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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.
In choosing Peter Fortunato for a Pablo Neruda Award, Stanley Kunitz told the author, "You've discovered your legend. Now where will it take you?" Entering the Mountain is the result.
"These poems brilliantly meld personal history, myth, and the heart's irrefutable music. The great poem, 'Every Wizard, ' like so much in this fine collection, is not only a testimony to history--his father's complicated immigrant experience--but to how each of us must honor the weight of love. We can celebrate Art, craft, and the intricacies of how a poem makes us feel, but Fortunato, like a seer, reminds us of the mind's irrepressible provender and the heart's irreducible calculus."
--Kenneth A. McClane
"The first thing we notice about the poetry of Peter Fortunato is the strength of voice as he delves into memories of family and kinship, and a cultural heritage going back to Italy and even classical Greece. An important theme in Entering the Mountain is performance, performance of music, of magic, escape artistry, the performance of rituals and celebrations of both the living and the dead, acts of homage and affection in our daily lives."
--Robert Morgan
"[These poems] walk the reader into a world that is full of mystery yet grounded in the poet's commitment to seeing and recording the natural world and his place in it, inviting us to be part of his magician's story."
--Bertha Rogers
The world celebrated with the development of Artificial Intelligence in the middle of the twenty-first century and established a robot singularity. In order to create an elite standard of living, most jobs were replaces with these robots. After the discovery that the uncountable could not be coerced, the armies of robots that inhabited every part of the workforce were recalled and replaced by a robot force that was tethered by a single computer run by the central government. The Agency that once protected the nation from malicious foreign influences was turned inward and trained to hunt and eliminate the members of the robot singularity.
Many years later, enthralled in a government conspiracy to destabilize the sovereign nations of the Americas in order to create a world government, a lone robot disappears with a dangerous antigen stolen from a government laboratory. Believing that the robot had been hacked by a terrorist group, the Agency was brought in to find it. Unable to locate the robot, the agency must hire Bob Sags, a retired agent turned person finder, to track down and eliminate the wayward robot. During his investigation when things do not add up, Bob is declared an enemy of the state and becomes hunted. It becomes a race against time when Bob realizes that the only way to clear his name is to find the robot before the Agency does.
The Dead Are the Only Lucky Ones Among Us.
Portents of evil. Dreams of destruction, chaos, death. Feelings of terrible foreboding, heavy as the dark skies before a storm hits.
Within twenty-four hours, the sudden and nearly universal presentiment of doom experienced by folks in the peaceful beach town of Furness, California is found to be horrifyingly accurate when a handful of people wake up to find that their friends, families, and loved ones--in fact, most of the inhabitants of the Earth--have simultaneously vanished without a trace.
Left behind to make sense of a strange and depopulated world are an odd assortment of people. A wry and jaded psychic who knows good and well that her fortunetelling is a sham--until the day it begins to come true. A kind, idealistic registered nurse. A thirteen-year-old science nerd. A church custodian. An outspoken, pragmatic physicist. A volatile and unpredictable bakery owner. A tough-as-nails ex-Army sergeant with a terrible secret, who is determined that he'll survive this, even if it's at the cost of the others.
But they soon discover that they're not the only ones trying to find their way through the empty streets of Furness. Because the cataclysm that took 99% of the Earth's inhabitants did one other thing.
It released the monsters.
But in fishing the jumps there comes a moment when an insatiable hunger rises up in you and everything turns wild."The term "fishing the jumps" speaks to a method of catching fish while they're in the midst of a wild, frenzied state. And just like the undercurrents that exist in the lakes on which this tale is based, some relationships have a way of hiding -- and revealing -- turmoil just beneath the surface.
In his latest novel, award-winning writer Lamar Herrin highlights the art of storytelling and the value of friendship with a lush, outdoor landscape serving as a backdrop. Set over the course of a weekend spent fishing on an Adirondack lake, two middle-aged friends -- Jim McManus and Walter Kidman -- sip Jim Beam on the rocks and share tales of memory and camaraderie as the past and present meld to reveal that what happens in the past rarely stays there.
Lyrical and poetic, playful and entertaining, Fishing the Jumps is more than just fishing tales. It is a seamless and haunting novel that is ultimately a story of the deep and necessary relationship between two men and the binding and nourishing effect of family -- not only of an extended family, but of a whole community, and in fact, a whole region.
A Thousand Acres and Empire Falls meet during the present hydrofracking controversy as a beleaguered patriarch must decide the fate of his land and children in this enveloping family drama
The Joyner family sits atop prime Marcellus Shale. When landmen for the natural gas companies begin to lease property all around the family's hundred acres, the Joyners start to take notice. Undecided on whether or not to lease the family land, Frank Joyner must weigh his heirs' competing motivations. All of this culminates as a looming history of family tragedy resurfaces.
A sprawling family novel, Fractures follows each Joyner as the controversial hydrofracking issue slowly exacerbates underlying passions and demons. With echoes of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, Fractures takes its reader deep into the beating heart and hearth of a family divided
"Lamar Herrin's Fractures is a brilliantly conceived and executed novel that illustrates how coping with familial dysfunctions can help us understand and deal with the more deadly dysfunctions of society. Here's one of my favorite writers at his finest." --Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James
Poetry. Jewish Studies. GRANDFATHER'S MANDOLIN, by Fran Markover, is a collection of poems deeply rooted in family and what has come before. David Keplinger notes that in these poems languages and names and articles of clothing seem to have lives, hats are thought to be alive, and names deserve elegies and memorials because they are breathing things that can pass away from this world, if we do not take care. Poem by poem, Markover creates a rich landscape of lives remembered, honored and loved.
Arriving on a distant shore, guided only by a mysterious book he found of a dead man, Dar LaCross journeys to join the famed Knights of Hibernia. But he soon finds that things are not how he expects as he clings to a knightly code of honor obsolete in the world he encounters. A young woman, Fayette, on a mission for the Duchess of the Eamhain, finds herself in midst of an invasion. Fayette convinces Dar to help her cross the wilds of the Marche to reach Eamhain before it is too late. Hunted by the invaders, Dar and Fayette must use their wit and skill to cross the wilderness of an untamed world. As they learn to work together, bandits, witches, invaders, and the creatures of the deep forest stand between them and the castle at Eamhain many miles away. Searching for a way through the wilderness, Dar and Fayette discover the means to reach their goal in each other. As they race against time, they must reach the Duchess and warn her before the next attack.
Twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user's short-term memory, have left single mom Mellie with her mind in fragments. With the help of a tough-minded sponsor, and motivated by her own medically-challenged daughter, Mellie clings to a fragile sobriety. Then, on the evening of her twenty-ninth day sober, a stranger pulls into her driveway and her heart surges. However, when Mellie's pursuit of this man and the past they may share threatens her sponsor, Mellie will have to put her tiny family and her recovery at risk in hopes of saving the woman who saved her first.
What if your future lies in your past?
When Darren Ault meets his friend Lee McCaskill for dinner, he doesn't expect the second course to be a gunshot to the head. Even more unexpected is the fact that the bullet doesn't kill him--instead, it causes the rest of humanity to vanish. Darren's attempted murder has caused a temporal paradox extending back over a thousand years, and now it's up to him to repair the damage.
Embarking on a mind-bending journey through time, Darren encounters Vikings, a depressed Norwegian silversmith, a cult that believes in salvation through pain, a beautiful Hebridean lass, and Archibald Fischer--the foul-mouthed, Kurt Cobain-worshiping Head Librarian of the Library of Timelines, where all of the possibilities that could ever happen are catalogued, tracked, and managed.
In Lucky Country, Gail Holst-Warhaft shifts her focus from Greece, where so many of her poems and other writings have been set, to Australia and to her own family. Several poems are about her father, who came from the slums of London to make his fortune in what was called, in those days, "The Lucky Country." Others are about her great grandmother, her grandfather, and her mother. Poems set in Ithaca, New York, where she has lived for nearly forty years, reveal the poet's love of the landscape surrounding her. The volume ends with set of poems dedicated to the memory of Holst-Warhaft's mentor and friend, the brilliant British poet, critic, and literary biographer, Jon Stallworthy.
First my husband told me he didn't love me. Then he said he didn't think he had ever really loved me. Then he left me with a baby to raise by myself. Amy, I don't want to be a single mother. I told myself I'd never be divorced. And now here I am -- exactly where I didn't want to be! My daughter and I live in London. We don't really have any friends here. What should we do?
Desperate Dear Desperate,
I have an idea.
Take your baby, get on a plane, and move back to your dinky hometown in upstate New York -- the place you couldn't wait to leave when you were young. Live with your sister in the back bedroom of her tiny bungalow. Cry for five weeks. Nestle in with your quirky family of hometown women -- many of them single, like you. Drink lots of coffee and ask them what to do. Do your best to listen to their advice but don't necessarily follow it.
Start to work in Washington, D.C. Start to date. Make friends. Fail up. Develop a career as a job doula. Teach nursery school and Sunday School. Watch your daughter grow. When she's a teenager, just when you're both getting comfortable, uproot her and move to Chicago to take a job writing a nationally syndicated advice column.
Do your best to replace a legend. Date some more. Love fiercely. Laugh with abandon. Grab your second chance -- and your third, and your fourth. Send your daughter to college. Cry for five more weeks.
Move back again to your dinky hometown and the women who helped raise you. Find love, finally.
And take care.
Amy
It's easy to think there are no more tricks to learn, especially when weary of the world. Faded, forgotten awareness can become new again with a fresh look. In her first poetry collection, Old Stones Understand, writer Stacey Murphy explores new ways of seeing intersections in life or glancing at an old idea from a new perspective. These poems bring readers back to what we forgot deep in our core, often through conversations with nature and with the realization that nature has the answers.
In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.
This fake memoir, as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.
Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story.
One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.
Mark M. Smith served two tours in Vietnam, 1967 to 1969, with the 1st Air Cavalry Division. In the 1970s and 80s, Mark wrote about his experience. The story of the first tour was written in short episodes, with exact dates and place names, documenting the war in the villages. The second tour account began as a letter to a friend and expanded into a loosely chronological, emotional, and sensory ride through the war in the jungle.
Although they had been classmates in high school, Susan Dixon took a very different path after graduation. She learned about war from observing its aftermath during travel in Europe and the Middle East. She learned about the war in Vietnam by reading the New York Times and watching the nightly news. Her visceral response to politicians and military leaders defending an engagement she could see they did not believe in pushed her into anti-war action based in the Campus Y at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Decades later, after Mark and Susan reconnected, traveled with a group to Vietnam, and learned to talk about war, they began work on Seeking Quan Am, Mark's account of his two tours, written in the 70s, Susan's account of her life in connection to war and anti-war, and the story of their reconnection with each other and with Vietnam decades later. Through all runs a theme - the request Mark made of Susan when he handed her his files. He asked her to "makes some sense of them."
Duncan Kyle is an ordinary twenty-something whose simple life of sports, job, and girlfriend comes to a crashing halt late one night when he falls through the floor of his apartment. He finds himself in Malkuth, a desolate, desiccated world where the only living beings are a sardonic Sphinx and her invisible caretakers, who in this frigid place are drawn to anything warm. He is told by the Sphinx that he will have to make his way through ten worlds before he can return to life as he knows it--the ten emanations of the Sephirot. On his journey, Duncan encounters a wild huntress torn between making love to him or killing him; an elderly woman who tries to convince him that he has been ill and dreamed the whole thing; a scarlet-robed judge who sentences him to be whipped and executed for performing evil magic; a kind potter and his daughter who take him in and heal his injuries; and a timid, soft-spoken Methodist minister who helps him survive in a place where all hell breaks loose--literally--once the sun goes down. In every world he visits, though, one thing stays the same. Duncan has to rely on his wits alone to stay alive and find his way to the next portal, and he has to summon the strength of will to keep going--because if he falls for the snare each world represents, he'll never find his way home.
In Japanese culture, shibai means "drama," or "play," but in Hawaiian slang it means "smokescreen," "bullshit," "gaslighting." In this uncategorizable work, Don Mitchell weaves together the brutal 1969 murder of his friend, Harvard graduate student Jane Britton, with harassment by law enforcement and the media, the language and culture of the Nagovisi people of Bougainville, the Big Island of Hawai'i and the high barrens of its dormant volcano Mauna Kea, ultra running and walking, and the New York milieus of Buffalo and Ithaca. The unforgettable Jane Britton threads through the book, along with one of the suspects, the State Police detective who eventually solved the case, and Becky Cooper, an investigative journalist in whose book about Jane's murder Mitchell is a continuing presence. Addressing himself in the second person, Mitchell explores how memory and meaning shapeshift, the way facts can shatter long-held perceptions about one's self and others, and how love and connection transcend time and culture. Mitchell creates a fascinating meld of fiction and nonfiction, past and present, speculation and discovery that excavates layers of truth, of error . . . and of shibai.
LEARN HOW TO WRITE LIKE THE EXPERTS, FROM THE EXPERTS.
In Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Handbook, you'll find practical advice in a perfect package for young aspiring writers. After receiving letters from fans asking for writing advice, accomplished authors Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter joined together to create this guidebook for young writers. The authors mix inspirational anecdotes with practical guidance on how to find a voice, develop characters and plot,make revisions, and overcome writer's block. Fun writing prompts will help young writers jump-start their own projects, and encouragement throughout will keep them at work.
Now a Disney Channel Original Movie, Megan Shull's smart and funny, very readable book The Swap is a great summer reading (or anytime!) choice. Will appeal to fans of R. J. Palacio and Katherine Applegate, as well as of graphic novels such as Click, Invisible Emmie, and Smile.
With one random wish, Jack and Ellie are living life in each other's shoes. He's her. And she's him.
ELLIE assumed popular guys didn't worry about body image, being perfect, or talking to girls, but acting like you're cool with everything is tougher than it looks.
JACK thought girls had it easy--no fights with bullies, no demanding dads, no power plays--but facing mean girls at sleepovers and getting grilled about your period is way harder than taking a hit to the face at sports practice.
Now they're dealing with each other's middle school dramas--locker room teasing, cliques, video game battles, bra shopping, and a slew of hilariously awkward moments--until they hopefully switch back!
Told in both Jack's and Ellie's voices, The Swap offers a fresh and honest take on tween friendship, all while exploring more serious themes of family, loss, empathy, and what it really means to be yourself. And as Jon Scieszka says, it's "seriously, truly, fearlessly funny!"
Plus don't miss Megan Shull's heartwarming Bounce--in development as a movie featuring YouTube star Jojo Siwa!
The Envelope, And The Rest Of Valentine's Dreams, is about a Middle Manager in a Large Corporation who falls into a dream and goes off on an adventure with a Princess from another planet in which he interviews Miguel de Cervantes, and together with Miguel and Carl, an attorney, and the little girl from the bridge, the Knights Of The Desert Grove, a transgender gas cylinder and other occupants of his RV, they rescue the Princess's mom, who happens to be the Queen, from Thun. And then he wakes up, and has even more dreams, in which he goes all over the place, and gets his hair cut, and acquires all the money in the world, and solves the mystery of The Tunnels in the Shetland Islands, and encounters a whole row of Daleks. Then he goes cliff diving with a crow in Acapulco, and drives all the way to a rest stop in Pennsylvania to get a cup of coffee. It's an autobiography.
Available August 1, 2020 from the immense world of EIGHT DOG CORNER PRESS.