Bøger udgivet af Serving House Books

In Out-Patients," Elisabeth Murawski 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.

In this debut fiction collection--the first by a nurse who served in Viet Nam--Susan O'Neill offers a glimpse into the war from a female perspective. These stories are about women, and men, who served in three combat hospitals in 1969 and 1970. They are interconnected, peopled by one-time "stars" and recurring characters, and they deal both with both the minutia of everyday life in wartime, and grander, more over-reaching themes--love and loss, faith and despair, morality, futility, military idiosyncrasy, magic, and the cost to the soul of a year in war's very particular hell. The stories are purely fictional, yet based loosely on the author's experiences, and they are laced as liberally with black humor as with pathos.

All these poems come from a suite-in-progress called Old Sayings. They are based on English clichés, bromides, idiomatic locutions, &c. Actually, "based on" is not correct; sometimes, a phrase is the starting point for a poem (e.g. "What Do You Want for Nothing?"), but at other times, a poem begins from the usual dark source and the title comes later.

A world of strange, haunting tales, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dark as deep Danish winter night, and sometimes both, and sometimes all of these things.

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.

With his customary pyrotechnics, Herriges gives us a "what if" tale written in a swift, agile manner that has become his signature style over the course of seven luminous novels. So you thought Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959, right? Rudolph Kearns, aka Rudy Keen, begs to differ. Keen, a striving rock and roll song writer and musician, narrates an alternate history concerning some of the greatest singers of the 50's and 60?s. He has the inside scoop on numerous Rock giants: Del Shannon, Sam Cooke, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper and a wealth of other famous singers. Keen manages to write his own hit song, but nothing turns out the way he dreamed it would. Between the lines, Herriges seems to be reminding us to be careful what we wish for and be careful not to take any agents or record producers (or film producers either) at face value.

In Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life, four editors and numerous poets and essayists pool their understanding of and admiration for a brilliant poet/ essayist/ teacher/ animal rights advocate/ political activist and all-around troublemaker who died April 2, 2015. The contributors to this collection have created an anthology that is also something of a biography, encomium, accolade, homage, love-song for a master who deeply touched their lives and, in many cases, changed their art-always for the better, they say again and again in their acknowledgments. Dear Reader, you hold a luminous book in your hands. It is full of wisdom and humor. A touch of sadness here and there. Some poems and/or essays may make you wistful; others may make you laugh out loud, and certainly many will make you examine your own judgments and beliefs. Turn the page and welcome to the world of Steve Kowit.

George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity is the exciting story of a handsome, psychologically complex, Jersey Shore coke dealer, who has a life-altering experience on Good Friday 1986 when he is abducted by aliens (Greys, Zeta Reticulians). Joycean, Pynchonian, a work of uncompromising genius, George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity will undoubtedly be read, dissected, and studied for years to come.

The Book of Worst Meals contains essays by 25 writers on their worst culinary experiences, tales of wretched dining in Paris, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships.

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.

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.

Madeleine Beckman's Hyacinths from the Wreckage, her third book of poetry, is a glittering collection that embraces body and place, and the constantly changing geography of an emotional landscape. The language of these poems wrenches, arouses recognition and empathy, and, finally, sings a persuasive song with the promise of renewal. This is a book of sensual revelation, a journey through intersecting emotions of desire, strife, sorrow, and laughter. Beckman's poems are fierce, vividly alive, and filled with passionate energy. She writes about love and loss in an original and startling way.

These stories, Greg Herriges says, were born of individual, fleeting glimpses and memories, seemingly unbound by any linear reason. But once they were arranged in this collection, the recurring themes were evident-of desire and loss, of the intense isolation each of us necessarily endures and struggles with, as well as the redemptive-if sometimes elusive-power of love. Some of the stories are new, appearing here for the first time in print; others were published before on either side of the Atlantic. All of them evidence the expansive range of Herriges's imaginative vision, the distinctive richness of his voice, informed by the conjoined power of his musical and literary talents and experience. Greg Herriges's stories will make you remember the breaking and the mending of your heart.

The stories in this book have been selected from the six previous collections of short fiction, as well as from recent work, Gladys Swan has published in that genre over the past four decades. Although she also has published novels, poetry, and essays, she finds that she cannot do without the short story-"it is such a beautiful form. I love the challenges it presents in dealing with characters and situations that light upon the cusp of the moment and which must be handled with an eye to economy and unity of effect."

Each of the fourteen interviews in this collection tells the story of a poet's career, starting with origins that in many cases overcame unlikely beginnings and went on to fortunate educations with inspiring teachers who often became friends and colleagues, and in at least one case a spouse. Then onto publication, books, awards, and, for the majority, their own teaching careers to share their gifts with others in emulation of their own mentors. Each interview is followed by samples of the poet's work. Readers will have an opportunity to appreciate and admire the fourteen poets as people and as artists.

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.

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.

As Chloride, a dying New Mexican mining town, whirls toward a rendezvous with truth, its people find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. A filmmaker trying to turn his disillusionment into truth; a once celebrated film star who disappears; a look-alike who takes her place; a trickster who enjoys the chaos he creates around him are all part of the play. In this eerie, beautifully crafted novel, Gladys Swan presents an impressionistic palimpsest of myth and modem life. The present is revealed as only a play of light and shadow over a ghost dance that-tenu¬ously-ensures the world's continued exis¬tence. Part history, part myth, part meditation on truth and illusion, the novel reveals a kaleidoscope of plots and subplots, each refracted through the perceptions-the voices-of a cast of characters as intriguing as the Southwest itself. Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices is the second novel in a trilogy that includes A Dark Gamble and Ancestors. A Dark Gamble is available from Serving House Books, and Ancestors is forthcoming. Nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award

The mythical T'ang poet Han-shan, placed somewhere between the camps of Daoism and Zen Buddhism and the alleged author of some three hundred poems, probably remains a post-T'ang literary invention - and a good one, it seems, since 'his' poetry is being read, translated and re-translated to this very day. In the present volume, Lars Rasmussen, whose collection of short stories, Come Raw, was published by Serving House Books in 2009, takes up the 900-year old tradition of ascribing newly composed poetry to Han-shan and gives a refreshing guess at what kind of lines the mad hermit would have produced, had he ever been alive. As a further addition to the Han-shan literature, the book also contains a number of homages to the master plus a selection of haiku-like miniature poems and a number of proverbs ascribed to him.

Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man's struggle to adhere to the philosophy of yoin ma do, which the narrator quickly translates into his pidgin Japanese-hipster English to mean. ..Go with do flow,"' meaning, as the story unfolds, to take life's ironies as they come.

Parenting, Corporate Thievery, Aging, Technology, Ideals - how to be a human being in this twenty-first century? With a unique approach to the personal, the political and the intellectual, William Eaton's essays keep asking: "How should we live?"

Artifacts and Other Stories explores the exhilaration, disappointments, and surprises of love and connection. These fourteen short stories portray relationships-between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and friends. Desire, longing, memory, secrets, marriage, betrayal, adultery, loss and fresh starts dominate lives. Men and women navigate their feelings and domestic struggles, wrestle with the shifting tides of affection, aging, and illness. Past and present weave together, spilling into the future, as these vibrant, memorable characters face unexpected changes in their lives and in themselves.