Bøger udgivet af Serving House Books

The authors of From Pantyhose to Spandex: Writers on the Job Redux take you on a tour through a single night in a taxi in Copenhagen while listening to Mahler's Ninth, through the "Melancholy House" of a maximum-security prison and assigning juvenile delinquents as their sentence to do the sentences of an essay, through a woman's decision to sell her eggs for five thousand dollars, through why the legendary jewelry store is called "Tiffany" rather than "Tiffany's," and on to a beach where forty-eight thousand pounds of lobster wait to be packed, moonlighting (a teacher's necessity), the sleepless nights of a veterinary assistant, working as a babysitter/envelope, stuffer/carhop/Christmas ball saleswoman/gas-pumpattendant/and so much more, a day job as a bookseller, a translator, and even more ways of putting food on the table to feed the muses.

Paterson Light and Shadow tells the stories in poetry and photography of Paterson, New Jersey, from one of the most gifted poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and fine art photographer Mark Hillringhouse, who together have spent a lifetime living, growing up and working in and around one of America's most important historic industrial cities.

Dean Troost is working on his master's thesis in history and can't seem-even though he realizes he must-to get beyond counting the war dead from the present war and innumerable past wars. The novel turns on the question of whether or not war is a crime itself, and whether the rationalizations offered for it are not dodges and deceptions to put a smiling face on an ugly truth.

In this collection, poems selected from a distinguished thirty-year career converse with each other across books and across time. Soulful, artful and yet accessible, these poems explore essential connections--one's relationship to poetic tradition, the reader, the natural world, other lives, language itself. Cox renews strategies that have served poets across centuries and international borders: voice, rhythm, image, vision, myth, humor, shrewd architectonics whether "free" or not, a willingness to bring the reader decisively into the transaction. The poems often generate dense, shifting constellations of metaphor, and Cox's voice carries a dreamlike power, yet he stays close to daily existence, mines it, giving especially clairvoyant attention to the difficult, beautiful life of families and the challenges of our mortality. In doing so, he reminds us of what's important, of the emotional and psychological inscapes that sustain us.

Having lived under and outlasted two globe-girdling empires, the Portuguese and the British, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro considers himself to be a pre-postcolonial writer, one of the last survivors of a dying breed. His new volume of short fiction includes 15 stories plucked from a long and illustrious career that began in the early 1940s, and is still ongoing. Seven stories deal with life in India; seven with the immigrant experience in New York. The fifteenth, "Dear J.C.," takes us back twenty one centuries, to a Roman colony at the time of Cesar Augustus and Herod the Great. The collection thus spans continents and lifestyles as well as centuries. Although several stories share a common thread, no two stories are alike. Love features in some-from lust to self-delusion to poignant loss in the novella, Loving Ayesha. Other stories contrast the innocence of youth with the problems of old age. A number are very funny. In this collection, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro embraces a unique range of subjects, moods, and emotions, a diversity that reveals a master of story telling.

This debut story collection depicts a wide range of compelling characters and their worlds: a hermaphrodite falling in love, a veteran Marine's "piercing" attempt to cope with PTSD, preparations for the anticipated destruction of a hurricane, aging and the aftermath of breast cancer, immigrants fleeing famine, a mother's worst fear, and the mystifications of love versus simple desire. As a tone painting, as well as an artwork painted with words, the final story "Galatea" offers a mind-bending, multimedia experience of the complex relationship between two artists and the workings of their minds. The book is not a linked story collection, yet some settings, subjects, phrases, styles, and themes weave throughout the collection, bringing to each stand-alone story a broad resonance and perspective.

A provisional title for this collection was "Fifty Stabs at the Truth of Language," which despite its weight, I remain fond of because of its nod to Montaigne's Essais, which the French master thought of as stabs at the truth of his experience. In some ways, that title is a better description of the book you are holding than "The Pleasures of Language," for the subject is so huge and complex all anyone can do is to take a stab at it in an attempt to unpeel the slippery onion of our tongue. Whatever I choose to call it, this is a book for the general reader who still consults a hardback dictionary and does an occasional crossword. Having never been a glib speaker, despite forty-two years in the English classroom, I turned to the written word long ago. Schopenhauer thought most of us spend forty years preparing the text and thirty on the commentary; with me it's been more of a sixty-ten split. But I come to the commentary phase well prepared. Laying out the text for me largely consisted of taking notes on 3x5 cards and filing them away for the final phase if I was fortunate enough to last that long. Hart Crane wrote that he needed to be "drenched in words..." in order "to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment." With me, before writing short essays like these ranging from pornography to prayer and concision to tautologies, I immerse myself in the ideas summarized on my cards. Then I try to teach myself something I didn't know before. I trust, gentle verb-adores, I have a few things to teach you as well.

In these rich and incisive essays, Robert Day reveals how his "learning" as a student defined his "teaching" at Washington College, the University of Kansas, the Iowa Writers Workshop and other colleges and universities. He learned because his best teachers included him into their intellectual lives, and it seemed natural for him to do the same for his students. The first part of this collection contains tributes to his teachers, and the second part tells how he followed their examples in his own teaching.

In this poignant story of new found love and love discarded, reminiscent of some of Graham Greene's novels, Tim Schell takes us to Central Africa where a young American, an African prostitute and the seventeen-year-old daughter of American Baptist missionaries are on the run from the police and other threats. The American, Jack Burke, has stabbed to death a Frenchman in the act of raping Mari, the prostitute and Jack's former lover. She is the one arrested, but Jack confesses, then flees because of extreme fear of confinement, the result of childhood trauma. The daughter, Faith, joins their flight in her love for Jack. While the novel dramatizes a suspenseful adventure of danger, escape and death, the intense action engages questions of love, loyalty and belief.

"The Silver Baron's Wife traces the rags-to-riches-to-rags life of Colorado's Baby Doe Tabor (Lizzie). This fascinating heroine worked in the silver mines and had two scandalous marriages, one to a philandering opium addict and one to a Senator and silver baron worth $24 million in the late 19th century. A divorcee shunned by Denver society, Lizzie raised two daughters in a villa where 100 peacocks roamed the lawns, entertained Sarah Bernhardt when the actress performed at Tabor's Opera House, and after her second husband's death, moved to a one-room shack at the Matchless Mine in Leadville. She lived the last 35 years of her life there, writing down thousands of her dreams and noting visitations of spirits on her calendar. Hers is the tale of a fiercely independent woman who bucked all social expectations by working where 19thcentury women didn't work, becoming the key figure in one of the West's most scandalous love triangles, and, after a devastating stock market crash destroyed Tabor's vast fortune, living in eccentric isolation at the Matchless Mine"--Amazon.com.

The place is Washington, D.C., and the year,1984.The ruthless dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell has not come to pass. Or has it? Under the presidency of a former Hollywood actor, the struggle for America's soul has begun-a trial of conscience and idealism versus idolatry and political dictatorship. The White House and its minions intend to shield the government from real public scrutiny, and with hundreds of billions at stake, any means necessary will be used to protect the corporate mobsters who now pull strings and triggers in every agency from the "Star Wars" Pentagon down to the to the trash collecting GSA. But it won't be easy. A resistance movement composed of rebellious government workers has formed, and they call themselves, The American Watch. Their leader, Laney Dracos, is a powerful government insider with strong ties to Capitol Hill. Like her partisan companions in the Watch, she rejects cooperation with the regime and plans for Its demise with the help of the fourth estate. However, when a naive new co-worker, Edison Eden, becomes an overly enthusiastic sidekick in her war on corporate Washington, she is inevitably forced to choose between her honor or her life.

In Ancestors, Hawkins, a man adrift, finds himself in a Native American homeland called Chaco Canyon, a place of relics haunted by history. He is besieged by voices revealing memories of other lives, including those of his immediate family, truths he had never known: "Like something out of a dream. He could see it, those stone dwellings high on the cliff, speaking of those who had been there who knows when. And who were they? Ancestors, the voice said . . ." Hawkins learns the painful histories of the generations of his origins, who he is, and the quest he must fulfill in spite of the obstacles in his path and temptation to give in and run from the challenges facing him. Ancestors completes Gladys Swan's Southwestern trilogy, following Ghost Dance and A Dark Gamble, novels also available from Serving House Books.

In this stirring new collection, Ronna Wineberg explores our essential bonds to partners, children, parents, and friends. Intimacy, marriage, parenthood, adultery, divorce, and the legacies left by the past unfold in these beautifully written stories. Men and women search for happiness and love, yet face longing, disappointment, and loss. The characters in Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life struggle with unexpected changes in their own lives but discover the power of kindness, the joy of connection, and the ways in which we can be renewed.

It's a winter of snow of mythic proportions. Caught in Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage, Philip Fellows is meanwhile happy to be immured inside with his lover-free to dodge undesirable work-as he seeks continual sensual pleasure. All the while he is being tracked by a mysterious man in black, who eventually informs him he's in despair. If Philip isn't ready for Kierkegaard's second stage, the ethical, he nonetheless becomes captivated by the beauty of a woman who is given to ramping up an ultra-rational, principled approach to the sexual.

A collection of poems, stories and essays that explore what Paris means to writers who have visited and lived in this fascinating city. These are works that are jubilant, despondent, flippant, stuck, liberated, devastated, bored, solitary, joyous, in love-that explore, in short, a wide rambling space that is not just tragedy or fantasy, but all the life that happens in between.

In writing, the only real rule is that there are no rules. The successful writer is a problem-solver, recognizing that each project presents its own challenges demanding specific solutions. In No Rule That Isn't a Dare, working writers - from bestselling authors to midlisters - share the thinking behind the tactics that helped their work come alive for readers. While these tactics are far from rules, they do serve as examples to stimulate the strategic imaginations of all writers.

Robert Day has invented a new form, the Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind memoirs?brief, whimsical, sometimes touching, reminiscences about his brushes (often friendships) with literary greatness. He treats Shakespeare, William Stafford, Mavis Gallant, John Barth, Ray Carver, Walter Bernstein, and Michael de Montaigne. Some he met and knew in person; others he met in his mind. But the collision is sparkling in its reverent irreverence, airy, gossamer-thin, a playful and informal jeu d?esprit that takes itself not very seriously, yet with flashes of seriousness and wit.