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FICTION

Our Place
by Atar Hadari (March 2013)

Hadari's multi-layered stories constitute a novella within Hadari's novel-in-progress, When We Were Saved. They are complex and beautiful, funny and disturbing, narrated in a distinctive voice with a subtext of survival and loss, removal and annihilation. The narrator is Natan, who recollects his life in a 1930s' kibbutz and the people whose paths crossed his. Mahmoud, Anschel and Sarah are as unforgettable as Natan himself and the place he has come to love.

MEMOIR

The Old Fever by Rick Gray
(December 2012)

Excerpts from a 1980s’ Peace Corps memoir: It is really about Kenya's spell — the fever of the place that gets into the blood and never leaves, making a return to everything that came before impossible. Includes hyperlinks to photos, videos and background articles to enhance and deepen the reading.

FICTION & POETRY anthology

Found. Seven stories and seven poems (September 2012):
Fiction by Susan Meyers, Tania Hershman, Mary McCluskey, Jeff Haas, and Lucille Shulklapper. Poetry by Sara Toruno-Conley, Angela Corbet, Bianca Diaz and Victor Perez. Ten authors write about things found or uncovered—repressed memories, a stolen necklace, fading photos, family secrets, broken promises, a derelict doll, embroidery sampler, love. Click here for a glimpse of each story.

Poetry

A City Full of Eyes
by James Cihlar (June 2012)

“James Cihlar’s poems reflect on the modern mythology of film and its intersection with the lives of those who go about their ordinary existence. Cihlar has a versatility with a range of forms and a confident voice that shifts deftly from his mother's divorce to Carl Jung and back to film divas.
The title suggests the cinematic subject matter, but also hints at the theme of life-reflecting-art-reflecting-life.”

—Terry Ehret, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, 2004-06

DOUBLE FICTION ISSUE

California Dreaming (March 2012). Excerpts from two novels by Patrick Fanning and Jerry Ratch. Each presents a different historical take on California as an island of possibilities. (Our double fiction cover is an antique map of the Pacific and North America, circa 1715 (when California was thought to be an island).

The Venice of the West by Patrick Fanning offers an alternate history of a 19th century California where the (Mexican) Republic of Alta California prevails from south of the Russian River in Sonoma County and a (Russian) Rossland streteches from Alaska to Fort Ross (the Tsar's summer palace on the coast) and east to Sakrametska (Sacramento). Fanning's narrative switches between dispatches from journalist/novelist Mark Twain and his traveling companion, American impressionist painter, John Singer Sargent, who has come to California to launch a career as a portrait artist and possibly explore his own unspoken sexual preferences. The excerpt includes sketches and watercolors by Fanning, who like his protagonists, is both novelist and artist. It includes a timeline of alternate history versus actual history.

Jerry Ratch's How the 60s Ended follows a van load of merry prankster poets on a road trip from the mid-west to the mad-west of California and the San Francisco poetry scene. It's funny, sharply written with the ear and eye of a poet and captures the charm of the 60s and early 70s, along with some of its excesses and blind spots. It includes Ratch's own poetry from the time. It also makes a fascinating extension to our recent memoir issue, Beverly Jackson's Loose Fish Chronicles (see below). 

MEMOIR

The Loose Fish Chronicles: Excerpt from a Memoir in Stories
by Beverly A. Jackson (December 2011)

Jackson's memoir gives us early 1960's Greenwich Village from a young woman's perspective. The stories are starkly honest and the language glows in their examination of a young woman starting adult life in the New York neighborhood famed for worshipping the arts and rejecting conformity. Greenwich Village became the epicenter for the enormous cultural shift we now refer to as the "Sixties," yet, even there, attractive young women were still expected to hide their own intelligence and talent. These stories are a wonderful read on their own. But we are also, for the first time,  honoring the "E" in echapbook. Hyperlinks to photos, videos, background articles, and Beverly's poetry and artwork add a kind of immediacy that only web-based publication can provide.

FICTION anthology

Loss. Ten stories by eight authors (September 2011):
Cezarija Abartis • T.M. De Vos • Stefanie Freele • Barry Friesen • Jessica Erica Hahn • Carol Reid • Sabra Sanjani • Anca Vlasopolos write about loss and its impacts — painful and funny, despairing and hopeful, violent and tender, ordinary and extraordinary, provocative and thought provoking. Click here for a glimpse of each story.

Poetry

The Wayward Orchard
by Paul Sohar (June 2011)

Paul Sohar's language is fresh and surprising, but never jarring, as if we were hearing these words for the first time. You may find yourself reading the poems aloud. Like the fire trail in "The Wayward Orchard," they will take you to unexpected places.

FICTION

Grace
by Robert Moulthrop (March 2011)

The seven luminous stories collected in Grace range from lightly comic to darkly complex. The voices are diverse — hopeful, angry, uncertain, amused, despairing — even where loss is profound, there are grace notes.

MEMOIR

The Bus Driver's Book of the Dead
by Jesse Millner (December 2010)

The Bus Driver’s Book of the Dead evokes Chicago in the ‘80s, where Jesse Millner drove a charter bus by day and by night drank to erase the failure of his life. His memoir is despairing and redemptive, gritty and lyrical, serious and sardonically funny.

“Millner has survived a fire baptism of religion and alcohol.”
— Dominika Wrozynski, Apalachee Review

FICTION

Trouble. Selected Stories
by Michelle McEwen (September 2010)

"In Michelle’s works, there is no wall between reader, writer and characters, we all mesh into a place and time that we feel we are living in, not reading about."
             — Walter Bjorkman, poet/writer and co-founder/editor
                 of the online literary community Voices

Poetry

Translation of Light
by Ruhama Veltfort (June 2010)

A collection of new and selected early poems exploring the ground of memory, vision and the illuminations of everyday life.

FICTION

Around the Bend. Selected Stories
by Laura Beasoleil (March 2010)

Laura Beausoleil's stories are a lyrical and edgy melding of memoir and fiction.

"This the work of a consummate writer, a reader's dream book."
                  — Ed Mycue

MEMOIR

Scenes From My Life on Hemlock Street. A Brooklyn Memoir
by Arlene Mandell (December 2009)

Coming-of-age stories that portray the vibrant and diverse life on one street in Brooklyn over fifty years ago. Selected from a book in progress.

“A writer does well if in his whole life
he can tell the story of one street.”
                     — Nelson Algren

Poetry

I Am a Fact Not a Fiction. Selected poems by Edward Mycue (September 2009)

“Ed Mycue's poetry is a lifetime of surprises. He was born surprised, grew up on wonder, and now surely lives under the ever crashing waterfalls of amazement. His language is pure chirp, flip and rouse. It never ever sleeps. Savor his lines — like memory — for as long as you dare”
       — Hiram Larew, author of More Than Anything and Part Of

FICTION ANTHOLOGY

Old Cars. Fiction anthology from the no-name writers' convivium (September 2008): Wray Cotterill • Judith Day • Richard Gustafson • Chance Lucky • Orianna Pratt • Jo-Anne Rosen • Linda Saldaña • Susan Starbird

Eight authors, exploring the mysterious allure of cars, write about infidelity, senility, family bonds, friendship, tough times, troubled marriages and more.

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