Bøger udgivet af Serving House Books

After the death of James Gandolfini in the summer of 2013, David Starkey decided to pay poetic homage to The Sopranos TV series and its star. Like a Soprano features one poem for each episode, with the poem sharing the episode's title. Like the series itself, the poems are by turns violent and sexual, comic and absurd. Never before has an entire television program received such close attention from a serious poet: this is a landmark in the crossover between poetic and popular culture.

A man who can't bring himself to return to the apartment of his failing marriage, a woman spied on by a neighbor, a father terrified by the four-year- old next door, a boy living in a house haunted by his mother's madness, a mother whose children are freezing in a heatless bedroom--the characters in the Stories of Local Music are unsettled in their own homes, their lives dissonant and discordant.

Both the beauty and frailty of human connections are seen in the thirteen stories collected in Sympathetic People. Here are women and men struggling to find love, meaning, happiness in marriage, adulterous affairs, art, meditation, and even the passage from life to death. Longing generated by loss is everywhere--in the death of a son, the end of a marriage, the slide from hope ignited by Neil Armstrong's moon walk to hopelessness after President Kennedy's death. In "Hindsight," Jessie, a hippie in Lawrence, Kansas, opts for what she assumes is stability in a world of change, only to be brought up short years later when her life veers off its predicted path. "The Secrets of Snakes" reveals the early ruptures in a marriage and a wife's futile attempts to stop them even as she tries to care for her son's pet racer. In "The Jewel Box," a grandmother promises to let her granddaughter know what Heaven is like after she passes and if, in fact, it looks like the Art Deco greenhouse built in St. Louis during the 1904 World's Fair. And in "Versions," a newlywed in Plano, Texas, entertains her sometimes angry husband's first wife and realizes too late what she has given up in choosing him. "The Second Time the Bird Escapes" brings the collection full circle as a woman vies for attention with her husband's new girlfriend and watches a peacock race across the yard to freedom, its dazzling tail open like an invitation.

Frivolity, joy and self discovery are the things which, Les Stein, the protagonist "Caravan 537 Christiania" arrives at in his two year sojourn in the freetown of Christiania. Fleeing from a world of angst and stress, longing for the woman who left him, and frustrated with the stale facets of modern life such as his university studies Stein develops a new understanding of love, independence and self realization. Told in a witty, fast paced style, Smidl's novel is both provocative and celebratory. He hails the human spirit and calls on all of us to live simpler and more free whether this living occurs inside or outside of Christiania. A novel of joy and brightness that records history as it makes it. Per Smidl lived at the Freetown Christinia for two years. His autobiographical novel "Wagon 537 Christiania" describes the life there among people with an individual and original approach to life, curious tourists, anarchists and what ever category of people you can think of. He does so in direct terms and with a wamth that makes you feel like you are there yourself.

It Must Give Pleasure is a deeply imaginative treatise on poetry, literature, art and life. And since Roberta Bienvenu's life has been touched by teachers and friends such as John Gardner, Larry Levis, John Nims, and Charles Simic, we also meet men and women whose ideas and art helped define the culture of the last century.

Hidden Lives presents compelling true stories of three New York City immigrant families-one Jewish, one German, and one Italian-set in three tenement neighborhoods-the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and Hell's Kitchen-during the first decades of the twentieth century. In each of these narratives, the central character is a woman without power and without voice. Their stories, compassionately told, bring to life statistics that record the city's stunning population growth between 1880 and 1910. The three women are Rogers's grandmothers, their stories kept secret for almost a century. She has chosen to break the silence that surrounded their lives and pay tribute to women too long hidden from view. Hidden Lives is also the story of her search for her families' past. Rogers writes, "Minnie, Margaretha, and Catherine could not share recipes or handiwork or wisdom with me. I never knew them. But I have learned to love them and cherish their heritage. I am them-Jewish and Catholic, German and Italian, tougher than I thought, more fragile, too."

John Spector is a seasoned high school teacher with 22 years in the trenches of a ghetto school filled with struggling teenagers, gangs, apathetic students- but also students "who make an indelible impression, kids with souls and hearts as big as the world." We get the whole spectrum from Spector, a brave and decent soul, a soft touch, too nice, too caring perhaps. Herriges spent many years as a high school teacher. He brings substance and legitimacy to Streethearts. The authenticity of his narrative comes across in every line of every page, many of them packed with witty and sparkling dialogue, at times genuinely humorous, occasionally grim or even horrific, but always candid, always down-to-earth, always reliable.

Writing successful fiction is a balance between trusting one's own instincts and making the right conscious choices. In by Cunning & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story writer Peter Selgin shows you how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity. With precise instruction and examples from classic and best-selling works, this authoritative guide helps you master all the essential fiction-wiring elements. Whether you're facing the blank pages of a first draft or trying to revise a completed manuscript, By Cunning & Craft provides you with the guidance you need to outfox common writing pitfalls and make sure your work isn't wanting in wit-or perfection.

Locals is a narrative atlas of prose poems as intimate as they are unpredictable, each a keyhole glimpse into the life of a different realm where our normal logic doesn't apply. Are we beholding magic? No, but through observing these strangers, we're confronted by the extraordinary paradoxes within our own hearts.

The poems in David Memmott's Lost Transmissions speak to the need we have to explore the depths of our own psyches, a need so insistent that many of us would sell our souls to unearth the answers to what motivates our lives-what motivates our actions. The poems express as well the power of verse, how it can help us rise above those experiences that might otherwise be crippling-war, death, brutality, loss of love, loss of voice and creativity, the soul's variable value, the insecure body and mind never knowing where the doors to understanding are, nor how many dimensions surround us unexplored.

Fifteen-year-old Virgil Foggy is trying to survive on a failing dairy farm in Minnesota. Virgil's mother is pregnant-an unwelcome addition to the family. Virgil's older brother joins the army and goes to war, but warfare is also close to home, much of it between Virgil and his stepfather. The Law of Falling Bodies is a novel about the schizophrenic, ubiquitous, and cyclical nature of all wars within and between men, women, and nations.

These black and white photographs and poems reveal the cultural geography of a vanishing America, using images of New Jersey that look back to a place in our collective memory: old state highways, greasy roadside diners, abandoned movie theaters, the vanishing Main Streets of Woolworth's five and dimes and of post-industrial inner-cities. It is an unusual collection in that the photographer is also a poet who documents the beauty amid the desolation of rust-belt America. In both verbal and visual imagery, Hillringhouse gives us a shadowed world caught between elegy and silence and that moves us from vastness to intimacy. Between Frames weaves family history, personal guilt, feelings of loss with meditations on the strangeness of being in a world fraught with beauty and decay. As the poet Gerald Stern says in his blurb, "The absolute sadness of America is in these poems and these photographs; and all the old hopes and dreams--and the rage--scattered throughout..." And as the writer Phillip Lopate states in his blurb, "...they conjure another world, shadowy and haunted, a royal vision lurking just beyond the everyday, like de Chirico's streetscapes."

A Vision of Neon is a story of two friends - one who survives the complex years of adolescence and one who does not - and the unconditional love and commitment between these young girls. Wild, sharp-tongued red-head Kelsey embodies the confidence that her shy and quiet best friend, the story's narrator, only dreams of. But as time passes, Kelsey's seeming confidence and acts of teenage rebellion become overshadowed by day-long crying spells, invented stories of fictitious friends and thin slashes of scab that mark her skin. In high school, Kelsey descends into mental illness, while the narrator attempts to maintain a normal teenage life, despite continuing efforts to support her suicidal friend. However, both girls must ultimately face one difficult fact: regardless of their longings, Kelsey's sickness has a debilitating stranglehold on them both.

29 women artists and writers explore aging through art, comics, poetry, photography, and essays. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sublime, each entry adds insight into the many ways we learn to be women.

Mesmerizing: In 17 riveting stories set in the author's native Minnesota, Duff Brenna's edgy tales journey from the mid-19th century to our current 21st century. While capturing the history centered in and around the cities of Medicine Lake, Golden Valley, Anoka, Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota Memoirs unfurl a series of unique narratives revealing a transfiguring perception of what it means to be alive in a world that never explains its quiet indifference to all things human. Called "a spectacular talent at crafting complex, believable characters" (Wall Street Journal), "a honed intelligence, unfaltering, unflinching, piercing" (New York Times) and "a master at capturing the helplessness of humans ... with tough written all over them" (Los Angeles Times), Brenna's insights into human nature show us who we are as a species and what we are capable of-our capacities for love and hate, intense desire, sanity, insanity, magnanimity, generosity of spirit and, above all, compassion.

Made Priceless presents snapshots of objects that their holders treasure: a 1950s swivel rocker, a fortune-cookie fortune that reads "The rubber bands are heading in the right direction" a marble with a world map painted on it, a bread-baking pan, a bar of soap, crocheted doilies, a masonry trowel... Each object has its own story, each its own meaning. The book's contributors include artists, a banker, a retired career military officer, secretaries, a pilot, stay-at-home mothers, students, professors, and others, each with a testament in praise of something priceless. The result is a remarkable collection that honors what money can't buy, and celebrates the extraordinary significance in an ordinary things.

What is it like to go abroad but not for vacation? What business do we have? What right-minded, haunted search for community, for family, for social justice takes us beyond our borders, domestic rooms, and familiar walls? What responsibility is there-those of us who've been to the two-thirds world, met the 99%, the uninsured, the impoverished-when we arrive and hear the planet's last message: pay attention, live on me. What W. S. Merwin has done to elevate ecology to the poetic, P. K. Harmon now takes-without bravado, without exaggeration-to the source, the sun, the tropics we've wanted, adorned with fantasies of leisure, then ruined. But also, despite any American devastation, what we've loved and longed for: "how blue / and how we turned from one / another into blue-all so blue / those old beaks cutting ahead /the flapping somehow grace too // in the flight-those two into / a deeper and deeper blue and I / drifted closer and closer // to the rough and sharp until / finally the heavy air that is / coming into a lovely silence." What island? The ultimate answer is earth.

Ida Mae Glick, a critically acclaimed filmmaker, has lived and taught in the small town of Willow Bend, New York for five years without drawing attention to her troubled past. But when she suffers a near fatal heart attack, the result of trying to live on the same meager rations as a group of homeless people she is filming, she winds up in intensive care under the scrutiny of a neurotic psychiatrist who believes she's unstable. To make matters worse, her mother's ghost has appeared at her bedside with old gripes, and her angry, estranged identical twin, Lisa, is heading toward town intent on having her committed. Ida Mae is desperate to escape with her freedom intact, but knows she'll have to get past her psychiatrist first. The only question is, can she? Shadows and Ghosts is Ida Mae's tale of artistic passion, fierce sibling rivalry, failed love affairs, substance abuse, and the magical redemptive power of cinema.

In this searing memoir, a father confronts the complex issues of love and hate as he struggles to deal with his emotionally troubled and often violent son. Desperate Love examines the lengths that parents go to preserve their families and rescue children from themselves. Often gritty and occasionally funny, this extraordinary memoir follows one father's quest for love, faith, redemption and understanding in a life beleaguered with infertility, adoption and adolescent aggression.

Winter Tales: Men Write About Aging is a miscellaneous collection of poems, essays and illustrations from professional writers and artists expressing their thoughts on the subject of aging. Their views are filled with insight, wisdom and humor, riveting accounts that may make you sad, or make you happy, perhaps even giddy, perhaps wiser, and certainly contemplative. You may see yourself and others you know who are in the same predicament. You might find yourself smiling wryly and even laughing at times. This is a bright book of life, not death, which these wonderful (at times brilliant) artists have created. Winter Tales is a timely book, given our country's aging population of boomers who will take comfort in knowing they are not alone when it comes to dealing with what aging is doing to their minds and bodies. Take and read. Join the camaraderie. Welcome aboard.

A Dark Gamble, a Western epic inspired by the great epic of Gilgamesh, is set in New Mexico during the era when gold and silver were being discovered and prospectors, miners and ranchers were pouring into the territory, the local Apaches consequently being hunted down and displaced. The novel is an attempt to explore an aspect of the American past, with its roots in an untamed land and the uneasy transition to the modern world. The action takes place in the town of Destiny, which shoots up when gold is discovered in the region. The story is told by a narrator who has heard tales of Gil Weston and Jack Cameron since his youth, men who still engage his imagination of those around him. Out of his own fascination and curiosity, he feels compelled to take up their story himself as part of his own quest for an understanding of the past and a meaning for his own life.

Twelve stories depicting Americans in France, a broad array of characters and situations- -a boozy basketball player colliding with bigotry; a vet at Omaha Beach confronting a memory; a boy sent abroad while his parents divorce; a jealous sister coveting one last heirloom; a killer seeking peace at Lake Geneva; a pharmacist shielding his suspect wife; an American woman who's never lived in America; sons bullied by fathers; a relentless dreamer about to go illegal. All seek the enchantment, refuge or even forgiveness France might offer. But they can't quite discard the baggage they carry.

Can the truth really set one free? In Miriam Polli's debut novel, IN A VERTIGO OF SILENCE, Emily, the young protagonist, discovers a family secret and thinks, I know now that secrets run in the blood and bones of those who came before. This intensely moving, multi-generational novel follows the lives of women, both strong and frail-shrouded, at times warped, by the confines of a long-held secret. Polli has drawn characters with empathy and poignancy as Emily strives to change the destiny of her family.

The Narrow Gate presents 19 short essays that explore ways in which literary writing and visual art affirm and clarify values, in our personal lives and in art, itself, with topics ranging from "resilience" to "madness" to "art + work." These essays often take a personal perspective, written by the editor of New Letters, a leading journal of writing and art; they originally served as introductions to and expansions on writing and art featured in the magazine. Citing the work of contemporaries, such as Daniel Woodrell and Marilyn Kallet, and past writers, such as Cervantes and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author asserts that writing and art uplift and sustain us in our relationships and spiritual endeavors. Included is a selection of art and poetry referred to in the essays.

Ravenous: New & Selected Poems by Rick Mulkey provides new and returning readers an opportunity to consider recent and previously published work in a collection containing wide stylistic variety with deep unifying themes and concerns. From an 18th Century Persian village to the porches and homestead's of the Appalachian South, these poems counterpoint the sorrowful with the joyful, exploring how "even in the soul's grim mines, one tuned string/perfectly plucked could make us believe all would be right."

When Mr. Finger builds his first Finger a half mile high flipping off the fabulously wealthy, Peter Boatz, a professor of Icons, finally has a fertile subject for his Icons of Power book. But this gigantic, obscene monument to the rich, with enormous grassroots support, soon takes on multiple meanings for Boatz: the abstract versus the concrete, the ideal versus the real, and involvement in the world versus withdrawal.

Infidelity anyone? Vicariously enjoy the unfaithfulness of twenty-four writers in this anthology, Runnin' Around, subtitled The Serving House Book of Infidelity. The cover is a black- and-white Mark Hillringhouse photograph of an appropriately seedy motel advertising day-rates. However, the content is not seedy at all, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn, who leads off with a poem that originally appeared in the New Yorker, inspiring editors Kennedy and Cummins to solicit eleven poets, two essayists, and eleven fiction writers to take a turn at telling a tale of infidelity, be it carnal or spiritual or somewhere in between. Included is the work of poets Dunn, Jack Ridl, H. L. Hix, Laura McCullough, Rick Mulkey, Steve Davenport, Renée Ashley, Dan Turèll, Elisabeth Murawski, Flower Conroy, and Mark Hillringhouse, essays by Rebecca Chace and Minna Proctor, and short stories by Timmy Waldron, Per Smidl, Duff Brenna, Roisin McLean, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, Greg Herriges, Susan Tekulve, Dennis F. Bormann and Kennedy and Cummins as well. Read it and lust!

Sixteen-year-old Elbert Earl Evans (known as Triple E) bursts out of Goodpasture Correctional Facility and speeds toward freedom in a stolen Oldsmobile. As he outraces the police, his car stalls in the Colorado badlands in the middle of a snowstorm and he is stranded with his girl-, Jeanne. Once he sets out on foot to find help in a landscape of bone- chilling desolation, his mind becomes a blizzard of memories and images, from the soft, sweet voice of his grandmother to his father's cruel betrayal to the stark words of a writer named Kafka. The past becomes inseparable from the present as he fights to stay alive?and relives the twisting, tragi-comic odyssey that has brought him to this desperate point. A classic tale of disaffected youth and the yearning for redemption set against the modern American West, Too Cool takes us into the heart and mind of a young man struggling to confront the violence in his nature and find the humanity within.

In this anthology incarcerated me in the Prison Literacy Project at S.C.I. Graterford contribute pieces about regretful decisions made or painful experiences in their youth, fearlessly exposing their vulnerability. The men chose many methods for sharing their messages; some wrote letters to their young selves or family members, telling of their struggles growing up in difficult circumstances. They reached out from behind the prison walls to caution young offenders while they still have time to change their lives, but they speak to us all. They remind us all about choices, consequences, and caring for others.

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.