Hawthorne Books Current, Noteworthy, and Upcoming Titles
2201 NE 23rd Avenue, Third Floor Portland, Oregon 97212 phone: (503) 327-8849 www.hawthornebooks.com
2 Current Titles from fully living. And in the title story, a couple testing out the waters of trial separation quickly discover how deeply the fault lines of their marriage run and how desperately they want to hang onto what remains. Mining Nadelson’s familiar territory of Jewish suburban New Jersey, these fearless, funny, and quietly moving stories explore the treacherous crossroads where disappointments meet unfulfilled desire. :: “Whether he’s describing a married couple experimenting with trial separation or a young woman dealing with her father’s cancer, Scott Nadelson writes brilliantly about the many forms of ambivalence that love can take. His characters, of all ages, are wonderfully vivid. Aftermath is a sophisticated, emotionally complicated collection with an exhilarating undercurrent of danger.”
—Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street “The former Oregon Book Award Winner’s prose is elegant in its unpretentiousness. The depth of his insight is stunning. The breadth and detail of his knowledge of the ordinary lives of men and women in widely varying walks of life is astonishing.” —Jewish Review
Aftermath: Stories, Scott Nadelson, fall 2011, $16.95, 288 page text + cover with 4” double scored flaps for bookmarks, Original Paperback,ISBN:978-0-9790188-6-2.
Scott Nadelson Published September 1, 2011 The characters in Scott Nadelson’s third collection are living in the wake of momentous events—the rupture of relationships, the loss of loved ones, the dissolution of dreams, and yet they find new ways of forging on with their lives, making accommodations that
are sometimes delusional, sometimes destructive, sometimes even healthy. In “Oslo,” a thirteen-year-old boy on a trip to Israel with his grandparents grapples with his father’s abandonment and his own rocky coming-of-age. In “The Old Uniform,” a young man left by his fiancée revisits the haunts of his single days, and on a drunken march through nighttime Brooklyn, begins to shed the false selves that have kept him
S
cott Nadelson is the author of two previous collections, The Cantor’s Daughter, recipient of the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for Short Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University and lives in Salem, Oregon.
Current Titles
David Rocklin Published October 1, 2011 In colonial India, at a time of growing friction between the ruling British and the restless Indian populace, a Victorian woman and her young Tamil Indian servant defy convention, class, and heartbreak to investigate what is gained—and lost—by holding life still. Suggested by the life and work of photographic pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron, The Luminist filters 19th century Ceylon through the lens of an English woman, Catherine Colebrook and a 15–year–old Tamil boy, Eligius Shourie. Left fatherless by soldiers, Eligius is brought as a servant to the Colebrooks’ neglected estate. In the shadow of Catherine’s obsession to arrest beauty—to select a moment from the thousands comprising her life in Ceylon and hold it apart from mere memory—Eligius transforms into her apprentice in the creation of the first haunting photographs in history. :: “An absolute spellbinder. In Victorian-era Ceylon, amidst colonial strife and natural splendor, taboo love unfolds. Debut novelist Rocklin blends the love-andwar sweep of Dr. Zhivago with the Heart of Darkness depth of Joseph Conrad. History, art, celebratory feminism, rapturous writing and true suspense—this is a staggeringly good book.” —Kirkus Reviews “This book is one of those few in which an author’s specific sensibilities nourish the text, as Abraham Verghese’s multigeographic heritage and his physician’s life inform Cutting For Stone and Andrea Barrett’s fiction, from Ship Fever to Servants of the Map, owes its density and savor to the botanic and historiographic facts that beguile her. David Rocklin’s The Luminist, is a weave of legend and history, science and art, politics and domesticity that are symphonic themes in the main title, the story of an enduring and forbidden friendship.” —From the introduction by Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of No Time to Wave Goodbye and The Deep End of the Ocean
The Luminist: A Novel, David Rocklin, Introduction by Jacquelyn Mitchard, fall 2011, $16.95, 322 page text + cover with 4” double scored flaps for bookmarks, Original Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-9790188-7-9.
D
avid Rocklin grew up in Chicago. He graduated from Indiana University with a BA in Literature. After attending law school, he pursued a career as an in-house attorney and continues to serve as a mediator. He lives in California with his wife and children. The Luminist is his first novel.
3
4 Current Titles with the love of her husband and son replace the earlier chaos that was her life. Lidia currently teaches, writes, and is publisher of Chiasmus Press. She is also a member of Portland, Oregon’s dynamic writing group including Chuck Palahniuk, Chelsea Cain, Cheryl Strayed, and Monica Drake. :: “I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a powerful, complex reaction to a book. The Chronology of Water is astonishingly beautiful, and, as a writer, Yuknavitch is a force. Her writing hits you, hard. It rocks you. She knocked me over with passages so brilliant, so true, I had to reread them over and over until I could bear to let them go in order to move on to the next paragraph.” —Megan Zabel, Powell’s Books “This isn’t a memoir ‘about’ addiction, abuse, or love: it’s a triumphantly unrelenting look at a life buoyed by the power of the written word.” —Publishers Weekly
L The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, April 2011, $15.95, 310 page text + cover with 4” double scored flaps for bookmarks, Original Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-9790188-3-1.
Lidia Yuknavitch Published April 1, 2011 Introduction by New York Times Bestselling Author Chelsea Cain: This is not your mother’s memoir. Lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful Lidia Yuknavitch accepts a college swimming scholarship in Texas in order to escape an abusive father and an
alcoholic, suicidal mother. After losing her scholarship to drugs and alcohol, Lidia moves to Eugene and enrolls in the University of Oregon, where she is accepted by Ken Kesey to become one of 13 graduate students who collaboratively write the novel, Caverns, with him. Drugs and alcohol continue to flow along with bisexual promiscuity and the discovery of S&M helps ease Lidia’s demons. Ultimately Lidia’s career as a writer and teacher combined
idia Yuknavitch is the author of three works of short fiction: Her Other Mouths, Liberty’s Excess, and Real to Reel, as well as a book of literary criticism, Allegories of Violence. Her work has appeared in Ms., The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. Her book Real to Reel was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets and Writers and Literary Arts, Inc. Her work appears in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Forms At War (FC2), Wreckage of Reason (Spuyten Duyvil). She teaches writing, literature, film, and Women’s Studies in Oregon.
Noteworthy Titles
Monica Drake Published February 1, 2007 Introduction by Chuck Palahniuk: In this darkly comic novel, Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run down and penniless that drugs, balloon animals, and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Against a backdrop of petty crime, Clown Girl struggles to find her place in the world of high art; she has dreams of greatness and calls on the masters, Charlie Chaplin, Kaf ka, and da Vinci for inspiration. But all is not art in her life: in an effort to support herself and her under-employed performance-artist boyfriend, she is drawn into the world of paying jobs, and finds herself unwittingly turned into a “corporate clown,” trapped in a cycle of meaningless, high paid gigs which veer dangerously close, then closer to prostitution. Using the lens of clown life to illuminate a struggle between artistic integrity and an economic reality, Monica Drake has created a novel that embraces the high comedy of early film stars—most notably Chaplin and W.C. Fields. At the same time Drake manages to raise questions about issues of class, gender, economics and prejudice. This debut novel is an stunning blend of the bizarre, the humorous, and the gritty. The novel resists easy classification but is completely accessible to a general audience. Clown Girl won the top Eric Hoffer Award in its category and the gold medal Storyteller of the Year “Ippy” Award from the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2008. ::
Clown Girl: A Novel, Monica Drake, Introduction by Chuck Palahniuk, winter 2007, $15.95, 297 page text + cover with 4” double scored flaps for bookmarks, Original Paperback, ISBN: 0-9766311-5-6.
“Riffing on language and revising her jokes in nervous flurries, Nita is the most endearingly teary clown since Smokey Robinson.” —Entertainment Weekly
M
onica Drake has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific NW College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to The Oregonian, The Stranger, and The Portland Mercury, and her fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, The Insomniac Reader, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop.
5
6 Noteworthy Titles
F
rank Meeink works as director of fan development for the Iowa Chops hockey team. He has been on the national lecture circuit for nearly a decade, speaking to various groups on the topic of racial diversity and acceptance. This is his first book.
Co-Author Jody M. Roy, Ph.D. has been studying hatred within American culture, including hategroups and hate-gangs, for the past twenty years. In addition to her work as Professor of Communication and Assistant Dean of Faculty at Ripon College, Jody serves on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere. Her publications include Love to Hate: America’s Obsession with Hatred and Violence (Columbia University Press, 2002).
Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, The Frank Meeink Story as told to Jody M. Roy, Ph.D., spring 2010, $15.95, 352 page text + cover with 4” double scored flaps for bookmarks, Original Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-9790188-2-4.
Frank Meeink and Jody M. Roy, Ph.D. Published March 1, 2010 Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead is Frank Meeink’s raw telling of his descent into America’s Nazi underground and his ultimate triumph over hatred and addiction. Frank’s violent childhood in South Philadelphia primed him to hate. He made
easy prey for a small group of skinhead gang recruiters led by his older cousin. At fourteen, he shaved his head. By sixteen, Frank was one of the most notorious skinhead gang leaders on the East Coast. By eighteen, he was doing hard time in an Illinois prison. Behind bars, Frank began to question his hatred, thanks in large part to his African-American teammates on a prison football league. Shortly after being paroled, Frank defected from the white supremacy movement. The Oklahoma City
bombing inspired him to try to stop the hatred he once had felt. He began speaking on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League and appeared on MTV and other national networks in his efforts to stop the hate.:: “Fearless, enduring story of human fragility and strength.” —Kirkus Reviews “Where does hate come from? Frank Meeink’s searing memoir provides some precious clues…You’ll see how easily he recruits angry, confused teenagers to his cause. But you’ll also learn what it takes to pull people off this path and prevent others from ever walking it.” —Utne Reader As featured on WHYY’s Fresh Air, WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show and the History Channel’s Gangland.
Upcoming Titles
James Bernard Frost Due April 1, 2012 A Very Minor Prophet is the story of how Barth Flynn, a barista swimming upstream against purposelessness in Portland, Oregon, becomes the faithful scribe of Joseph Patrick Booker. Booker is a dwarf preacher who serves Voodoo donuts, Stumptown coffee, and, while his congregation throws PBR cans at him, rants about George W. Bush during the height of the 2004 presidential election. Barth’s Portland is a world of bikes, zines, and cheap beer, but it’s also a confined world, full of the desperate search to find meaning. In this lonely setting, Barth passes time learning trivial details, like the dozens of Gaelic words for rain. During Barth’s quest for human connection, he meets the passionate Booker, who sees light in the gray world and strives to help people think and believe in something and to find connections with each other. Barth’s fascination with Booker becomes a friendship that comes to define his life, as he discovers himself, his city, and his budding feelings for an enigmatic bike messenger who helps distribute Booker’s gospel in the form of zines. A Very Minor Prophet is a comic novel, a gospel, an ode to great coffee, a story of great friendship, great love, and of a man waking up in Portland, Oregon, to realize his life and his story is just beginning. :: “To date only Gus Van Sant has depicted the grim, dim, greasy, cramped world of Portland, Oregon. Now James Bernard Frost has given us the best novel, ever, about this strange underground world of misfits and heroes.” —Chuck Palahniuk, author of Tell-All “Bucking a headwind of despair, Frost pedals his verbal bicycle into the belly of the Beast, only to return bearing a brand-new Gospel illuminated with Voodoo cream and composed in the edgy vernacular of Portland’s thriving freak scene.” —Tom Robbins, author of Villa Incognito “With all the poetry and skill of a deranged art collector, James Bernard Frost has thrown the zine scene, bumper sticker
A Very Minor Prophet: A Novel, James Bernard Frost, April 2012, $18.95, 8.5 x 11, 200 page text + cover with 4” double scored flaps for bookmarks, Original Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-9833049-8-2.
theocracy, bicycle pirates, and hipster love into a coffee grinder of awesome.” —G. Xavier Robillard author of Captain Freedom: A Superhero’s Quest for Truth, Justice, and the Celebrity He So Richly Deserves
J
ames Bernard Frost is the author of the novel World Leader Pretend, and the awardwinning travel guide The Artichoke Trail. His fiction and non-fiction has been published in many places, including the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Wired. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with the author Kerry Cohen, their four children, the rain, the freaks, and the trees. His bike is currently in disrepair.
7
8
For further information please contact Rhonda Hughes at rhughes@hawthornebooks.com. Hawthorne Books is distributed by PGW. (800) 788-3123 | www.pgw.com 2201 NE 23rd Avenue, Third Floor Portland, Oregon 97212 phone: (503) 327-8849 www.hawthornebooks.com Book design by Adam McIsaac
Catalog design by Olivia Croom