Published Books
Claire Bateman's Coronology is a compendium of the crowns we bear, from the asbestos crown that insulates our thoughts to the zeitgeist crown, "a collective rather than an individual illumination," and provides pertinent information concerning crown birth, crown anatomy, the medical treatment of crowns, and more. The jailbreak crown, the quintet crown--you'll meet them all here, alphabetized for your convenience. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Supriya Bhatnagar's and then there were three... is a collection of personal essays about a family rebuilding its life after early tragedy. Set in a ten-year time period of the author's life, the book begins with the death of the only man in her life, her father, when she was ten, and ends with the entry of the next man in her life, her husband. The accounts of life are both particular and universal—the joys and the sorrows of being raised in a family headed by a single mother bringing up two girls in the male-dominated 1970s India. The book is available on Amazon.com.
The Girl with Red Hair is a collection inspired by centuries of red hair lore, but especially the languorous photo on the front cover. Nineteen authors created
stories, poems, and an essay to reveal the
special powers of the world’s redheads,
the forces of their hold over the other
98 percent of humanity.
Steve Heller's What We Choose to Remember asks crucial questions about human memory. What is the relationship between memory and imagination? How unbridled is the power of story? How intimidating? The narrative essays in What We Choose to Remember tread the tenuous, shifting grounds of memory, revealing how our imperfect recollections shape not only how we live our lives, but the act of storytelling itself. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Steve Kowit's Lurid Confessions, his first full-length poetry collection, had two printings with Carpenter Press in 1983 but has been out of print for years. It's been our loss not to have access to the wit and insights of so many excellent poems. Serving House Books is proud to be the publisher of a new edition. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Thomas McCarthy's The Coast of Death is a literary thriller of IRA tensions. In the edgy lull between the Good Friday Agreement and the formation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, there is frantic manoeuvring. The IRA leadership are concerned about a dissident group who oppose the GFA and seek to resume the conflict. Iggy Davin, the Army Council Chief of Staff, sends Eamon, long retired from the Council, with his wife Mary, to investigate the link between the dissidents and the drugs money suspected of funding them. During the search, they find evidence of an informer at the top of the IRA. Amidst the treachery, Eamon discovers a sinister plot to destabilise the GFA and resume the war. A deadly race develops to find the informer before he gets to them. It soon will be available on Amazon.com
The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke's Fight agaisnt Torture contains three chapters from a book about Dr. Genefke's work to rehabitate torture victims from throughout the world (translated by Thomas E. Kennedy and first published in New Letters) and Kennedy's interview with Dr. Genefke and her husband Bent Sørensen, her partner in the Anti-Torture Support Foundation. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Liam Mac Sheóinín's George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity relocates James Joyce's Dublin to the New Jersey shore with the same spirit of inventive wordplay. Frank McCourt called an excerpt "a language mad romp with many, many laughs along the way." Margot Norris, author of The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake, called the parody of the Circe chapter of Ulysses "certainly a hoot!"
Elisabeth Murawski, in Out-patients, transforms the vulnerabilities of our bodies into poetry, her precise lines evoking hospitals and cemeteries, malignancies and bomb blasts, The birth of a child prefigures its end: “this life / slated to be brief / as a poem.” These poems confront our inevitabilities. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Susan O'Neill's Don't Mean Nothing, a powerful story collection now in a Serving House Books edition after initial publication by Ballantine Books and then the University of Massachusetts Press, is the first work of fiction by a nurse wno served in Viet Nam, revealing much about that war from a fresh and original perspective. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Rita Signorelli-Pappas' Satyr's Wife fuses classical, aesthetic, and personal history. She summons a world in which mythic time mercurially flickers into the present, and transformations erupt and intersect with Ovidian force. As the poems move from understated to extreme psychological states, they explore the thematic terrains of love, exile, travel, art-making, and death, all conveyed through a hypnotic dark-play of images and a haunting urgency of tone. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Lars Rasmussen's Come Raw offers a world of strange, haunting tales, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dark as deep Danish winter night, and sometimes both, and sometimes all of these things. There is even a story here written in Latin! Although it is followed immediately by the English version. Whether brief as a flaming match or burning more slowly, like a taper in the dark, these tales have a tendency to brand themselves into the reader's mind. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Lars Rasmussen's What Can Buddha Teach the Rain? offers twenty poems to Han-shan and seventy poems ascribed to him. The mythical T'ang poet Han-shan placed himself somewhere between the
camps of Daoism and Zen Buddhism, but Han-shan is a poetic invention—
and a good one, it seems, since ‘his’ poetry is being read, translated and
re-translated to this day. Once again, Han-shan comes to vivid life in this
new poetry collection by the Danish author Lars Rasmussen, whose
collection of short stories, Come Raw, was published by Serving House
Books in 2009. The book is available on Amazon.com.
In Timothy Schell's The Memoir of Jake Weedsong, Jake and Estuko Weedsong live a bucolic life on their vineyard in rural Oregon, where Jake spends his days working on a memoir, much of it comprised of his years living and teaching in Japan where he married Etsuko some twenty years earlier. As the novel opens, Jake and Etsuko have been attacked by three skinheads, who are found guilty of a hate crime. At the sentencing hearing Etsuko convinces the judge that a prison sentence will only further reduce the boys’ humanity. Instead, she would like these racist boys sentenced to a traditional Japanese dinner at her house where they will be dressed in kimonos and immersed in Japanese culture. This is the story of love and friendship and of the food that nurtures the greatest hopes and desires that hate can be overcome.
In Gladys Swan's The World of Carnival, you will find the first chapters of Carnival for the Gods, and the three novels that form a sequence from her comic fantasy, first published in the Vintage Contemporaries Series. The World of Carnival, continues with its original inhabitants and their struggles against the odds: Alta and Dusty, who dream big; the midget Curran, who undertakes a journey at the behest of the acrobat Elise, whose son has gone mad (Small Wonder); the Kid, who, after a long search, sets out to find the Seventh City, picking up along the way a melancholy Jew, who grew up there (The Dreamseekers). And, finally, a return to Alta, who finds herself drawn back to the circus to follow another set of dreams (Down to Earth). The series of novels explores the relations between life and art, reality and illusion, the openness to possibility and the capacity for the renewal of energies within a culture. It is the writer's major work, and it is her dream that the sequence may one day be published. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Susan Tekulve's Savage Pilgrims includes five poems and five stories, most of which were first published in journals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Denver Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Emrys, Connecticut Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. These short stories and lyric interludes roam from suburban America to the trellised landscapes of Europe, exploring the revelations of love and fear in characters thrust into fierce journeys. Fired from his sales job, a middle-aged Ohio man becomes a full-time Civil War re-enactor. A faithless Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Poland leads a group of elderly Catholic women on a pilgrimage to the shrine of a Black Madonna. After learning of her husband's ocular disease, a wife takes him on an urgent quest to Scotland to see the sights she believes he will miss after he is blind. Regardless of their circumstances, these characters all wrestle with the complex disappointments and hopes that keep them searching for savage truths about themselves and others as they take off-kilter paths toward healing, love, grace and solace. The book is available on Amazon.com.
William Zander's Gone Haywire contains a harrowing long poem of that title which weaves the turmoil of a psychotic breakdown with the cataclysm of September 11, 2001. Other poems in the collection for Zander's Old Sayings series were first published in various literary magazines, including The Chattahoochee Review Connecticut Review,Defined Providence, Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse, The Louisville Review, Naugahyde Literary Journal, New Letters, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Slant: A Journal of Poetry, and South Dakota Review. The book is available on Amazon.com.
The Book of Worst Meals contains essays by 25 writers on their worst culinary experiences—tales of wretched dining in Paris, Edinburgh, Porto, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships. The book is available at Amazon.com.
Pending Books
Mark Hillinghouse's Between Frames integrates poems previously published in many magazines with more than twenty striking black and white photographs.
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