Sonju’s story is one of triumph made possible through the relationships she develops with the women she meets along her journey, and eventual success as a writer and businesswoman in a male dominated world. Chang has written a deeply moving novel that will expand the worldview of readers from all backgrounds Reggie Scott Young, author of Yardbirds Squawking at the Moon
One of feminism’s many challenges is to express it in fiction without yielding to the temptation to oversimplify or overdramatize its evolution within individual women, and within those women’s social and cultural milieus. When those milieus are unfamiliar to most readers, the difficulties can be compounded. Sonju does a masterful job of guiding the reader through all of this. || Sonju herself is a young Korean woman who comes of age in the 1940’s while her country is subjected to Japanese rule. She submits to a hasty, inferior marriage to protect her family’s status, then tries to be resigned and loyal while still trying to find her own way. Relationships within her new family, the Korean War, her husband’s infidelity, her decision to leave him and return to the lover of her youth all serve to slam doors shut behind her. She is even forbidden all contact with her daughter, a loss that torments her ever after. At the same time, what lies ahead is nothing she planned and nothing she knows how to manage. Without overt or artificial drama she leads the reader through the thoughtful renovation of her life, and, at the same time, the slow evolution of her country. || Without the usual spectacle of such a Cinderella-seeming story, Sonju rings with truth and realism. The reader never questions the harshness of the culture nor her commitment to it. The reader admires the small but steady steps she and Korea make together. This story is truly one of a kind, unforgettable, and deeply satisfying Kathryn Berck, author of The Hostage, The Suppliant, The Hunter, and The Good Kinsmen
Wondra Chang delights us with a story of family, love and the search for happiness. Here is a journey filled with romance, tragedy, and intrigue, a journey worth taking. Enjoy. Jose Antonio Rodriguez, author of This American Autopsy
Pitting a woman’s passion against life-crippling traditions, Wondra Chang does for South Korea what Thomas Hardy did for the English countryside. Chang’s debut opens in Seoul in 1946, when Sonju is almost 20 and the nation is poised on the edge of war and modernization. Her strict parents force her to marry a well-off stranger in the country, though she has long loved a poor, fatherless man committed to an equal union. But Sonju was not made to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of family “honor.” With a style direct and lyrical, Chang’s debut moved me so viscerally that I wept through the last third. You won’t be the same after reading this courageous and powerful novel. Janet Benton, author of Lilli de Jong
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A Woman’s Story
by Francine Rodriguez
978 - 1 - 956440 - 22 - 5 hardcover 26.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 60 - 1 paper 19.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 61 - 8 ebook 9.99
5½ x 8½, 294 pp.
Short fiction
August 2021
The stories of these Latina women’s lives depict conflict in gender bias, experiences of exploitation, violence, and powerlessness, sometimes resulting in pain and despair in their turbulent world. But these stories also tell of these women’s celebration of life itself that empowers them and gives them the will to sustain. These stories resonate on a deeply emotional level.
Francine Rodriguez grew up in and around downtown Los Angeles and later worked as a Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Investigator in the Federal sector. All told, she has worked in the fields of law and psychology for over thirty years, and her experiences in these fields inform her writing. She has published two previous novels, A Fortunate Accident (Booklocker 2015), and A Woman Like Me (Booklocker 2019). Her website is FrancineRodriguezAuthor.com
PRAISE FOR STORIES FROM A WOMAN’S STORY
“Smiley and the Laughing Girl” By Francine Rodriguez WHY WE LIKE IT: We love Rodriguez’s honest, down to earth, totally unaffected style and her deep investment in her characters. The story falls under the classification of ‘dirty realism’ (with a feminist slant) but in the end it resists any kind of definition. All we can call it is “good writing.”
Fleas On The Dog, Vol 7
Wow! Once again author Francine Rodriguez proves that she is the eyes and ears of Latina Realism. Her series of short stories in A Woman’s Story draws on her inner-city life experiences, revealing extraordinarily provocative vignettes of love, sex, violence, and injustice. Francine’s vivid descriptions of the lives of women as heroines and as victims stir all one’s emotions. My soul is aroused by her captivating imagination portrayed in the half-fiction, half real-life personalities ¡Bien hecho!—Rocky Barilla, International Society of Latino Authors, author of Esmerelda
Through a brutally honest approach, Rodriguez’s words guide you on a timely and unfiltered expedition of the contemporary social landscapes Latinx women traverse in the U.S. in the early 2000s. Her writings explore the delicate and very real balancing ac t they must display being the human at the center of frenzied collisions in culture, community, socioeconomics, sexuality, and gender. Often gentle, and painful, the intensity of her stories shine through with the same intensity with which Latinx women must face society in today’s America. Nikolas Gonzales, World History Adj. Professor World History Department - Bunker Hill Community College, and author of Moraga Deconstructed: Illuminations in Mexican-American Heritage
In a unique and unlikely feminist reclaiming of dirty realism, Francine Rodriguez’s A Woman’s Story takes us on an intimate yet dystopian journey into the effects and innerworkings of identity-based marginalization.… These silenced memories give us insight into many other Herstories and truths that may never be known not only because they were once forbidden, but because they are still mostly inaccessible to a mass U.S. American audience. Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Ph.D., Associate Professor – Decolonial Media Studies Department of Communication Studies, CSU San Bernardino
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TABOOS &
TRANSGRESSIONS:
STORIES OF WRONGDOINGS
EDITED BY LUANNE SMITH, KERRY NEVILLE, & DEVI S. LASKAR
978 - 1 - 948692 - 64 - 9 PAPER 20.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 65 - 6 EBOOK 9.99
6X9, 300 PP. FICTION ANTHOLOGY
MARCH 2021
Available from all online retailers, including MadvillePublishing.com
YouTube Readings from this book.
Taboos and Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, is an anthology that includes fiction and nonfiction. It was edited by Luanne Smith, Kerry Neville, and Devi S. Laskar, and focuses on breaking the rules with stories by Pam Houston, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Joyce Carol Oates, and Kim Addonizio alongside exceptional work by both noted and emerging writers. The anthology offers a scope of voices, styles, stories, and wrongdoings. From infidelity to family prejudices, from breaking the law to broken promises, from losing everything to finding empowerment, characters in these pieces offer a look at stepping over the line in all too human ways.
This anthology represents the best of both solicited and unsolicited work. Unsolicited material has been read by judge Maurice Carlos Ruffin and prizes awarded to one winning story and two runners up.
Luanne Smith is also the lead editor Runaway: An Anthology (Madville 2020), and Muddy Backroads: Stories From Off the Beaten Path.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Kim Addonizio - Paco Aramburu - Lisa Lynn
Biggar - Bonnie Jo Campbell – Yohanca
Delgado - Walter Evans - Michael Gaspeny
- Molly Giles - Pam Houston - Kyle Ingrid
Johnson - Soniah Kamal - Sabina KhanIbarra - Jen Knox - Dalton Monk – Hadley
Moore - Joyce Carol Oates – Pamela
Painter - Francine Rodriguez - J.C. SasserC.J. Spataro Sarah Stone - Melanie Rae
Thon - Chavisa Woods - Lee Zacharias
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/bookreviews/luanne-smith/taboostransgressions/
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Being Home
edited by Sam Pickering & Bob Kunzinger
978 - 1 - 956440 - 26 - 5 hardcover
978 - 1 - 948692 - 62 - 5 paper 19.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 63 - 2 ebook 9.99
6x9, 200 pp.
Essay Anthology
September 2021
Being Home is about the spirit of place, the juncture of memory and emotions. It is different for everyone; it is different for members of the same family, and it most likely has nothing to do with where you were born or grew up. Award-winning essayists Sam Pickering and Bob Kunzinger selected the essays for this collection, favoring essays about being home where setting becomes character, where time becomes the antagonist, and where we make our most important discoveries. These are not quarantine, stay in place, Covid-19 essays.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Johnnie Bernhard
• Karin Hedetniemi
• Judy Johnson
Rhonda Ray
• Rick Campbell
• Maryah Converse
• Anndee Hochman
• Deb Liggett
• Susan Delgado Watts
• Richard Holinger
• Mel Livatino
• Claude Clayton Smith
• Jamie Hughes
• Geoffrey Martin
• Marsha Lynn Smith
• John Flynn
• Robert Iulo
• Robert Miltner
• Bill Stifler
• Debra Frank
• Kyle Ingrid Johnson
• Vicky Oliver
• Elizabeth Templeman
• Lea Page
•
• Elaine Terranova
• Lee Zacharias • Madelaine Zadik
EDITORS: Sam Pickering spent 67 years in classrooms learning and teaching and has long been a rummager and writer wandering New England and the South, the Mid-East, Britain, Australia, and Canada. He has written some thirty books.
Bob Kunzinger is the author of eight collections of non-fiction, and has been widely published in publications such as World War Two History, Southern Humanities Review, the Washington Post, St Anthony Messenger, and more, including notations for essays in Best American Essays
Alegría
by Emi Wright
978 - 1 - 948692 - 40 - 3 paper 16.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 41 - 0 ebook 9.99
6x9, 336 pp.
Fiction
October 2021
Alegría’s family struggles to keep afloat amid secrets as she develops narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder that disrupts her nights and dulls her days. In a fantastical world where dead grandmothers come to visit and witch doctors prescribe waking concoctions, young Alegría discovers the secrets behind her namesake and the imperfections within her family. When the wind blows and the rains come, will she be able to keep her family together?
A powerful and impassioned novel based out of hope, loss, and of finding one’s place in the world. Through breathtaking descriptions and elegant prose, A Myriad of Dreams shows a girl’s mystical journey through its enchanting moves, and it’s graceful telling of life’s search for faith, acceptance, and clarity.” Jasmine Robinson, author of Stony the Road we Trod
Drenched in the witchdoctor mojo of the world she’s conjured, Wright’s Alegría is the hundred-year dream-flood of a lifetime. Where daughters are named for their mother’s drowned sisters, and ghosts walk hand in hand with the living, as fine a debut as you’ll ever see. Bravo.”—Michael Gills, author of Burning Down My Father’s House
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A Quiver in the Purlieu
by Amit Verma
978 - 1 - 948692 - 68 - 7 paper 18.95
978 - 1 - 948692 - 69 - 4 ebook 9.99
5½ x 8½, 158 pp., Fiction, available: November 2021
A book flies away as soon as it’s completed, defining a pivotal point in the life-arch of the protagonist. This life-arch also features a banyan tree growing in Canada, a bar in semi-rural U.S.A., a sliver of time in an idyllic, isolated village in India, a bored billionaire playing the stock market, a comic book princess, and an interstellar spaceship journey. And all this takes place in a universe that’s ever-expanding.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT A QUIVER IN THE PURLIEU
“This magical novel takes the reader on a remarkable journey that at times made me think of Herman Hesse and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A fanciful work from a promising author.”
Don Trowden, author of No One Ran to the Altar
“The literary universe expands its depth to make room for Amit Verma’s new novel A Quiver in the Purlieu. This book travels from Canada to America to India to outer space and deals in themes as varied and complexly relayed as postcolonial politics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and even monetary market theory. It channels Italo Calvino by addressing the capital “R” Reader, who is ready to expand their thinking while also having a wildly fun time zigging and zagging through this unpredictable gem!”
Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
“Verma has penned a thought provoking and enlightening tale about a young man’s epic journey from boy to man.… When we first meet [the protagonist], we find him lost in a chaotic world that is a mystery to him…. we sense that he is grappling with daily life and is doing his best to make sense of the essence of just being…. This was a brilliant read and I take my hat off to Amit Verma for creating such an awe-inspiring story.”
Natasha Murray, award winning author of Julia’s Baby and 58 Farm End
Amit Verma Is a resident of Houston, TX, where he divides his time among things he is passionate about, including molding captive impressionable minds and conducting research as a professor in Electrical Engineering, a perfect family, and a never perfect yard. His two works on literary fiction, The Lives and The Times, and The Lives and The Times II have been variously called, “rare find,” a “page-turner,” and “… Is refreshing and does a humorous take on some of the pressing Issues …”
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Obama’s Children
by Earl S. Braggs
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 72 - 4 paperback 16.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 73 - 1 ebook 9.99
6 X 9, 76 pp
December 2021 (January 2022)
poetry
A universal quest for human dignity and acknowledgement made specific through the Black experience.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT OBAMA’S CHILDREN :
If poetry is music, Earl Braggs is its composer. And what he composes is jazz smoky, sensual, serpentine stanzas of jazzy poetry at its improvisational best: staccato-trumpeting lines, tempodriven voices, melodic repetitions, lowdown bluesy fragmentations of logic and sensibility… pouring into the corners of our consciousness, ragtiming us into booty-shaking highs and tenorsaxing us into deep deep downs. Such is jazz. Such is poetry. Such is jazz and poetry together. And such is this jazz-riffing collection.
George Drew, author of Drumming Armageddon and Fancy’s Orphan
“Like notes of jazz played between notes of jazz music,” Obama’s Children is a headlong riff on the motifs of race, history, legacy and love. These vital poems reverberate with elements of improvisation and pastiche and are galvanized by exultant word play and an ecstatic vividness of spirit. Of Earl S. Braggs’ many collections, Obama’s Children is a fearless, sparkling magnum opus.
Gianna Russo, Wordsmith of the City of Tampa, and author of One House Down
Earl Braggs is his own man. His poems are a personal and public history of America told in numerous personas, poetic syntax, and a dancing rhythmic narrative that carries the reader into stories that seem familiar yet are often a bit askew. It’s like looking at the world through old glass windows streets, cars, trees, people, and history are wavy and grainy but not untrue. The truth is in the spirit, in the heart of the work and the poet. Book after book reveals what it’s like to be a Black man in the United States, and therefore, what it’s like to be an American.
Rick Campbell, author of Provenance and Gunshot, Peacock, Dog
A country boy from Wilmington N.C., Earl S. Braggs is a UC and Battle Professor of English at the U of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His awards include the International Jack Kerouac Literary Prize and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. Braggs is the author of fourteen poetry collections including Negro Side of the Moon and Ugly Love.
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2022
Dead Fish Wind
by Cooper Lev e y - Baker
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 74 - 8 paperback 19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 75 - 5 ebook 9.99
5 ½ X 8 ½, 204 pp
January 2022
fiction
Cicely has got problems. Stuck working a crappy job to take care of her deadbeat father, she’s living just a step above homelessness in a town ruled by a remote, affluent elite and stricken with a catastrophic outbreak of red tide. But then Cicely makes a friend, perhaps her first, and she starts dreaming of a way out of her predicament. It’s a scheme that involves stolen placentas and a dangerous outlaw doula that leads to a confrontation with the malignant forces around her and the mother who abandoned her as a child.
In this grim, comic debut novel, author Cooper Levey-Baker tells a bizarre coming-of-age story in prose that is lyrical, gross, tragic, goofy, and maybe even a bit tender.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT DEAD FISH WI ND :
For those who adore the dystopic cli-fi, the not-quite-today, the Jeff-VanderMeer-on-aplate-in-Florida, Cooper Levey-Baker’s Dead Fish Wind does it all. Ciceley, our heroine, in her pasties serving Cub Scouts. Ciceley confronting her father with a boxcutter. Ciceley inching toward happiness with Zinnia, a remote chanteuse. Dead Fish Wind, Levey-Baker’s first novel, is set to explode. But beware the orange-scented golf course, the male nurse in blue scrubs, and, of course, the fish.
Terese Svoboda, author of Great American Desert
The scariest part of Cooper Levey-Baker’s near-term dystopia in Dead Fish Wind is that after our poisoned, red tide summer, that future is already here. Levey-Baker’s heroine, Cicely, scrapes by in an ecologically ruined Florida. One wishes this taut novel, LeveyBaker’s first, could serve as yet another eco-warning. Instead, it’s a guide on the dark choices we will all soon have to make to survive.
Tony D’Souza, author of Whiteman, winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction
The Florida depicted here is one we know and one we don’t want to know; it is our present and it is our possible future. Levey-Baker’s achievement, through wondrous prose and compelling characters, is to vividly bring us into this debauched and debased world and, perhaps, offer us a plaintive warning. Dead Fish Wind is an important novel from an impressive new writer. It’s not to be missed.
Brian Petkash, author of Mistakes by the Lake
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Cooper Levey-Baker is a writer and journalist. His fiction has appeared in the Sierra Nevada Review and Burrow Press’s Fantastic Floridas series, and his journalism has won multiple awards from the Florida Magazine Association and the Florida Society of Professional Journalists.
All I see is your Glinting: 90 Days in the Pandemic
poems by Gianna Russo
photographs by Jenny Carey
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 99 - 1 Hard back 28 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 00 - 3 paperback 19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 01 - 0 ebook 9.99
8 x 8, 90 PP
January 202 2
Poetry / Photography
All I See Is Your Glinting, a dialogue between poems and photographs, documents each day of the last quarter of 2020. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, ninety poems written in a created form called the daily, detail the small meaningful moments in daily life. Stunning photographs of the natural world and intimate environments enrich and further open the text. Together, they refract and reflect our collective experience through a personal lens. All I See Is Your Glinting champions the value of nature, friendship, family, and love in coping with individual and universal suffering and grief.
Gianna Russo is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa (2020-22). She is the author of the poetry collections, One House Down (Madville Publishing, 2019) and Moonflower (2011), winner of a Florida Book Award. She has published poems in Green Mountains Review, Gulf Stream, Negative Capability, Crab Orchard Review, Apalachee Review, The Sun, Poet Lore, saw palm, The MacGuffin, Florida Review, Tampa Review, Ekphrasis, Florida Humanities Council Forum, Karamu, The Bloomsbury Review, and Calyx, among others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she directs the Sandhill Writers Retreat. A third-generation Tampa native, a mother and grandmother, Gianna lives in an almost 100-year-old bungalow with her husband Jeff Karon and their cat Gingko.
Jenny Carey is a photographic artist residing in Florida. Her work explores the themes of memory, loss, and sense of place. Ordinary subjects and intimate environments are used to evoke memories, document the intangible, and narrate unseen beauty. She began her practice as a photojournalist and that perspective is evident in her work. Her images have been exhibited nationally, most recently at The Tampa International Airport Gallery (Florida), Manifest Gallery (Ohio) and Davis Orton (New York). Her photographic works are included in numerous private collections. The natural environment is often the subject matter in her images, but frequent travels have opened narratives with urban elements. She is the founder of Creatives Exchange, a collective of professional women artists in Tampa, Florida where she maintains a studio practice.
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT ALL I SEE IS YOUR GLINTING: 90 DAYS IN THE PANDEMIC with poems by G ianna R usso
and photographs by J enny C arey:
Gianna Russo’s All I See Is Your Glinting is a beautiful, timely collection of delicate, haiku-like poems that shape-shift and transform into a magical, wide-ranging long poem, a necklace of small beauties to wear in grief and celebration. I love the way the subtly changing form of these poems unfolds across the days, building resonances that ultimately feel like revelation. This is formal poetry in the best sense of that word: the limitations Russo has imposed upon herself guide and control her improvisations while sustaining a scintillating tenor of surprise and delight. Paired with striking photographs by Jenny Carey, there’s great wisdom in this supple and inventive verse not a word is superfluous, not a moment of perception lost.
Michael Hettich, author of The Mica Mine, winner of the 2020 Lena Shull Book Award, and many other books of poetry
In this poignant and gentle book, poet Gianna Russo strikes out to cross the pandemic in a form that she has invented, the daily. Each day is an image, a number of words, and an attempt to contain fear and make sense of the wrenching fragility that had become viral and global. Paired with Jenny Carey’s healing photographs, this innovative and luminous book goes straight for the heart.
Janisse Ray, author of Red Lanterns and A Cracker Childhood
Engaging with Gianna Russo’s verse and Jenny Carey’s photographs is a stirring immersion. Each diary entry possesses its own poignant beauty. All tell us something about ourselves and our relationship with the earth, its resilience and our own and that there is something worthwhile to hold onto from hard times, just as you will want to hold onto this inspiring book.
Jack E. Davis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Gianna Russo’s dailies haiku-like poems mark the seasons of the plague. She deftly mines the shifting emotions, the fear, the fleeting beauty, the frustrations, and the sudden joys of each passing day. Jenny Carey’s photographs tell their own story at the nexus of the manmade and natural worlds, her meanings often spelled out in the crinkled letters of fallen leaves. All I See Is Your Glinting is a pitch-perfect chronicle of our shared year of masks and menace, alongside the muted doings of daily life.
Paul Wilborn, author of Cigar City: Tales from a 1980s Creative Ghetto
The book speaks unabashedly and refreshingly about issues of human interpersonal relationships and feelings of alienation... Both the poetry and the photography speak with an unsentimental approach to reality in both material and spiritual character. Russo and Carey touch on universal themes such as acknowledging the limits of human experience, putting into words and colors something so difficult to understand, let alone explain.
Zora Carrier, Ph.D., Executive Director, Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
These haiku-like diary entries by the poet Gianna Russo and images from nature by the photographer Jenny Carey speak to one another in an inspiring dialogue. Together, they create a dual spiritual diary that responds to our pandemic era. The poems meditate on landscape, relationships, and current events, while the photographs focus on nature’s news of feathery grasses, glinting light, and rippled reflections in water.
Lynn Saville, NYC Fine Art Photographer
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Judgment Day & Other White Lies
by Mike Hilbig
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 76 - 2 paperback 18.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 77 - 9 ebook 9.99
5 ½ X 8 ½, 164 pp February 2022
short stories
Judgment Day & Other White Lies is a short fiction collection that deconstructs whiteness by retelling versions of Greek, Roman, and Christian myths, concepts, and characters through a contemporary lens that reads whiteness into history as a force of destruction for white characters (in addition to those they oppress). From an alternative biblical Genesis about apes having orgies while on magic mushrooms to create western civilization (as told by the kinds of philosophers who have to be stoned themselves), to a retelling of the Oresteia where the white heavy metal musician Orestes is helping his aging mother Dawn commit suicide, to a white graffiti writer, magician, and cultural mis-appropriator named Per-C who fundamentally alters reality by painting fantastical ’Dusa portraits all over the city of Houston to the eponymous story Judgment Day that primarily concerns the mind-alteringcollapsing effects of a hallucinogenic on a Christlike white man who has two sets of memories stuck in his head, these stories show the tragicomic consequences of what happens when white people identify with the white lie of an identity that lives a fiction to maintain power.
Cover by Crowcrumbs, a designer, illustrator, and artist based in Houston, Texas. She studied design and studio arts at the University of Houston.
Mike Hilbig graduated in 2017 from Sam Houston State University with an MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. He lives in Houston, TX and teaches English at the University of Houston-Downtown and at Lone Star College.
The stories in Judgment Day & Other White Lies are quintessentially Mike Hilbig, his deft artistic imagination at work (and play). The stories engage in a kind of Romantic revolution. But Hilbig’s is a post-Romantic strategy designed both to turn the natural into the supernatural and the supernatural into the natural, and to deconstruct, destabilize that Romantic experiment a postmodern impulse I believe Coleridge himself would find deeply com-pelling…. These are stories underpinned by wisdom and humor, which are simultaneously a powerful cultural critique the call for a reckoning.
Robin Davidson, author of Luminous Other and Poet Laureate of Houston, TX from 2015-2017
Judgment Day & Other White Lies is a kaleidoscopic collection sharply intellectual, at times hallucinatory, but always grounded in deeply felt and richly imagined human drama. In these stories, the mythic and the mundane collide and remix in startling ways, feeling both timeless and contemporary. The transfigurations that Hilbig’s characters undergo are rendered with such precision and empathy that the reader can’t help but feel transformed as well.
Nick Lantz, author of You, Beast
A thoroughly enjoyable work by Mike Hilbig on the interconnectedness of race, gender, religion, and spirituality … and Houston! A writing style that’s at once Milan Kundera like, and original, with a voice that speaks for and to our tumultuous times.
Amit Verma, author of A Quiver in the Purlieu
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The Pursuit : A Meditation on Happiness
by Gerry LaFemina
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 78 - 6 paperback 1 9 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 79 - 3 ebook 9.99
8 x 8, 154 PP
February 2022
Personal Essay / creative nonfiction
It’s CNF. Like the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, it’s a hodge-podge: memoir, philosophy, lit crit, pop culture, history, and reflection. Gerry calls it a meditation It really is an essay in the French way of being a trial or an experiment.
Gerry LaFemina’s poetry collections include Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping, The Story of Ash and Little Heretic. His essays on prosody, Palpable Magic, came out in 2015 and Kendall Hunt recently released his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the Carlow University MFA Program. https://gerrylafemina.com/
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT GERRY LAFEMINA’S THE PURSUIT: A MEDITATION ON HAPPINESS
Among the many inspired riffs in Gerry LaFemina’s freewheeling meditation on happiness, nothing impressed me more than the hard-won honesty the author brings to bear on his own foibles, wounds, privileges, and passions. Though he never explicitly says so, his book strongly implies that while honesty cannot guarantee happiness, it does make happiness possible. It has done that much and more for LaFemina.
Garret Keizer, author of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want
I have a hard time distilling books that are wise, timely, gracefully written, richly compassionate, and honest and truthful and necessary. And yet, here I go, fumbling around trying to find the right words to entice you into opening these pages, knowing that no map is the territory, no portrait is the person. All I can tell you is Gerry LaFemina’s voice is as warm and direct as soul music, and his observations about our fallen world will give you hope. Go on ahead, open the book. Here comes our morning.
Reginald McKnight, author of White Boys and He Sleeps
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Heartbreak Tree
by Pauletta Hansel
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 88 - 5 paperback $16.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 89 - 2 ebook $ 9.99
6 x 9, 94 PP
poetry
March 2022
painting by Angelyn DeBord
Heartbreak Tree is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. “There is a road, but the road is still inside you,” the mature Hansel tells the girl she was, encouraging her: “You are trying. Remember.” This book does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own and other women’s lives.
Pauletta Hansel is a poet, memoirist and teacher who is author of eight poetry collections including Friend, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian Poetry. Her writing has been widely anthologized and featured in print and online journals including Oxford American, Rattle, The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry and Verse Daily Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Review, Cincinnati Review, and Still: The Journal, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate, 2026-2018 and for ten years served as managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT HEARTBR EAK TREE:
Women. We belong to a secret sharing, among mothers and daughters, girlfriends and sisters and lovers. We see each other across the grocery line, or in traffic, or in the salon and we nod, knowing that we each have suffered brutalities, unnamed. We survive what others do to us, and we survive what we do to us, so often in self-violating silence, as we go on because we must mustn’t we? smiling, pleasing. But sometimes, rare and sure, a voice comes out of this silence, unpleased and singing; sometimes, somehow, a woman knows how to transform this violence into medicine, enough to share. Pauletta Hansel’s Heartbreak Tree is just such a miracle. Every unflinching, healing poem tells the mother, daughter, girlfriend, lover who is silenced inside me to never forget: it is only the truth that sets us free.
Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author, American Purgatory; United States Artists Fellow, 2019
Heartbreak Tree is a gorgeous book, carefully assembled from flowers, dirt, graveyards, family memories, and letters to the poet’s younger self. It’s a love story to a place and a people, an excavation, a time capsule, a fierce inquiry and a song. Read it once for the pleasure of the honest voice, read it again for the beauty of the land and lamentation at its destruction, and keep reading it because its heartbeat, however specifically regional, is the same that pulses through all of us, whispering “home, home, home.”
Alison Luterman, In the Time of Great Fires, winner of the 2020 Catamaran Poetry Prize
Pauletta Hansel’s Heartbreak Tree is the breakout work of a lifetime, a work of breaking silences and ancestral truth telling, of weighing what poet Mary Oliver called a “box of darkness” in heart and hand like the pound of flesh it extracted and finding it a strange gift of hard growth, harder knowledge and wisdom, and perhaps most importantly, self-forgiveness.
Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
Pauletta Hansel’s poems were born in the hardscrabble mountains of Kentucky. The splendor of their moments of beauty that spring up like “ironweed purpling/ the spent fields” seems earned, deserved.
Michael Simms, author of American Ash, and editor of Vox Populi
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Muddy Backroads: Stories from off the beaten path
edited by Luanne smith and Bonnie Jo Campbell
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 14 - 0 paperback $ 20 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 15 - 7 ebook $9.99
5.5 x 8.5 , 284 pp
June 2022
For this anthology, the editors asked for stories that moved away from the norms of daily life to explore the side roads that take us away from the known. What do your characters do when they step away from what’s seen as normal or usual? What happens when they find themselves in unexpected situations or locations? What if nothing about their lives is what most consider typical? When a character takes a “muddy backroad,” he, they or she moves away from society and out into a place where anything can happen. Where will those backroads and back alleys take us?
CONTRIBUTORS:
Dorothy Allison, Hillary Behrman, Henri Bensussen, T.C. Boyle, Elizabeth Bruce, Ulrick Casimir, Michael Darcher, George Drew, Stephanie Dupal, Walter Evans, Michael Gaspeny, Roger Hart, David Hartshorne, Suzanne Heagy, Jen Knox, Mark Lammers, Robert McBrearty, Jayne Anne Phillips, Heather Mateous Sappenfield, Lee Scharf, Misty Skaggs, August Tarrier, Melanie Rae Thon, Luis Alberto Urrea, Siobhan Wright, Paula Younger
NO MU D WAS ACTUALLY REQUIRED.
the editors are LUANNE SMITH & BONNIE JO CAMPBELL .
the judge is ALAN HEATHC OCK , author of VOLT: STORIES
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A lso edited by Luanne Smith:
Watermark
by Jeff Hardin
ISBN : 978 - 1 - 948692 - 80 - 9 paperback $18.95
ISBN : 978 - 1 - 948692 - 81 - 6 ebook $9.99
6 x 9, 80pp
poetry
April 2022
At the heart of Jeff Hardin’s inventive seventh collection Watermark, a devotional, philosophical faith seeks “to know what can’t be known,” to step into, as if a sanctuary, “some deeper / deep / than what our words / can touch.” In each poem, his meditations stitch back through a visible, vertical phrase a whispered prayer, a “watermark” that serves not only to anchor thought but also to align and to re-align the purpose of thought within “this bent and broken world.” Born from Frost, Dickinson, Rilke, Whitman, and others, these phrases bind us and bless us at a time “when it seems the words / to enter others’ lives / are disappearing.” In an age in which it is increasingly difficult to “sort out what is true,” Hardin’s poems invite us to wake to the mystery all around us, to time’s revelatory unfolding, and to how our minds might find healing, if not communion, if only we listened intently enough to hear “the intercessions / made on our behalf.”
Jeff Hardin is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, No Other Kind of World, and Small Revolution. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Originally from Savannah, Tennessee, he has taught for almost three decades at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT WATERMARK
In Watermark, his seventh collection, Jeff Hardin continues his project of retrieving shreds of grace from the dusty corners of ache and want. With an attention to form as original and incisive as Mary Szybist’s, and with a sense of wonder as far-reaching as Wendell Berry’s, he spins out poems that have a timeless quality like the hand stitching of a nine-patch quilt, or congregational singing from a shape-note hymnal, or the eternity-flung stanzas George Herbert left behind. Jeff Hardin’s poems are vessels of wisdom and truth.
Bobby
Rogers, author of Paper Anniversary and Social History
For years, Jeff Hardin’s captivating, spiritually engaged poems have revealed the resonant beauty of the natural world and celebrated the labor of metaphysical striving. Watermark’s lyrically rewarding poems provide a “whispered prayer” that tracks Hardin’s deliberations and debates with luminous companions Yeats, Whitman, Hopkins, Dickinson, Oliver, the Four Evangelists, U2, John Mellencamp, and more. This poet’s restless intellect pays tribute to “the shape of thought,/how it shimmers and stretches/and cannot lie still,” examining the legacy of personal loss, family trauma, and the “murky depths” of faith. Hardin, a master craftsman, brings into view “the glimpsed-forth/shining/of one thing seen/through the presence/of another.
Jane Satterfield, author of Apocalypse Mix
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The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia
by Bob Kunzinger with photographs by Michael Kunzinger
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 86 - 1 paperback $1 9 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 87 - 8 ebook $9.99
Memoir
April 2022
The Iron Scar is both a literal journey by a father and son on the longest railway journey in the world, and a metaphoric pilgrimage of not just the author and his adult son, but all of us learning to let go on our way through life.
Bob Kunzinger is the author of nine collections of essays, including: A Third Place: Notes in Nature, and Penance: Walking with the Infant. He lives in Virginia.
Michael Kunzinger’s photography has appeared in publications such as Kestrel, Blue Planet Journal, and St Anthony Messenger, and has been in solo and group shows in Virginia, New York, and Galway, Ireland. His abstract work was featured for a solo exhibition at the renowned Quick Center for the Arts in New York, a finalist in an International Competition featured at The Louvre in Paris, and he is the author of the photo essay book, Across This Wild Land: A Photographic Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Blurb Books www.blurb.com/b?ebook=638486
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THE IRON SCAR :
The Iron Scar brought me on a journey that unexpectedly and artfully had me thinking about my own father and my sons throughout the book, as well as introducing me to the wild, warm, and colorful world of Siberia. Thank you for bringing me onboard with you and your son.
Martin Sheen, actor and author of Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son
I wish every book I've read over the past two months had been as moving, gripping, and loaded with fascinating information. The journey becomes an emotional and thematic whole that transcends the standard “look what I saw” travel book. So many things stick with me: the royal blue station shacks, the birches with no tops, the meat and potato pastries, the smell of onions, the vodka, the wheel tapping, the once-in-hundred-year flooding, the vast vacancies of human presence, the moving village of the train, the Leningrad hero, the Leningrad ghosts . . . Just so much. Well done!
Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato
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Worrisome Creatures
by Kate Sweeney
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 82 - 3 paperback $1 8 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 83 - 0 ebook $9.99 poetry
May 2022
This is a collection of the body, of the failings of history and family. The range is wide and balanced in geography, in tenderness and trauma, in startling imagery, craft, and heart. Kate Sweeney’s work takes me within and outside myself, making both realms real and seen/felt as if for the first time. In fact, much of the collection feels like entering uncharted territory and how intriguing to explore it! Here is a master poet and, as the highest compliment, I wish I could write poems like those in Worrisome Creatures.
Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
Kate Sweeney Kate Sweeney is the author of the chapbook Better Accidents (Yellow Jacket Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Tampa Review, and Poet Lore, among others.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT WORRISOME CREATURES :
In this sharply observed account of the subtle and not-so-subtle varieties of violence we visit upon one another, often on those we love best, Kate Sweeney reflects on the relationships families sustain and sometimes unravel. To have a child is to consign oneself to a lifetime of worry, and these vibrant and moving poems wrestle with this constraint as they delineate the consequences of loving and the various impositions we visit on those we live with. The poems meditate on our fragilities and strengths and, more broadly, observe the burdens we impose on the landscape we live in in this complex and deeply intriguing collection.
Sidney Wade, author of Bird Book and Straits & Narrows
Reading Worrisome Creatures is like paging through a family album, images rich with loss and love, and then walking the beach at the continent’s edge, along history’s wrack line. With a voice intimately, achingly authoritative, Kate Sweeney’s poems startle us with both the familiar and the exotic.
Elizabeth Dodd, editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy, and author of Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World
Kate Sweeney’s debut collection Worrisome Creatures bursts with beauty, humor, frank confidences, and nervy resolution. With pitstops across America and the decades, these poems range over everything from pregnancy, motherhood and exes to cockroaches, invasive trees, her own jealousies and other people’s stupidity. Sweeney deploys fresh, startling images in these lines and bolsters them with both tenderness and wit. Worrisome Creatures announces the arrival of a poet in full command of her craft and a worldywise voice that is just right for this moment.
Gianna Russo, Wordsmith of the City of Tampa and author of All I See Is Your Glinting and One House Down
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Genesis Road
by Susan O’Dell Underwood
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 84 - 7 paperback $ 22 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 85 - 4 ebook $9.99 fiction 342pp
June 21, 2022
Glenna Daniels faces a midlife cul-de-sac. She bears a recent miscarriage and third divorce the way her Appalachian parents taught her to cope with tragedy in stoic secrecy. She quits her social work position in Knoxville and runs away from home at the age of thirty-six, heading west with childhood friend, Carey, a gay professor in Atlanta. During their years in school, Glenna protected him from bullies. Now Carey is her savvy guide as she tries to heal her fractured life. Through the wilds of America Glenna grapples with the past and reconciles a way back home.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT GENESIS ROAD
BY SUSAN O’DELL UNDERWOOD
“Genesis Road is a sprawling travel narrative that centers on Glenna Daniels, a woman from Appalachia, and her childhood best friend Carey, who as a gay man abandoned small town living for an urban cultural center. As Glenna and Carey make their way across America, readers grapple with something new while also being aware that every landscape and every character has a vast and untold history. Throughout this complex journey, Underwood carves out a deeply rendered story of America that reveals the deep scars of its history even as it is also a place where we love and lose each other, searching for a definition of home.”
Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
“Glenna Daniels of Genesis Road joins a long tradition of Appalachian narrators bound to home and bound to leave. A woman with no plan, Glenna leaves behind the ashes of her life, roadtripping with a lifelong friend with his own losses and facing the landscape of the West ‘like a blank page and writing her name there, a brand new name.’ The humor and warmth of intimates on the road interlaces with Glenna’s account of her past full of regret, hurt, and the rare tender moment of salvation. Underwood’s compassionate novel allows us to journey with her characters into a more deeply understood sense of self and belonging.”
Jessie van Eerden, author of Call It Horses, winner of the 2019 Dzanc Books prize, and The Long Weeping (Orison Books 2017), winner of a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award.
Susan O’Dell Underwood grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, the daughter and granddaughter of publicschool teachers who also farmed. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and holds a PhD in English from Florida State University. She directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University, where her husband, artist David Underwood, also teaches. Besides two chapbooks, she has one full-length collection of poetry, The Book of Awe (Iris Press), and her poems, nonfiction, and stories are published in many journals and anthologies, includ-ing Oxford American, Ecotone, Bellevue Literary Review, Still: The Journal, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia
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Provenance: a novel
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 02 - 7 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 03 - 4 ebook $9.99
212 pp.
July 2022
By Sue Mell
WINNER OF THE MADVILLE BLUE MOON NOVEL COMPETITION
Still grieving his wife’s early death, DJ has spent the last three years and the money from her insurance policy collecting guitars, composing music, and continuing to shop the Brooklyn stoop sales and flea markets they’d always enjoyed. When his building is sold, he takes refuge in his younger sister’s halffinished basement, imagining a comfortable and solitary retreat in Hurley, the small Hudson Valley town where they grew up. Instead, he finds himself caught up in her troubling divorce, drafted as caregiver for his 11-year-old niece, and unable to face or afford a storage unit crammed with hundreds of vinyl records and every other scrap of his former life. DJ gifts his niece a marbled glass egg, a porkpie hat, and one of his prized guitars. But what’s asked of him, on his return to Hurley is not to give the perfect object it’s to give of himself.
Winner of the Madville Publishing 2021 Blue Moon Novel Award, Provenance is a story of hope in ruin. With subtle poignancy and humor, it offers fresh takes on contemporary conflicts, exploring pivotal moments of sorrow, longing, and renewal in the lives of three deeply textured and indelible characters.
(cover art by Sue Mell)
Sue Mell is a writer from Queens, NY. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College and was a 2020 BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, was a semi-finalist for the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Prize. Other work has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cleaver Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, Jellyfish Review, Narrative Magazine, Newtown Literary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Whale Road Review. Find her at suemellwrites.com and on Twitter @suemell2017
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT PROVENANCE :
The story is compelling, and the relationships that are explored here are a study in the dynamics of family and social expectation. It reminded me in ways of novels such as The Shipping News, and others of like categories, studies in mood and situation and character. More to the point, it’s just plain beautifully written. The prose is gentle, swaying, warm, and inviting. It’s a good read, and it stays with the reader afterwards in a very pleasant if somewhat bittersweet way.
Clay Reynolds, Blue Moon Novel Competition judge, and author of The Vigil, Agatite, Franklin’s Crossing, Ars Poetica, Monuments, and The Tentmaker.
"Provenance is a beautifully supple book about the power of renewal and the everyday, small redemptions hiding within families. Sue Mell artfully captures the hold of the past in all its intoxicating, tumbledown glory and sings it to life in the present."
Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
“Widowed DJ leaves Park Slope to move in with his younger sister and her 11-year-old daughter in upstate New York, leaving behind a lifetime’s collection of musical instruments, memorabilia, and flea market treasures. Unmoored without the security of his stuff, DJ is finally able to face his own grief and become able to truly love, for perhaps the first time in his life. Sue Mell’s searingly beautiful prose and her truly troubled, truly decent
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characters make Provenance a gorgeous, unforgettable novel about learning how to value what is most important in life: those we love and those who show us how to be better.”
Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley: A Novel
“Sue Mell’s Provenance is a story of resiliency. Her characters are as challenged and as flawed as the rest of us, but through the small things they do for each other and the small gifts they give each other, they find their way forward. Ultimately, this is a book about kindness, compassion, and sacrifice old-fashioned virtues that, Mell shows us, still hold their value.”
Peter Turchi, author of Maps of the Imagination
“In Sue Mell’s Provenance, an adult brother and sister navigate a tricky relationship that tests the limits of interdependence. They exemplify what Alfred Hayes said, that what one ran out of was not mistakes, but the years to make them in. This novel taps into the characters’ reserves of motivation and strength in service of what we all want: another chance, and what might still be possible when our best efforts fall short.”
Amy Hempel, award-winning author of Sing to It and The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
“Siblings DJ and Connie have each lost a spouse and a home. Now what? Living together as adults, they make sense of what they still possess literally and metaphorically, using the objects in their lives to consider the past and move into the future. Sue Mell’s Provenance is a relatable, intricate novel about later-life reckoning that (like the antiques store it features) offers up plenty of treasures for the reader.”
Debra Spark, author of Unknown Caller
“Wisdom of great depth and span marks each page of Sue Mell’s Provenance. The two memorable central characters, brother and sister, try to dig out of accumulations of guilt and loss and dread while learning to count on each other as never before. Mell presents their complex dilemma with remarkable sensitivity and intelligence. The reader of Provenance intimately experiences the characters making the difficult effort to recognize who they were and who they are, not for the sake of easy absolution, but for the intention of living more authentically.”
Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor
“Sue Mell's Provenance is a novel of irresistibly messy lives, loves, and legacies that, ironically, reads immaculately. Not a letter, not a paragraph, is out of place in this beautiful, beautiful book."
Liam Callanan, author of Paris by the Book
“In clear-eyed, luminous prose, Sue Mell tells the story of a man submerged in grief and impossible yearnings who digs his way out of the remnants of a former life. D.J. scrutinizes his vanishing options with the startling honesty of a man bewildered by circumstance, adrift in his suddenly unrecognizable existence, but always articulate, always a charmer. In this wise and beautiful novel, everyone falls in love with D.J., including the reader.”
Megan Staffel, author of The Exit Coach
“Sue Mell's astute powers of observation, wit, and emotional intelligence shine in this deeply rewarding novel about a middle-aged man-child who can't stop himself from screwing up. DJ has been relying on his charm to coast through life. Women have always bailed him out. But when his wife succumbs to cancer, his life falls apart. Grief past the platitudes is a dangerous trap, especially for a guy like DJ. I raced through the pages of this book to see if he was capable of doing better for the sake of his sister who takes him in. Long after I read the last page, this book sings in my heart.”
Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water & Other Stories
“Sue Mell is a master of quiet tension, which builds slowly throughout Provenance, until the characters seem to have run out of options to make their lives work, either alone or together. At the same time about large themes like life and death, the novel gathers its momentum from the small moments and choices that fill our days. Packed with quietly exquisite prose, nearly every word perfectly chosen, Provenance fills the reader with both admiration and anxiety until the very end, when the main character, who fizzled away his previous life and has come to live in his divorced sister’s basement, realizes he might need to rethink his purpose.”
Jane Anne Staw, author of Small: The Little We Need for Happiness
“If you’ve ever suffered a loss, if you’ve ever had to start over, you will find kinship and hope and even joy in Provenance, the story of a widower seeking to salvage his life after moving back to his small hometown in upstate New York. I cannot recall reading a debut novel imbued with such depth of understanding and compassion for its characters, or one that better captures the messy business of living. Sue Mell writes like a dream.”
Will Allison, author of the
novels
What You Have Left and Long Drive Home
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Secret City
by Katherine Smith
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 90 - 8 paperback $1 8 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 948692 - 91 - 5 ebook $9.99
poetry
August 2022
Secret City explores belonging and power through the eyes of children and adults, whether the relationships in question are to a family, to a religion, to a region or to a country. The imagery of the natural world weaves in and out of the dreams of a young Jewish girl brought to live with a Christian family in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II. A woman with a childhood of being bullied moves north only to find herself an authority figure, teaching students who are themselves outsiders marked for deportation. In the midst of confusion and ideology, where victim and perpetrator ceaselessly exchange roles, the voices in these poems search for a ground of belonging in the natural world, in serving others, and in the intimately textured language of poetry.
Cover art by Kathryn (with a y) Smith. She goes by Kat and is no relation to this author, Katherine Smith.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT SECRET CITY:
I have long admired Katherine’s finely tuned, lush work and her discipline as a writer. Her vision continues to expand and deepen in this third collection, Secret City. Persecution, war, and its haunting aftermath come in various forms. But redemption is nigh in this work, the prayer of embrace and belonging answered by red sumac, willow, camellia, chestnut pony. The speakers are indeed born again: “I’m going to live twice, / once baptized in the Clinch River, // once with the wild geese that fly over Norris Dam / towards the Cumberland Plateau and never look down.”
Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
Secret City is the perfect title for Katherine Smith’s latest collection of poems. Literally, it is the name for Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where atomic bombs were made in secret during World War II. This is the setting for many of her poems inspired by her relatives who immigrated there. Metaphorically, it stands for the life of the mind of this fine poet working at the height of her powers to create poems that lyrically and lovingly describe her journey from childhood as a (lonely) Jewish girl in the South into adulthood, all the while “… yearning for / the scent of a place, the song of a people.” A keen observer of the natural world, the poems are grounded by these exquisite images as she finds the language of identity at the various stages of her life. Ultimately, Smith finds peace with her history and her choices, stating in the final poem: “I am American, teacher, woman, Jew. In both worlds / I am born not of those who stayed behind / but of those who sailed away.”
Marjory Wentworth
Katherine Smith is a meticulous observer of the flora and fauna of the Tennessee Valley, allowing us to join her “…to breathe… to feast / at the common table of trees and mountains.” She deftly turns her description of trees into a commentary on human nature: “I learned to distinguish the American chestnut / from the oak chestnut by the serrated edge, / … I learned to recognize my kind by its serrated song.” With a stunning lyricism, Smith reminds us we cannot separate ourselves from the natural world we carry inside: “So too you have seen the ordinary oak / of your own heart. Its aorta branches / from the ventricle, beats / on the screen.”
Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of An Infusion of Violets, Associate Editor, Tupelo Press
Katherine Smith’s poetry publications include Boulevard, North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her first book, Argument By Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems, Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. A Tennessee native, she works at Montgomery College in Maryland.
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Bicycles of the Gods : A Divine Comedy
by Michael Simms Fiction
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 04 - 1 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 05 - 8 ebook $9.99
August 2022
In Bicycles of the Gods, the main character, Jesse, presents an earthly incarnation of Jesus Christ come to earth in the body of a 12-year-old boy in the company of Xavi, who is the earthly incarnation of Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, also a 12-year-old boy. The pair stand on a hilltop above the city of Los Angeles contemplating how best to destroy it as a precursor to destroying the entire world to rid it of humanity so it can refresh and rebuild. Xavi is ready to get on with the task The Big Guy, God, has assigned them, but Jesse has a problem. He isn’t sure that everyone deserves to be destroyed.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT Bicycles of the Gods
A playful, provocative, and imaginative discursus, Bicycles of the Gods is an affront to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, and heterosexism as it posits a Divine who will not be captured and used by white supremacists for their own purposes. Michael Simms has created an engaging new world order that functions within our familiar one.
Rev. Dr. Moni McIntyre, author of Social Ethics and the Return to Cosmology
Whether Michael Simms is writing a personal essay about growing up with autism or poems about our dying planet, a barfight, or the mystery of a hummingbird’s radiance, he is a master storyteller whose narratives hold memorable moments full of fresh and telling details that unlock the heart. And now, in Bicycles of the Gods he has invented a new genre apocalyptic satire. The novel is hilarious at times, but make no mistake, Simms is serious as a heart attack in a hurricane. It tells an old story in a completely new way, exploring issues of faith, politics, trauma, imagination, and the triumph of love over tyranny.
Peter Makuck, author of Wins and Losses: Stories
Set in today’s digital-age Los Angeles, with a delightful cast of characters, including celestial ones “in disguise to make it easier to move through the world,” you will encounter The Big Guy, Maria, Jesse, Xavi, Luke, and Abe, as well as Christine, Mikey, Patrick, the Six Sisters of the Piston, Father Jack, Stefan the Poet, Birdie, Dharma the Dog, and Caruso the Parrot, all of whom are caught up in the tragic-comic battle between the forces of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Michael Simms has given us a frolicking and “novel” approach to the Apocalypse of John that offers a front-row seat to the shenanigans of the times in which we are presently living. Bicycles of the Gods deserves its own Broadway billing as both “Dantean” and “Shakespearean.”
Rev. Dr. Charles Davidson, author of Bone Dead and Rising: Vincent van Gogh and the Self Before God
MICHAEL SIMMS is an accomplished poet, writer, editor, publisher, teacher, blogger and entrepreneur. Seven collections of his poetry, three novels, and two widely adopted poetry textbooks have been published or are under contract with publishers. He has also been the lead editor of over 100 published books, including the bestselling Autumn House Anthology of Poetry, now in its third edition. Simms has taught at a number of universities, including Chatham University’s MFA program from 2005-2013.
Bicycles of the Gods is Simms’s debut novel.
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Gravity Hil
b y Susanne Davis
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 06 - 5 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 07 - 2 ebook $9.99
FICTION
September 2022
Runner up in the Madville Blue Moon Novel Competition
Gravity Hill is a story about Jordan Hawkins, her family, and a small rural town in Connecticut wrecked by the tragic death of three boys on Gravity Hill. But what first appears to be a tragedy of drunk driving leads back to a mysterious accident that has plagued a small town for years, sending Jordan on a journey to clear her brother’s name. What she discovers a hidden toxic waste site sends the whole town on its own bumpy road to self-awareness and healing.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT GRAVITY HILL :
Susanne Davis’s Gravity Hill delivers the goods: hers is a heartfelt story of loss and renewal, populated with characters who are flawed, feisty, and entirely sympathetic. At the heart of this story is Jordan Hawkins, an irrepressible young woman whose grief over her brother’s death triggers the risky behavior and impetuous decision-making that will send her down roads she had not meant to travel. Davis has a gift for dialogue and vivid description; her details about agricultural life, the family dynamic, and the rules of the road are evocative and precise. It’s both a pleasure and an honor for me to endorse Gravity Hill, a story to which readers will be drawn and by which they’ll be rewarded.
Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of We are Water and She’s Come Undone
Susanne Davis is an extraordinary writer. She creates characters that you instantly care about, that you worry over, that you live with. She writes about situations and lives that, like John Irving, are not only fiercely entertaining, but they also have a deep moral center about how we should be living our lives, what we should care about, how we can manage our rich and complicated world. A diamond talent.
Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of both Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You
In Gravity Hill, Susanne Davis has tackled the wide, sweeping themes of love and loss, environmental troubles, feuds, families forced to confront each other’s mistakes, communities coming apart and then coming together, regrets, fathers and sons, and families torn up by old lies and secrets. This story, told with gentle but vivid writing, brings us to painful tears of recognition about the human condition and yet uplifts us with the redemptive quality of hope.
Maddie Dawson, author
of The Stuff That Never Happened
A remarkable protagonist leads a robust cast in this absorbing tale of self-discovery.
Kirkus Reviews
SUSANNE DAVIS is the daughter of a sixth-generation dairy farmer and lives near her dad’s farm where the real Gravity Hill exists. Her dad works every day to keep his farm from developers, just like Jordan's father. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a short story collection, The Appointed Hour (Cornerstone Press). Individual stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Notre Dame Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and other literary journals. Her work has won awards and recognition, including 2nd place Madville’s Blue Moon Novel Competition and mention as distinguished story in the Best American Short Stories series. She teaches creative writing at the college level and beyond.
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Just Like Oz: Essays on a Few Poet Wizards & Their Multifaceted Magic
By George Drew
ISBN: 97819564401 2 6 Paperback $20.95
ISBN: 9781956440133 Ebook $9.99 essays / literary criticism
October 2022
Just Like Oz, a book consisting of eighteen essays, some short and some long, mostly examines the work of “wizard poets,” some wellknown and even iconic, a few unknown to the wider literary community. George Drew’s purpose is to take a deep critical dive into the art of poetry by analyzing the work of those wizard poets and, in doing so, praising them and their shimmering art. For those poets, Drew shows us, the poetic flood flowered. For readers, these essays provide a kind of yellow brick road into an Oz of truth and beauty that is the magic realm of poetry.
George Drew is the author of nine poetry collections, including Pastoral Habits: New and Selected Poems and The View from Jackass Hill, winner of the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, both from Texas Review Press, Fancy's Orphan, Tiger Bark Press, and most recently Drumming Armageddon, Madville Publishing, 2020. Drew also has published a chapbook, So Many Bones: Poems of Russia. He has a new chapbook coming out titled Hog: A Delta Memoir, Bass Clef Press. He has won awards such as the South Carolina Review Poetry Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Adirondack Literary Award, the St. Petersburg Review Poetry Contest, the Knightville Poetry Contest and in 2020 the William Faulkner Literary Competition. Drew was a recipient of the Bucks County Muse Award in 2016 for contributions to the Bucks County PA. literary community. His biography appears in Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide, U. of Mississippi Press, edited by Catherine Savage Brosman. In 2019 Drew collaborated with singer/songwriter Rick Kunz on a CD of original poetry and songs entitled A Triumph of Loneliness, KBW Music.
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The Cyclone Release b y Bruce Overby
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 08 - 9 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 9 56440 - 09 - 6 ebook $9.99 November 15, 2022
Runner-up - Madville’s Blue Moon Novel Competition
It’s the late 90s Internet boom, and Brendon Meagher has just lost his wife Sadie in a freakish car accident at the edge of Silicon Valley. The Cyclone Release follows Brendon as he emerges from tragedy and lands in a pre-IPO start-up that promises astonishing riches. Mo Gramercy, a bright and commanding colleague with her own deep secret, joins Brendon, disrupts his malaise, and takes him as her lover. The characters’ careen toward IPO millions, their secrets suddenly converging, and both are shaken without mercy from bucolic notions of work, life, and impending fortune.
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT THE CYCLONE RELEASE:
Masterful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Cyclone Release speaks to the unpredictability of love and loss and the seemingly heartless way life changes on a dime, while offering readers an intimate view into the bizarre landscape of the Silicon Valley tech start-up. An impressive debut.
Danielle Girard, USA Today and Amazon #1
Bestselling Author of Far Gone
In a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley, Brendon Meagher is a modern-day Tommy Wilhelm for fans of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Overby delivers a poignant look over the cubicle walls of a high-tech start-up and into the lives of hard-charging acolytes. Filled with love and loss, and propelled by the looming promise of financial windfall, this debut is not to be missed!
Jeffery Hess, author of No Salvation and the Beachhead trilogy
In The Cyclone Release, Bruce Overby registers the shifting landscape of San Francisco’s South Bay, where orange groves and pastoral farm life have given way to big tech campuses, the mad energy of startups, and IPOs. We follow Brendon, an experienced tech writer, as he grapples with a new job and the intensity of an impending IPO in the wake of his wife’s sudden death. When he is finally ready to explore love again, he discovers an unlikely connection between his new workplace interest and his dead wife. Overby brings the book to satisfying crescendo with secrets revealed, an IPO launched, and a believable, sympathetic main character who finds himself facing a new, unexpected horizon of possibility.
Angela Pneuman, author of Home Remedies and Lay It On My Heart
Born in California’s Santa Clara Valley long before it became the Silicon Valley of today, BRUCE OVERBY both participated in and keenly observed the transformation and evolution of an insular place that many still fail to understand. His fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and his story “Bookmarks” won First Prize in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. He holds an MFA in Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and continues to live in Northern California with his wife Caroline. The Cyclone Release, a finalist in the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Competition, is his first novel.
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The Parting Glass : poems
by Lisa J. Parker
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 16 - 4 paperback $1 9 .95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 17 - 1 ebook $9 .99
November 15, 2022
Winner of The 2021 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
The Parting Glass, like the old Irish song, is a toast to the places and people who make up the author’s roots and base. However Appalachian at its root, it tells a universal story about what grounds and keeps us, even as we move in cities and circles far from home. At its core, this book brings the thread of downhome with its voices and song, to the cities and cultures the author moves through. The poems raise a glass to those still at the table and to those already gone, to homecomings and deployments, to the navigation of love and grief.
What people are saying a about The Parting Glass :
As haunting as the Irish ballad for which it is named, The Parting Glass is a book of searing elegies and unforgettable odes to moments of joy shared in tranquil places. Whole worlds emerge and collide in these poems, experiences as rich as the black bread offered by the Ukrainian neighbor to the “Hillbilly Transplant” in New York City. Many of us from Appalachia will relate to her fish-out-of-water adventures and heartbreaks, missing family back home but also feeling the electric thrill of subway rides and all-night restaurants. Lisa J. Parker has created a deep and nuanced book that would have made the late Arthur Smith proud, and I cannot imagine a more worthy first entry for the poetry award named in his honor. I have felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes more than once when I come to the lines, “the surreality of that meager box / with its pewter top, your name punched into it.”
The Parting Glass offers enormous heart and soul in the face of unbearable grief, survivable only through a sense of belonging to a place and its people and by committing to words those memories that affirm what we have lost.
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place
Lisa Parker possesses the perceptive eye of a photographer and the truth-telling, visionary voice of poet. From the orange trumpet vines and sycamore trees of northern Virginia to the “crushed velvet walls” of the Metropolitan Opera, each precise, wondrous image in The Parting Glass transports the reader. As Parker shows us how to look at these beautiful, sometimes broken, sometimes aching landscapes, she tells an important story about the places we call home, the terrible weight of grief, and love always love.
Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star
These are poems of loss, displacement, and deep grief, yet they are shot through with light, in particular the illumination that comes with beautiful writing. There is not one wasted word in this moving, intelligent, and timely collection of poems that stand perfectly on their own yet sing even louder as an entire gathering. The Parting Glass is a marvel of a book.
—Silas House, NY Times bestselling author of Lark Ascending
Lisa Parker is a native Virginian, a poet, musician, and photographer. Her first book, This Gone Place, won the 2010 ASA Weatherford Award and her work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Her photography has been on exhibit in NYC and published in several arts journals and anthologies She has worked in the Department of Defense for nearly twenty years, worked as a first responder for 15 years, and currently serves as a crisis and disaster response volunteer with Team Rubicon. Some of her work may be found at www.wheatpark.com
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The Gate in the Garden Wall
essays by Sam Pickering
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 10 - 2 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978 - 1 - 956440 - 11 - 9 ebook $9.99
June 2022
Last year Sam Pickering announced that he’d written his final word. “I intend to sit in a chair at the edge of the driveway and on sunny days doze through hours waking up occasionally to identify birds on the feeder. My hands and lap will be empty, and I won’t worry about a wind scattering papers across the yard.” Three days later Mike a college classmate wrote him. “Given all the books you have written, it makes me sad to hear that you have written your last book. Please remember what mighty things 80year-olds can do. For instance, Goethe taught himself Greek when he was 80. Too bad he died at 81.”
“I’m trapped,” Pickering said and picked up his pencil. “Words are me.” Sam Pickering has written more than thirty books and barrows of articles. When not at his desk, he was in the classroom, the last thirty-five teaching English at the University of Connecticut. Originally from Nashville, he did not plan to teach, or write. “But,” he says, “the good life knocks a person about and takes him here and there” in Pickering’s case to years meandering the Mid-East, Eastern and Western Europe, to Australia, and Nova Scotia, to places great and small. He says he loved teaching, the secret to which was “liking people.” His pages reflect his enjoyment of and love of life, particularly the ordinary things that form the fabric “of all our lives.”
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Vicki Pickering holding Little Sammy Pickering, Big Sammy looking on beside the Reedy River in Greenville, South Carolina. (Photo by Edward Pickering)
“The Truth”
Familiar essays by Sam Pickering
ISBN: 978-1-956440-27-0 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-28-7 ebook $9.99
October 2023
This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a professional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row. They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Old-timer? Not me. That poor man hadbetter see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”
What people are saying about “The Truth”:
I’ve been reading Sam Pickering’s essays for nearly fifty years, and they have always been for me a touchstone, a place to go home. Now, in his 34th book, he seems even more comfortable in the genre the personal essay that he has so beautifully embraced and made utterly his own. These essays are uplifting, poetical, sometimes melancholy, always hugely entertaining. Pickering is an American original, and he’s writing here at the top of his form.
Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me
Sam Pickering isn’t bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and naïve. His world, and pages, however, are green with life. In this collection of essays, he celebrates friendships and the memories of friendships. He rummages through closets of books, some so wormeaten they are wondrously nourishing. He cures aches and pains by turning them into words. He meanders days and places and looking closely at life finds it intriguing. Under his pen, the imagination soars and the familiar becomes richly appealing, at once both familiar and unfamiliar. He is not a self-help writer, but his essays lighten one’s steps and make a person, even a vegan, want to eat a Montreal Sausage and cheer villains, and heroes, at a country wrestling match. Although Sam Pickering lives in Connecticut, he has long been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
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Cover art is Estella Canziani’s The Piper of Dreams, The Medici Society, Grafton Street, Bond Street, London
Sam and Vicki Pickering with companions Jack, Suzie, and Mia in Connecticut near the Fenton River. Photo by Eliza Pickering.
2023
Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology
edited by Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke
ISBN: 978-1-956440-51-5 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-52-2 eBook $9.99
Launched January 19, 2023 in honor of Dolly’s Birthday. Happy Birthday, Dolly!
Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology offers 54 poets’ takes on often-unsung facets of this diamond in a rhinestone world calling in Dolly’s impeccable comedic timing, her lyric mastery, her business acumen, and her Dollyverse advocacy. These poems remind us to be better and to do better, to subvert Dolly cliché, and they encourage us to weave Dolly metaphor into our own family lore. Within these pages, Dolly takes the stage and the dinner table; readers see the public Dolly of the silver screen and the private Dolly of identity contemplation. Dolly raises praise and question, and she butterflies into our hearts to unabashedly to claim the mantra In Dolly We Trust.
With Dolly poems from 54 contributors:
Steven Reigns
Maureen Seaton
Linda Neal Reising
Gregg Shapiro
Vianese • Donna Vorreyer
L.J. Sysko
Julie Marie Wade
Nicole Tallman
Jennifer Wheelock
Roberta Schultz
Isaiah
Dustin Brookshire (he/him) a finalist for the 2021 Scotti Merrill Award, is the founder/editor of Limp Wrist, curator of the Wild & Precious Life Series (a Zoom-based poetry reading series), program director for Reading Queer, and founding chapter president of the South Florida Poets. He is the author of three chapbooks: Never Picked First for Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Visit him online at www.dustinbrookshire.com.
Julie E. Bloemeke (she/her) is the 2021 Georgia Author of the Year Finalist for Poetry. Her debut full-length collection Slide to Unlock (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) was also chosen as a 2021 Book All Georgians Should Read. Winner of the 2022 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2020 Fischer Prize, her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, EcoTheo Review, and others. An associate editor for South Carolina Review and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow, she is also a freelance writer and editor. Visit her online at www.jebloemeke.com
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Kelli Russell Agodon • Nin Andrews • Lana K. W. Austin • David-Matthew Barnes • Nicky Beer • Julie E. Bloemeke • Emma Bolden • Dustin Brookshire • Phillip Watts Brown • Marina Carreira • Denise Duhamel • teri elam •Rupert Fike • Diamond Forde • Chad Frame • Makayla Gay • Tyler Gillespie • Kari Gunter-Seymour • Robert Gwaltney • Beth Gylys • Karen Head • Raye Hendrix • Collin Kelley • Dorianne Laux • Chin-Sun Lee • Arden Levine • Katie Manning • Kelly McQuain • Lynn Melnick • Jenny Molberg • Rachel Morgan • Caridad Moro-
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Carolyn Oliver
Jeffrey Perkins
Stephen Roger Powers
Benjamin Anthony Rhodes
Micah Ruelle
Anna Sandy-Elrod
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Kerry Trautman
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Dan Vera
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Yvonne Zipter
The Dog Years of Reeducation
Poems by Jianqing Zheng
ISBN: 978-1-956440-39-3 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-40-9 ebook $9.99
February 2023
In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, millions of middle school and high school graduates, called the zhiqing or Educated Youth, were sent up to the mountains and down to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor peasants. With deep conviction that they would play an important role in the transformation of rural China, the zhiqing became field hands, never realizing that reeducation was both a physical and psychological challenge. This collection of poetry is the representation of those reeducation years in the fields. Half a century has passed, but memories remain fresh, each a page of suffering, cheering, or dreaming to turn.
What people are saying about The Dog Years of Reeducation
by Jianqing Zheng
Jianqing Zheng’s startling collection of poems, a reliving of the author’s experience as a young scholar relocated to a farm, summons nature as companion. The poet’s exile is “a double plow”: “plain laughter / flavor / of plain life”; “We remain silent as if / we must accept the fact that / our bodies deserve / bending or transplanting / like rice seedlings.” As from the work of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, we absorb history absorb it the only way we can: as experience. Dazzle of fireflies, leeches glomming to legs in rice paddies. Hard work and rest, lit with hand-rolled smokes. Each night “the moon peeks through / the broken window.” And, finally, there is this compelling invitation: “Tell me when you want to smell the scent of new rice, and I will bring you a whole bag of it grown with my muddy hands. It’s my sweat of love.”
Angela Ball, author of Talking Pillow
What I like best about Zheng’s poems is nearly every line has an image: I see what he’s saying verbal movies. He shows, rather than tells. I’m entertained by what he says and by the way he says his what. Unforgettable pictures: “Our husky voices / sandpaper the muggy heat,” “Straw hats float like life preservers / in a white sea of cotton,” a roommate bubbling snores, and “Light recedes / field to field / into a big tomato / toothed in half by hills.”
DC Berry, author of Yes, Cancer French Kisses
What will wake the reader here and keep attention from beginning to end is the series of original and important metaphors that reveal how deeply Jianqing Zheng’s memory was cast within the confines of his reeducation. In Zheng’s book, we experience the actual human side through the author’s keen perceptions, as well as compelling moves in the writing of his poetry.
Theodore Haddin, author of By a Doorway, in the Garden
Jianqing Zheng is the author of A Way of Looking and two poetry chapbooks, editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia, Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku, and five other books. He received the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Prize and two literary arts fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, among other awards and honors. He is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature and Valley Voices and is the former editor of Poetry South. A reeducated youth in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Zheng has lived in Mississippi since 1991.
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Biggest Little Girl
a novel by Jodi Angel
ISBN: 978-1-956440-41-6 paperback $21.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-42-3 ebook $9.99
March 2023
In Biggest Little Girl, 14-year-old Joey has run away from home in smalltown California in search of anything better. She’s got a few dollars and a bus ticket north, but at a truck stop just 30 miles from home, she meets Jerry with his gold watch and wad of cash. Jerry buys Joey a hamburger and offers her a job in Reno making deliveries and desperate for someone to trust, she accepts. In Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, shacked up in a motel, Jerry cuts off Joey’s hair, gives her new clothes, and sends her out to run envelopes into casinos in exchange for money. Joey makes a new group of friends at the motel, all teenagers, and when Joey falls for the ringleader, Amber, they all start making big plans to scam Jerry and run to Portland like a makeshift family. It doesn’t take long before everything starts to dissolve when the suppliers get shorted, Jerry gets desperate, and the future becomes a gamble with a deck that has already been stacked against her.
This
is a survival story.
What people are saying about Biggest Little Girl:
Jodi Angel is a rock star. Jodi Angel is one of my literary idols. Anything she writes is solid gold wrapped in black leather. This novel is gorgeous.
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels and The Water Museum
Every sentence of Biggest Little Girl is pure poetry. Gritty, beautiful, and raw, Jodi Angel takes her characters and her readers on one hell of a ride. Hold on.
—Jennifer Pashley, author of The Watcher, The Scamp, and The Conjurer
Jodi Angel is the author of two story collections, The History of Vegas and You Only Get Letters from Jail, which was named as a Best Book of 2013 by Esquire. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, Electric Literature Recommended Reading, and Byliner, among other publications and anthologies. Her short story, “Snuff,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She grew up in a small town in Northern California in a family of girls.
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The Green Mage
A novel by Michael Simms
ISBN: 978-1-956440-18-8 paperback $21.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-19-5 ebook $9.99
March 2023
Volume One of The Talon Trilogy
Norbert Oldfoot is a simple mage who makes his living traveling the Bekla River Road, selling trade goods, performing healing magic, and singing traditional songs of heroes. He becomes friends with Kerttu, a coppersmith who has developed a new alloy which is perfect for manufacturing swords. When Kerttu is kidnapped by the evil Wizard Ludek, Kerttu’s teenage daughter Tessia, a skilled hunter, recruits three friends, including Norbert, and sets out on a quest to find a legendary dragon who lives in the mountains. With the help of the dragon, Tessia plans to save her father. Little do they know that in order to save Kerttu, they will first have to save the kingdom.
“Whether Michael Simms is writing a personal essay about growing up with autism or poems about our dying planet, a barfight, or the mystery of a hummingbird's radiance, he is a master storyteller whose narratives hold memorable moments full of fresh and telling details that unlock the heart.”
– Peter Makuck, author of Wins and Losses: Stories
Born and raised in Texas, MichaelSimms has worked as a squire and armorer to a Hungarian fencing master, stable hand, gardener, forager, estate agent, college teacher, editor, publisher, technical writer, lexicographer, political organizer, and literary impresario. He is the author of seven collections of poetry and a textbook about poetry. In 2011 Simms was recognized by the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his contribution to the arts. Simms and his wife Eva live in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Washington overlooking the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers.
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Original cover art by Andrew Dunn “Tessia meets the Dragon.”
Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear
A novel by Michael Gills
ISBN: 978-1-956440-31-7 paperback $21.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-32-4 ebook $9.99
274 pp.
March 21, 2023
Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear, Michael Gills’ fifth novel, plumbs the depths of the Stepwell family tendency toward theatrical catastrophe. When Weldon Stepwell, bareknuckled catcher for the Danville Little Johns and town florist, has his leg amputated in a woodcutting accident, the team shows up on the hospital lawn to give blood, pray, and curse God. Mostly they gather to be with the stricken wife, daughter, and son and wait to see if their teammate will live through the night. One teammate is sent to retrieve the leg, and just what on earth do you do with such a thing? Rural Arkansas in 1950, they are men who’d just whipped Hitler and come home to play ball, volunteer firemen, rural mail carriers, the stray senator-tobe, hardware store workers, and fish farmers. Spanning three generations, they just can’t seem to outrun whatever it is that stalks their periphery. Finally, an adult grandson must contend with the Stepwell business in the form of a plague that comes on them and the world from nowhere. Quarantined between a gleaming football stadium on one side of the road and the city cemetery on the other, a moment comes when they must walk out under the sun and re-commune. A story that dives as deep as you like into the abyss, then fights its way out with all the hope and grace this life allows.
What people are saying about Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear:
Michael Gills can flat out write fine sentences. His writing is part Old Testament prophet, part Cormac McCarthy. It’s not as violent as either, but it’s not without its moments of violence, betrayal, and the attendant tragedies those things bring. All of Gills’ novels are rooted in the Stepwell family’s history, which is dark and shiny in turns. This, his fifth novel, Before All Who Have Seen This Disappear, is, to some extent a baseball novel, but not as much about baseball as the cover might lead us to believe. Like all good baseball novels, it’s about life, love, loss, and most of the time rallying, finding enough strength to persevere. This season, 1949, after the war against Hitler has been won, is cut short by the buck saw that takes Weldon Stepwell’s leg, and soon his marriage. It does not end with a shot into the gap with the winning run in scoring position. No, Weldon, like the mighty Casey, strikes out. He’s “sorry to beat the band. Sorry like no one’s business. The sorriest man on a planet full to the sorry brim with sorry people.” And yet, his grandson Joey forgives him, as we are wont to do, and loves him to the end of his days. This novel will leave you a bit bruised and battered, but it also will help you find your way through the dark times, past and yet to come. —Rick Campbell, author of Sometimes the Light and Gunshot, Peacock, Dog Michael Gills’ brand-spanking-new novel begins with an avalanche and never slackens pace thereafter. These pages jangle with incident, present a pageant of unforgettable personages, and speak a language of ruefully humorous lament and celebration. Every phrase exhibits the generous outlook of its author. Every sentence reveals and affirms a surprising truth we already know. The ornery humor is truthfully mordant, energized by sprightly melancholy. —Fred Chappell,
Arkansas native Michael Gills is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel New Harmony (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Book 4 of the Go Love Quartet. A fourth collection of short fiction, Burning Down My Father’s House, will be published by Texas Review Press in 2023. Other work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop has been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own, including Emi Wright’s Alegría (Madville Publishing, 2021). Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah, where he lives in the hills with his wife of thirty-four years, Jill.
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Turbulence & Fluids
poems by karla k. morton (2010 Texas Poet Laureate)
ISBN: 978-1-956440-33-1 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-34-8 ebook $9.99
April 2023
Immediately in karla morton’s poetry collection, Turbulence & Fluids, the tables are turned as the waters of the Earth speak first. Not only do they speak in their power and vulnerability, but in relationship to the humans that use and so often abuse them. This tells us the speaker of these poems is in close relationship to the natural world, especially water’s lifegiving necessity in the dry Texas of the poet’s childhood. In “Fish Multiplication,” with a reverence and gratitude found throughout the book, morton writes, “I hope when they pull their chairs / up to the table, they taste / the prayer of thanks / that flowed through those gills…”
Equally powerful in these poems is the force of the speaker’s voice, which pulses with color, range, passion, and ironic humor. This voice dares us to live fully, to crack open our hearts, to chance it all: “Dare to be lotus. / Dare to live down among this mucked mire. / The world needs the hope of your struggle. / Do not be consumed / rather be the fight, / be your one perfect bloom…” Also paramount for the poet is the family in community, even the four-legged variety: watering new sod beside her father in an unforeseen drought; moving him to a care facility, his guiding voice ever in her ear; making chow-chow in a hot kitchen; lifting and mourning the beloved dog (“be dove-like with his soul”). Equal to this expansive voice and heart is an overarching spirituality, a Christian echo that never proselytizes, but girds and deepens the speaker’s worldview.
It’s fitting that the book flows poem to poem, with no section breaks to interrupt the movement as the speaker recounts not only the geographical but ancestral waters from which she rises, as in “Shine Shine Shine” and “Washita River”: “What magic breaks a river / through earth and flint and time; / what makes our lives eternal / but each legend of bloodline.” We each have this river of time and history and blood within us and, despite being drenched in grief as our losses mount, we and these poems travel and sing with it and in it.
Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth
karla k. morton is a professional speaker, award-winning author, photographer, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Described as "one of the more adventurous voices in American poetry," she has been featured on Good Morning Texas, NPR, PBS, ABC News, CBS News and in countless newspapers, blogs, and magazines.
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With Access to Tools
Poems by Dana Wildsmith
ISBN: 978-1-956440-37-9 paperback $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-38-6 ebook $9.99
May 2023
In the same spirit as the iconic The Last Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools, Dana Wildsmith’s With Access to Tools offers a means for navigating a new time of change. Opening with a series of odes to traditional tools, each tool is inextricably bound to the hand and heart of the worker. The book then shifts, as has our world, to cyber tools which work at a physical remove that echoes the pandemic’s societal disruption. The book concludes with persona poems offering a note of hope through the strength of individual cerebral tools.
What People are saying about With Access to Tools:
With Access to Tools is beautifully crafted, strong, and wise. It is filled with amazing insights. Dana Wildsmith’s ability to see the truth in things and speak of it with such eloquence and quietness is a true gift to us all. This book gives us new and important paths to move through the world. It is unforgettable.
—Philip Lee Williams, author of Eden’s Last Horizon: Poems for the Earth
With Access to Tools is an elegiac owner’s manual that helps readers “bushwhack through the thick” of a virus-fueled world, except this is no ordinary how-to guide. No. Wildsmith’s musical and striking sonnets, ballads, and songs veritably lift from the page to form an ars poetica that instructs and delights us while speaking to our collective trauma, where every poem finds “a home for grief, / stitching it like squares for a quilt.” These poems are a joy of cadenced verse and memory that honor the work of writing and will fill you up with anticipation and hope.
Marianne Worthington, editor of Still: The Journal and author of The Girl Singer: Poems
This is a book that is both practical and is also a serious work of art. It rightly attends to our daily chores and the hands-on tools we need to feed ourselves, yet presents those humble tools the hoe, for instance in stately, metrically precise sonnets. The tools of our modern world are also presented, often through wordplay that signals the limits of such tools, because their claims for immediacy clash with reality. However, With Access toTools wisely and lovingly suggests we neednot saddle ourselves with a perceived dilemma betweenthesestances. The waysand doings ofanearlier timestillmatter,justas theways ofourpresent timematterand askforour response.Oneresponse,voicedherewithgreataffection, is poetry that ancient art that builds a bridge between two realms that seem to oppose each other, but are, in fact versions of the same thing. The poems here present a reality that is fierce and grave, yet subject to whimsy. Only true art can capture such a paradox, and this fine book proves the claim, and does so with some wonderful rhymes along the way.
Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter and One Man’s Dark
Dana Wildsmith is the author of six collections of poetry, a novel, Jumping, and an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South, which was the finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. Wildsmith has served as Artist-inResidence for Devils Tower National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Everglades National Park. She is a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for Science and Creative Arts. Wildsmith works as an English literacy instructor for Lanier Technical College. She lives with her husband on an old farm in the toe of the Appalachians.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
STAY
Hybrid flash essay by Sarah Leamy
ISBN: 978-1-956440-43-0 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-44-7 ebook $9.99 May 2023
STAY is a hybrid visual story of a British tomboy & clown negotiating place/identity, trauma/neurodiversity, friendship/play, sexuality, and violence. Mixing illustration, photography, and narrative non-fiction, this experimental work transcends the binary, bravely imagining a world that makes space for all of us. What happens when an awkward and shy tomboy doesn't always feel safe at home or at school? Leamy has fantasies of another life and at 18 she finally takes flight. She leaves her small town to study languages and migration patterns in London before setting out with a rucksack, teddy bear (John), and juggling toys to hitch across Europe and the States. Leamy begins to wonder: Will she ever find her people, her place, her purpose? Or will each new home be forever as inconsistently hospitable as the first?
STAY received an honorable mention from Red Hen Press for their 2020 Quill Prize.
What people are saying about Stay:
Stay offers an eloquent exploration of the need to stay in motion and of the emotional and psychological forces that allow us to stay centered and afloat even amid great turmoil and change. Leamy’s eclectic yet carefully cultivated style casts a story not bound by ordinary expectations.
David Deutsch author of Once Before Sunset
Sarah Leamy knows that all good writing starts with questions and that all excellent writing maintains the questions, enlarging and propelling them from page to page. Nance Van Winckel, author of Sister Zero (2022, Slant Books)
Sarah Leamy is a gender-queer writer, editor, and non-traditional academic, currently living on the road. She is the author of When No One's Looking (2011), Lucky Shot (2012), Lucky Find (2014), Van Life (2016), Hidden (2021), and G'Dog (2022).
http://www.sarahleamy.com/
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Splinter
Finalist for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Poems by Susan O’Dell Underwood
ISBN: 978-1-956440-29-4 paperback $18.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-30-0 ebook $9.99
June 2023
On a collective level, the human diaspora is incalculable. Our leaving and resettling are as ancient as we are, whether immigrant, refugee, exile, or pioneer. In Splinter, Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poems trace the unique experiences of the Appalachian diaspora. Splinter suggests the deep ambivalence in the breaking away, a sundering which can never be mended. These poems test the emotional spectrum, weighing the joyful possibilities and sorrows of leaving against the obligation of those who stay “home,” grateful yet bereft in an altered place.
What people are saying about Splinter:
Susan O’Dell Underwood’s poetry shares a deep understanding of the signs and symbols of Appalachian life in the twenty-first century, how our voices change from one situation to the next and, as happens in “Assimilation,” the dread we feel at being asked, “Where in the hell are you from?” Art and the feeling of lived experience converge through ingenious allusions to Allen Ginsberg in “Holler” and Tillie Olsen in “I Stand Here Frying Okra.” Underwood’s vision is unfailingly wise and expansive, and the joy and laughter in these poems provide a counterweight to the knowledge that so many loved people are gone and not returning. Splinter offers readers an irresistible music of time and place, of “Exile,” where each of us comes into our own being: “We bloomed out of the barn loft’s hay mow / like one-at-a-time petals dropping.”
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place
"Everybody lived closer to the ground then," says Susan O'Dell Underwood at the beginning of Splinter, her rich evocation of Appalachia the land, the people, the animals and the changes that occur as its sons and daughters leave to find different lives, but who cannot forget that fireflies were once lightning bugs and cicadas were jarflies. Beauty and darkness are woven throughout these pages, and they will leave you with a moving portrait of a place forever changed.
Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems
Susan O'Dell Underwood is a native of East Tennessee, where she has lived most of her life. She's the director of creative writing at Carson-Newman University. She has published one earlier collection, The Book of Awe (Iris Press, 2018), a novel, Genesis Road (Madville Publishing, 2022), and two chapbooks. Her poems and fiction have appeared in journals and anthologies such as A Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Still: The Journal.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Valediction
Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
ISBN: 978-1-956440-61-4 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-62-1 ebook $9.99
June 2023
Paul Éluard writes, “There is another world and it is in this one.” Within these worlds, we travel outward and inward, straddling our lives’ oppositions: parental/relationship struggle and loss, home and away, isolation and reconnection, the spiritual/mystical realm and physicality always balancing grief and reemergence, hello and goodbye. The hybrid nature of Linda Parsons' sixth collection, Valediction,with poems, diptychs,and micro essays, brings those oppositions into focus and reconciliation and grounds her in the earth under her feet, especially in her gardening meditations. In this striving, we are balanced and grounded with her as she lifts the veil on what it means to live and create fully, even in the face of impermanence.
Cover art by Gary Heatherly, author photo (below) by Kelly Norrell
What People are saying about Valediction
Linda Parsons has written a book we sorely need lyric meditations composed with an impeccable ear, explorations of family love and loss, flowering and decline, sunderings and difficult reunion. Combining sure-handed verse with prose poems of drastic intensity, Valediction reminds us the world is a cutting garden worthy of relentless tending and care. These hard-won poems are the harvest of a talent in high season.
Bobby C.
Rogers, author of Shift Work and Paper Anniversary
For the poet, a garden is world enough. The bee, the singed leaf, the needful dirt, the worm. The tiger lily, fireworks. The moss, its slug. We may enter our gardens thinking we will control the earth, curate it, but we walk out realizing that we’re just another bug with song. (Thank God.) In Valediction the master Tennessean poet Linda Parsons gives us not just her song but the whole oratorio out from the center of her Knoxville yard she broadcasts the glory of her evening hour, joining in with cicadas and hawks, figs and frost, black widows, and all the ghosts of her ascendants living inside her, the perfect cacophony of love. This book is transcendent. Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory and A Winter Breviary
“After the long virus winter, how can I be / anything but sun-warm skin and bone / down to my brightening folds, / down to the naked earth”? These lines highlight the many acts of transfiguration found inside this excellent collection by Linda Parsons. Steeped within the natural world, the poems explore the “mired muddy lake bottom of childhood” and weave throughout the collection a series titled “visitations” in which memories and the deceased meld into the present. The poems here are joyful, but it’s a joy that comes hard-earned and clear-eyed. Be they aboutswimmingoff thecoastof Cuba,reminiscingabout theloss ofafriendwhilesledding,orsimply tending to the backyard garden, these poems dowhat all great poems do they risk wonder despite loss. As Parsons writes in“October Foot Washing”:“For what is the earthbut a tangled bouquet / lit to its core,what amI but a conduit / of ions.” Valediction, which is the act of saying farewell, pulses with lyrical energy. This collection showcases a poet whose talents, insights, and rhythms are at their height. Charlotte Pence, author of Code
Poet, playwright, essayist, and editor, Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, and Shenandoah, her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019). Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lives and gardens.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels
Edited by Susan Cushman, foreword by Sophy Burnham
ISBN: 978-1-956440-45-4 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-46-1 ebook $9.99
June 2023
There is something mystical about holding the hand of a person who is “crossing over.” It can be heartbreaking, of course, but also very holy and beautiful. Some of the pieces in this collection share the experience of personal loss when a loved one dies. Often the presence of an angel or another mystical experience is shared. But not only in death there are also stories here of the way the mystical world interacts with us in daily life. And not only angels, but also mothers, fathers, sisters, grandfathers, friends, and even a homeless man and a dog.
Contributors:
Cassandra King – Suzanne Henley – River Jordan – Sally Palmer Thomason – Natasha Trethewey –Sonja Livingston – Johnnie Bernhard – Frederica Mathewes-Green – Angela Jackson-Brown – Christa
Allan – Renea Winchester – Jacqueline Allen Trimble – Mandy Haynes – Wendy Reed – Lisa Gornick – Jennifer Horne – Ann Fisher-Wirth – Averyell Kessler – Lauren Camp – Cathy Smith Bowers – Nancy Dorman-Hickson – Joanna Siebert – Susan Cushman – Claire Fullerton – Julie Cantrell
What people are saying about All Night, All Day: Life, Death & Angels
All Night, All Day is a gracefully executed anthology of hope, a merciful reminder we are not alone in this world. Each story,poem, and essay: a featherknitted upon an angel’s wing.
Robert Gwaltney, award-winning author of The CicadaTree
All Night, AllDay is an inspirational collection of personal essays, stories, and poems by outstanding women authors who write about the appearanceof the divine in their lives. Some of these angels cometosave a life orchange a flat tire. Some appear towarn people, tellthem what to do,suggest more vegetables andmaybe better shoes.
They appear as a tap of intuition, a whisper, a whoosh of warmth, a rainbow, or an act of kindness. They are the stranger ministering to you in the hospital, the sound of voices singing in the attic, the sudden light at the window, the man by the side of the road. They are nurses and sometimes they are you. In this stunning anthology which explores so many heartwarming brushes with celestial beings, all these angels are messengers come to assure us we are not alone, and we are loved.
Margaret McMullan, award-winning author of Where the Angels Lived
All Night, All Day is an anthology to be savored. This collection includes powerful first-hand accounts, interwoven with short fiction and poetry, beautifully exploring the themes of life, death, and angels. Jewels include Cassandra King Conroy's unforgettable tale. It takes courage to write the raw truth of last moments, as Renea Winchester did in her touching story of her mother’s death titled “Waiting for Her Angel.” I loved Mandy Haynes’ heartwarming story, “Rose’s Angel” (plus, she's a lovely person!). “The End” by Lisa Gornick is an intimate, touching tale. I shed tears over Susan Cushman’s “Hitting the Wall.” Within this collection are remembrances and memorials, which pay homage to a loved one or to a mystical experience. At the end, Claire Fullerton’s beautiful, final words offer the hope of peace. Crafting an anthology is an art. Susan Cushman has done a big topic justice the sum of the parts is greater for having been compiled together. Savor this book for its wisdom, humor, and truth.
Carol Van Den Hende, award-winning author of Orchid Blooming and Goodbye, Orchid Stories that evoke a sense of peace, reassurance, and safety, as well as strength and encouragement through reported angelic activities. These stories tell of unexpected humanity and love in the lives of thosewho needed affirmation of spirituality in the human world. The presence of angels is recountedthrough brilliant and descriptive imagery andintriguing yet identifiable characterization.
Francine Rodriguez, award-winning author of A Woman’s Story Life, death, and angel stories are usually only shared with those whom we trust and only during the quiet hours of our souls. Susan Cushman is the finder and sharer of these stories. She is the editor and the force behind All Night, All Day. She has collected a wide spectrum of authors and encouraged them to contribute their personal stories and poems, thereby giving us a glimpse into their souls and the unspoken truths of our universal beliefs. The reader is treated with a wide range of storytelling and writing styles each pointing a way to introspection, restoration, and healing. In the hush of a still night there is a soft beauty in the laughter and tears the reader will discover as love gently laps at the door of all the things we hold dear.
Donna Keel Armer, author of Solo in Salento: A Memoir
Susan Cushman is author of five books two novels, two memoirs (most recently Pilgrim Interrupted), and a short story collection and editor of three previous anthologies, including Southern Writers on Writing. A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Susan lives in Memphis with her husband of 53 years. Susan has not yet seen angels in person, but she has a growing relationship with her guardian angel, who has been with her in at least two near-death experiences.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure
a novel by David Rothman
ISBN: 978-1-956440-47-8 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-48-5 ebook $9.99
July 2023
In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Andrew, the assistant director of a funeral home one mile from Elmhurst Hospital, the “epicenter of the epicenter,” meets a legendary Coney Island witch doctor (Lelya Dorche), who makes him an offer that could better his chances of keeping his COVID-positive elderly parents and his severely asthmatic 13-year-old son, Miro, off the ever-expanding list of virus mortalities. To keep up his end of the bargain, Andrew will have to find his way to Bulgaria (no small task considering that there’s a ban on passenger flights to Europe) to secure 10 liters of a rare Macedonian pine sap, a key ingredient of Lelya Dorche’s proven remedy.
What people are saying about Lelya Dorche:
David Rothman’s Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is one of the first COVID-19 novels and it is an adventure, a family drama, and very funny. This is the New York of real people: denizens of Queens and Brooklyn, not Manhattan day traders, not Brooklyn hipsters, but the immigrants, the Jews, the Muslims, and Hindus. Rothman has imagined a melting pot of a novel with a Roma witchdoctor, a Filipino nurse, a Jewish funeral home director, and an alcoholic Ukrainian smuggler in a race against time to save lives outside the official realms of government and capitalism. Like the Coney Island Cyclone that makes an appearance in the early pages of the book, once you get on this ride, you wouldn’t want to get off even if you could.
John Talbird, author of The World Out There
"Sometimes life puts you in the darkest corner,” and what corner could be darker than a vicious virus which (at that point) had no cure or even treatment? Lelya Dorche and the Coney Island Cure is bright, and moving, illustrating how will, magical thinking, and the power of love can overcome the insurmountable. Guided by his sister’s ghost, warm, pragmatic Andrew risks it all to save his family. With sharp prose, an endearing cast of characters, and the haunting background of Coney Island, David Rothman’s novel reiterates the biggest lesson that came with the global pandemic: Love is absolutely everything.
Claudia Zuluaga, author of Fort Starlight
Rothman treads a fine line between reality and fantasticality when he portrays a mental health break, as many people’s mental health problems were exacerbated during COVID and by grief, too. Andrew, the narrator, is semi-unreliable, and yet, he is also smart, sensitive, and capable in many ways. I also like the way it shows how people in desperate situations will search out whatever they think might help, whether there is much evidence of that fact or not. It feels like a book rooted in parental love and the gap between helping and hurting and being overbearing in the process.
Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
David Rothman teaches writing for the City University of New York. A novella, The Lower East Side Tenement Reclamation Association, won the Omnidawn 2018 fabulist fiction prize and was published in 2020. A short story, “Guided by Voices” won a fiction prize with Glimmer Train. Other short stories were published in such journals as Hybrido, The Prague Review, Newtown Literary, The Piltdown Review, among others. He is the drummer for the NYC-based band, The Edukators, and is a proud resident of Jackson Heights, Queens.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
ECHOES
or, The Insistence of Memory (a novel)
by Tom Shachtman
ISBN: 978-1-956440-49-2 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-50-8 ebook $9.99
August 2023
Ell, a millennial of European and Mexican heritage, has one humorous children’s book published, but her more serious writing projects are stalled, her boyfriend has dumped her, and she is deeply frightened by a recurring dream. To solve her problems, she delves into family mysteries Civil War-era slaveholding, madness, and theft of artifacts. The key to all, previously unknown to Ell but remarkable, is a female Confederate warrior ancestor whose nightmare echoes her own. By tracing both of their dreams to ancient times, and by using insights from modern genetic theory, Ell solves the mysteries and enables herself to move forward.
What people are saying about Echoes or, The Insistence of Memory:
"Ell’s own searching identity merges with that of her rediscovered Warrior Princess as the novel moves beyond its characters to explore how our notions of history and memory are comprised of an infinity of fragments that interrelate in many ways."
—Kenneth Knoespel, poet and professor emeritus in history and literature, Georgia Tech
Tom Shachtman has published forty books, most recently The Memoir of the Minotaur (Madville Publishing, 2020). His histories include The Day America Crashed, Skyscraper Dreams, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, and The Founding Fortunes; his social analyses, Rumspringa and The Inarticulate Society; non-fiction children’s books such as Growing Up Masai; and an eclectic trilogy of short novels about sea lions, Beachmaster, Wavebender, and Driftwhistler. His awardwinning documentaries have aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and BBC. He holds degrees in experimental psychology and in drama and has taught writing at NYU and lectured at Harvard, Georgia Tech, the Library of Congress, Stanford, and other institutions.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home
A
memoir by
Sean D. Carberry
ISBN: 978-1-956440-55-3 paperback $20.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-56-0 ebook $9.99
August 2023
A candid, darkly comic, and emotionally naked tale of a journalist who driven by grief, loss, and the desire to find his “tribe” seeks solace in the world’s most dangerous places and his pursuit to join the ranks of combat-tested war correspondents. The learning curve of reporting in hostile environments is steep and at times comical, at others nearly fatal. He encounters a lot of dust, ragged infrastructure, weaponry, scary driving, whiskey, lust, and way too much food poisoning. When the assignment ends, he is left to confront the mental and emotional impact of the years of danger, death, and destruction.
What people are saying about Passport Stamps:
Passport Stamps tells the story of a wartime journalist earning his stripes as he seeks out danger in Kosovo, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Tripoli. With the obvious discussions of foreign policy that are inherent to relaying the story, this memoir is not journalism per se, but rather a narrative about a man’s search for fulfillment, adventure, and companionship, as Carberry relays what it was that first motivated him to become a war journalist and then also how the experience of seeing violence, danger, and poverty up close changed him as a person. A man who begins the novel much like a bored American seeking romance and adventure and wanting to earn his stripes, or his passport stamps, if you will (in the book, he also refers to having first experiences like being shot at as “merit badges”), in the world of international journalism, which he hopes will grow his career and benefit him both emotionally and financially. However, as the memoir moves along, we see a man torn by what he sees, who has trouble readapting to his routines after being in a warzone for ten days, and who increasingly comes to weigh the costs of his desire to write a good story versus his knowledge that in a warzone, a good story means violence, and violence always has a human cost that is hard to reconcile with how it promotes career advancement.
Mike Hilbig, author of Judgment Day & Other White Lies
Sean Carberry an award-winning writer, editor, and foreign policy and national security expert. In his more than 15 years as a radio and print journalist, he traveled to dozens of countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. He was NPR’s last Kabul-based correspondent, covering the country’s security and political transition 2012 through 2014. Before journalism, he was a Gold Record-winning recording engineer and producer. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his cat Squeak who he rescued from the streets of Kabul.
All titles available through Ingram, all online retailers, and direct from Madville. Contact: Kimberly Davis, info@madvillepublishing.com for wholesale orders. Visit our website at https://madvillepublishing.com
by Tom Shachtman
by Kate Saunders
by Randall Watson with art by Charles Moody
by Juan Ochoa
Original cover art and design by Edgar Torres
Original cover photo “Golden Pockets” by Erin Case
