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YA Book Club POSTPONED! Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had to cancel this Saturday's YA book club meeting. We will reschedule and post it here and on our social media as soon as we can.
Local Authors
Psychology provides the option of two thinking and reasoning languages. One is grounded in the assumptions of a natural science, the other is rooted in pseudo-scientific ideology. The choice between these two languages determines how one thinks and reasons. The non-labeling language of science guides one's thinking to behavioral explanation, based on observed truths. The other, the labeling language of main-stream psychologies, reduces one's thinking to assuming behavior can be explained by believed-in abstract constructed determiners. The Natural Science Of Event-Based (E-B) Psychology, is the only applied psychology that is grounded in the psycholinguistic assumptions of a natural science.
How would our lives be different if we could weather the storms of tragedy and loss without fear? What if the fearlessness were not a result of isolation from others or insulation in comforting beliefs, but of full immersion in uncertainty, armed only with the trust that what we perceive as the entirety of a lifetime is nothing compared to what Life really is?
With the raw, surreal events of September 11, 2001 as the backdrop, "Birding in the Face of Terror" is told by two parallel narrators, Joseph and Pedro, facing the same spiritual crisis. Both must use their scattershot religious and philosophical background to come to grips with psychological exiles of their own devising. Joseph, trapped by circumstance as an eyewitness to the terrifying events on the East Coast, is forced from his agoraphobic shell into a hero's role. Pedro is secluded and silenced on the West Coast, left to plumb his own interior landscape to make sense of it all. The saving grace of connection comes in ways both ordinary and mysterious when a kindred clan of mystics from the Heartland emerge, offering a middle road between their extremes.
As John Donne famously told us, "No man is an island." "Birding" contemplates this timeless truth anew, unveiling answers both familiar and revolutionary. Though it flips the bird in the face of our post-9/11 security hysteria and de facto state religion, it does so by pointing toward an alternate way of seeing that confounds common assumptions about who we are. While tipping some of our most sacred cows, it also makes space for everyday miracles to work their wonders through characters who never expected themselves to be holy. The result is an upwelling inspiration, steeped in a no-nonsense pantheistic spirituality that will speak to today's savvy, multicultural truth seekers.
"Birding" is an antidote for our age of anxiety, a hopepunk testament of love and wholeness for a culture broken by fear.
The painter Guido Diamante is plunged into the mystery surrounding the apparent suicide of his rascal mentor at the Hudson River College. Exciting, heady times ensue as he reviews his own guilty past and traces his life through a labyrinth of adventures from the sexy, psychedelic 1960s to the financial crisis of 2008. Steeped in references to Renaissance art, alchemy, and the Tarot, Carnevale is a family saga, a satire of the art market and of faculty life, and the story of Guido's love for his wayward cousin Tina, a psychic like him.
the tides unbroken. the hidden rocks knowing nothing of battlements. the mind its own white room washed by a confluent prayer...
"To enter into Dear Excavator," says American Book Award winner Ed Bok Lee, "is to wade into an epic river-part sour dream mash, part metaphysical disquisition, part tinker's time machine, all lifeline to the jugular sublime austral light in the tradition of William Christenberry, James Agee, Whitman, and Chagall." This debut full-length collection from prose-poet Evan D. Williams comprises two dozen pieces selected from literary journals-including Borderlands and The Mud Season Review-and a further two dozen pieces that appear here for the first time. The volume is divided into seven abstractly thematic parts-starting with Maps of the World in Its Becoming and concluding with The Crocodiles Who Look Back Into an Abyss of Time-which are introduced with striking ink drawings by Southwestern outsider artist JC McCarthy. "Somewhere in the middle of this singularly post-Gothic landscape," Lee continues, "you'll awaken to find yourself soaring through an Inner Americana exhumed back to miraculous life by the sheer forces of love and lyricism."