Bøger udgivet af Big Table Publishing Company

We think we know people, and yet, do we? Impeccably organized by natural cycles of life from birth to death and gorgeously told, Jeanne Althouse's collection reveals truths that often hide in plain sight. These twenty tales, from joyful to heartbreaking, offer insights into the changing nature of lives, and loves, and lies.--Tony Press, author of Crossing the Lines

Things don't often go as the reader expects in Michael C. Keith's collection If Things Were Made to Last Forever. The death of a child becomes the occasion for purchasing lavish gifts and a dinner from McDonald's devolves into a national scandal. Even an honest attempt to rescue baby birds from a barren nest becomes an exercise in cruelty. Keith delights in putting his characters in unlikely situations and then watching them react in unexpected ways. Whether he is telling the story of the stray dogs who were killed to make way for the Sochi Olympics or introducing us to a boy who obsessively creates exact duplicates of each painting in the Van Gogh catalogue, Keith takes us into a world where all the rules have been rewritten and every guarantee has been revoked. If Things Were Made to Last Forever is a macabre smorgasbord of humor and absurdity. Craig Fishbane, On the Proper Role of Desire Michael C. Keith has come up with another collection of brilliant, inventive stories. "The Boy Who Would Be Van Gogh" is just one of the stories that's a must read. There are countless more. Cetywa Powell, Underground Voices This fantastic collection features a mix of lengths, forms, and subjects infused with a sense of banged-up knuckles and gritty fingernails. Keith startles readers with the beauty of his characters' scabs and bruises and some of the loveliest dirt we've ever seen. John Sheirer, What's the Story? Michael Keith's stories are a playful and inventive pleasure, as filled with humor as they are with wry commentary and strong emotion. Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point

The best writers understand the value of revision-how personal history gets filtered can make or break your integrity to the reader. It's a navigated line between self-indulgence and self-immolation. Amye's poetry is disarmingly honest, confessing a discovery of poetry in Aqua Net, spandex, and MTV glamour boys-or more to the point-the small town boys who take their cue from them. Bangs isn't a love letter to the Big 80s as much as it is adjusting the rearview mirror. Amye reminds us time and again in the poem "Bangs" that it's not who we take home, it's what we take to heart that keeps us up at night. Jim Warner, Quiddity Literary Journal Life in Bangs is measured in Aqua Net and stonewashed jeans, as Amye Archer, a rebel girl riding in a car filled with boys, carves out our eyeballs with the sharp knife of girlhood's memory. Fumbling over her lifetime like a first kiss, she wraps us in "Poster Boys" like Axl Rose, Jon Bon Jovi, and Bret Michaels, and we can feel her father ripping those posters off the walls of our body. Bangs takes us back to the days when hairspray and high bangs weren't just cool-they were required by all the girls tapping out the beat with their feet, flicking ash on the ground at a packed concert hall they broke into. Archer's writing is full of beautiful contrasts: edgy and soft, angsty and free. Bangs will always have a place on my shelf for its brutal, heartbreaking, yet fun and youthful honesty. Loren Kleinman, The Dark Cave Between my Ribs Readers of a certain x-shaped generation will pop this mixtape of a collection into their Sony Walkman and hear Amye Archer sing to us the soundtrack of a life from girlhood to motherhood. In BANGS, Archer conjures the spandex-panted, heavy eye-lined stylings of the big-haired 80s, as they happened to a girl who struggled to live and love in a gritty northeastern Pennsylvania town. Archer's work stings with resonance and reminder, both of our personal crises (divorce; the death of a school friend, pain of infertility, the fear embedded in motherhood) and those public crises that have marked our time-the first Gulf War, 9/11, the Sandyhook elementary massacre. This book is a power ballad to a time and a place, to a girl who grew into a mother and put away the Aqua Net, who hasn't "worn eyeliner since Bon Jovi's New Jersey," but who I bet-I hope-still knows which button to push on the jukebox. Sheila Squillante, Beautiful Nerve (and one-time-owner of Def Leppard's Pyromania on vinyl)

Funny, insightful, heartbreaking, ironic, the forty-nine flash stories in The Roadkill Collection glimpse herds of humans crossing life's roadway-and no one crosses that road unharmed. Graced with compassion and laced with sharp humor, this diverse collection leaves burning rubber all over the road.

50 Photographs and 1,000 ideas to Inspire Creative Writing The perfect cure for writers block This book is filled with intriguing photographs of scenes, people, objects, and situations with 1,000 ideas to stimulate your imagination

It doesn't take advanced calculus to realize that there's no easy solution to the formula: Jeffrey Coleman, a biomedical researcher at the National Institutes of Health, has one kidney to donate, but two desperate recipients. With both of his twin sons suffering from Polycystic Kidney Disease, he is torn between the loyalty and love of one son and the scorn and anger of the other. Saving One examines love, betrayal and forgiveness, and brings to life a cast of memorable characters that evoke great empathy, and is a grippingly suspenseful novel that holds the reader spellbound until the final page.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Tricia was a very social woman with lots of friends, local and all over the country via Facebook. She shared her journey of illness, pain, and the tragic late diagnosis of her cancer because she thought it might help others on a similar journey. But she refused to allow herself to be defined by her cancer. Despite all the surgeries and the chemo that made her beautiful hair fall out, she found joy everywhere. Even at the end, her life was about living, not dying.

"The Fool takes us to this basic truth: that when we feel most unloved and unlovable, we enter the space of endings and beginnings, the space where we must decide whether or not to believe. This collection of poetry is thus an article of faith, poems that dare us-in unflinching terms-to believe. Jean's poetic emerges in twists of language that hurtle into dangerous places, steep falls and banked curves that bring us back to consider life's vital air and light." Afaa Michael Weaver, The Government of Nature "Jennifer Jean's The Fool asks us, 'Aren't we supposed to see after time spent in the dark?' And blessedly, the answer is yes: so much life goes on to breathe and dwell in this exceptional debut collection: muggy men, hornets, vespers, '...the eyes of these poems black like beetles.' The Fool gives us a world where '...we need every red-engine knell to slumber...and then we could wake stoked to survive.' This is a poetry that does more than survive in our collective memory: it flashes, it burns." Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Lucky Fish "When you open Jennifer Jean's new book The Fool, be ready to travel with her. The title comes from an archetypal figure in the Tarot cards, one typically imagined as a wanderer, someone open to life, needing freedom but perhaps buffeted by it too, a figure not beyond fear, but not afraid of the dark either. These are also the virtues you'll find in Jennifer Jean's poems. They travel back to a hardscrabble childhood, and forward through a young woman's coming of age. She also takes us inward via dreams and shape-shifting visions, charting thereby some of the wilder and more difficult areas of the psyche. At each turn of the journey, we accompany a person in the process of acquiring hard-earned and utterly worthwhile spiritual wisdom. In effect, what we witness in these vivid poems is the growth of a soul." Fred Marchant, Full Moon Boat and The Looking House

Through various points of view, Davis takes us back to a simpler time when "men wore suits and ties." Her poems are observations of people she has known: neighbors, relatives and friends, of poignant memories resurfacing after a "long and peaceful nap." We come to know a woman joyful in nature and among loved ones who's still "struggling to maintain balance" in this ever-changing world. Norma Ketzis Bernstock, Don't Write a Poem About Me After I'm Dead *** Lorraine Davis is a quiet poet. Her poems are often soothing, sometimes painful but always thought-provoking. From "The Blue Serge Sears and Roebuck Man" to "Our Daughter's Hair," each has its own message for us, its own life lesson. Some make us smile, some provoke a tear. All are entertaining for they all represent life. Lorraine has found a way touch each and every one of us, making us want to go back and revisit our own memories. Marianna Knowles, A Humorous Slice of Life *** Sometimes it seems that a poet has all too many riches to draw from. In Going Back to Retrieve It, L. J. Davis glimpses a garden rake leaning against a shed and finds that the homely object evokes a torrent of images and memories. With authenticity and compassion, she celebrates beloved children who grow up and deal with hardship, babies who are stillborn but fiercely loved, parents and old friends who pass away-"nothing will ever be exactly the same again." Davis is a fearless explorer, one who knows that the splinters of glass that remain under the skin after an accident are somehow vital to the process of becoming fully alive even as she recognizes the fleeting beauty of existence. She enriches her own writing with epigraphs drawn from cherished poems, establishing a dialogue that adds glittering facets to the original work that follows. Carol Alexander, Bridal Veil Falls

"Brad Rose enhances our understanding of life, death, and everything in-between through manic images that challenge conventional perception. His poetry and short shorts remind us that good literature is not only something to read, but also something to experience. Pink X-Ray provides the kind of reading experience that rattles the brain and refurbishes the heart." Howie Good, Fugitive Pieces "Brad Rose's collection of spare and powerful monologues combines the emotional immediacy of micro-fiction with the precision of poetry to confront the twists and turns of our distorted psyches. Pink X-Ray teems with voices in extremis-the homeless veterans, mug shot photographers, pedophiles, arsonists, murderers and their victims who have lived lives 'beautiful with mistakes' (not to mention Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, horseflies and hummingbirds)-filtered, with sardonic humor and unblinking directness, through the referential arsenal of Schrodinger's Cat, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Munch's Scream and Vegas jackpots. If 'redemption is the shortest distance between two points' then these gut-punching monologues are sure to help us on our way." Susan Lewis, This Visit and How to be Another "Pink X-Ray is a vestige of mysteries grazed by the tepid existence of daily duties fuming between crests of crackling language. Rose haunts each line, each page, with the lucidity of a madman swapped at birth, 'not even a hand without fingerprints is guiltless.' Damn inspiring and alive! Get a copy!" Meg Tuite, Bound By Blue "Comes now Brad Rose with this collection of tiny stories. True: thumb through the book and you'll see poems and, more expectedly, given what I just wrote, very short pieces of fiction that only occasionally exceed a single paragraph or page. But they are all narratives, complete with a character or two, the necessary conflict, a beginning, middle and end-or, at least, an end that points to a range of possible endings, some warm, and some that remind us that the world can be cold and heartless. Rose's narratives bring us tiny snapshots of terrible things, funny things, scary things and, fully human things." Dale Wisely, editor of Right Hand Pointing "Over and over Brad Rose delights with his ability to make us stop and see the world in a new way; from his candid observation that King Tut looks like a girl and the real reason we cry at a stranger's funeral to his elegant explanation of Death ('it's music and it isn't') and an evening with Buddy at the Pink Elephant, each story in this collection urges you to examine life in celebration, playfulness, and sometimes in mourning." Doug Mathewson, editor of Blink-Ink Magazine

"Timothy Gager is a genius of the quotidian, keenly observing the details of our lives and rendering them so that we can hear the deep pulse of our identities, of our pure being, within them" -Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author "In his collection written in the midst of a pandemic. Timothy Gager managed to capture the chaos, the confusion, the despair, and the existential strangeness of those (of these) days." -Nick Flynn, American Poet, Memoirist and Playwright "Gager studies the crisp space between life's summation and the gathering of what harvest may wait for us as we work at a more genuine quality of being." -Afaa M. Weaver, Poet and Writer, winner of Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Fulbright Scholar