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Current Books

Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems by Lawrence Millman
Finalist, 2020 Southwest Book Design and Production Awards

Unlike most books of poems nowadays, Goodbye, Ice by Lawrence Millman has a strong ecological bias. The book offers a window on the natural world of the Arctic and its tradition-bound indigenous people. Climate change, inevitably, raises its ugly head in many of the poems, but the book itself is a lament not just for the loss of ice, but for the loss of the Arctic itself.

Toothpaste with Chlorophyll / Maritime Hot Baths: Stories by Elias Papadimitrakopoulos; Translated by John Taylor; Illustrated by Alekos Fassianos

Elias Papadimitrakopoulos, one of the most admired Greek prose writers, was born in 1930 in Pyrgos (Eleia), Greece. Toothpaste with Chlorophyll and Maritime Hot Baths are his first two collections of short stories and have been reprinted several times in Greece. Papadimitrakopoulos combines his remarkably subtle gift for precision of language with the profound sensitivity and compassion for his subjects that has made his reputation as a master painter of the triste and ephemeral. He received the Petros Haris Foundation Prize from the Academy of Athens in 2010 and the National Literary Award in 2015. His collected short stories are now gathered in a six-volume set published by Gavriilidis. He lives in Athens and, during the summer, on the island of Paros.

Rumi’s Mathnavi: A Theatre Adaptation by Joe Martin

Rumi’s Mathnavi was first sponsored by the Center for Global Peace and the Department of Performing Arts at American University in a reader’s theatre version in 1999 and 2000. Versions of it have been produced at the La MaMa ETC main stage in New York and elsewhere. In 2006, the piece toured the East coast cities as a theatre-for-peace project—with discussions hosted by Quakers, conflict resolution specialists, Imams, Rabbis, a Sufi Sheikh, and well-known peace activists including Iraqi-American Andy Shallal. Performed in the traditional Sufi circle with live musicians and Persian dance, it became a ritual realization of Rumi’s book. UNESCO in conjunction with the Turkish Embassy — representing the country where the Persian poet lived most of his life—has issued a medallion for the year of Rumi, recognizing his present importance for the world. The events scheduled for this year that also honor Rumi and his incomparable poetic work include a documentary film on current-day students of Rumi and a CD of his poetry set to music. A feature film on the life of Rumi is currently in the works.

Forthcoming Books

The Book of Tasks by Christopher Spranger

The Book of Tasks: Volume I: Atlantean Undertakings by Christopher Spranger

Pre-Orders pending. Join the waiting list.

“There are incompletable tasks. Tasks which are either impossible to accomplish or impossible to comprehend. Such tasks allow one neither the illusion nor the distraction nor the escape of what is styled “success.” On the contrary, the unperceived glory of perpetual failure is their sole promise. Far from whetting the appetite for worldly enterprise, tasks of this sort exercise a stunning and bewildering effect on the will, plunging it into a perplexity which borders on vertigo. Did it puff and pant before in frenzied pursuit of some hallucinated prize? Now look as, crawling to a halt, it sinks, as if seized with paralysis, into that luminous quiescence which hitherto eluded it! . . . When the will is quelled, the muscles go slack, and when the muscles go slack, the mind kicks into gear; then, on the ruins of volition, perspicacity erects itself. So the servitude to action ends, and the heroism of introspection begins.”

Christopher Spranger is the author of The Comedy of Agony: A Book of Poisonous Contemplations (Leaping Dog Press, 2006) and The Effort to Fall (Green Integer, 1998).

Parabola: Shorter Fictions by Joe Martin

Pre-Order pending

A volume of fiction built upon parables, satires, paradoxes and mystic teaching tales.

“But what is a parable? The Sufis and their predecessors have used the parable and ‘teaching tale’ extensively as one of their modes of contemplation. This is similar to the way Zen has employed parables and paradoxes — in trying to impart insight that is different from that produced by the normal intellect…. The word ‘parable’ derives from the Latin ‘parabola.’ What is a parabola in fact? Aside from designating a perfect geometric arc, which can be evenly divided by a vertical bisecting line up the middle, it has connotations of ‘throwing to the other side….'”
— From the Author’s Note

Joe Martin lives in Washington DC, where he teaches and directs theatre productions. He is the author of Rumi’s Mathnavi: A Theatre Adaptation (Coyote Arts, 2020) and many other titles.

Green Leaves: New and Selected Poems by Eric Paul Shaffer

Pre-Order pending

Eric Paul Shaffer’s Green Leaves includes new poems as well as poems selected by the author from his previous books: Kindling: Poems from Two Poets (1988), RattleSnake Rider (1990), Portable Planet (2000), Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen (2001), Lāhaina Noon (2005), Even Further West (2018), and A Million-Dollar Bill (2018).

Eric Paul Shaffer Shaffer lives on O’ahu and teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College.

The Secret of the Old Cloche: An Agatha Christine Mystery by Leslie Stahlhut

Pre-Order pending

In one fell swoop, Agatha Christine Bigelow loses both her jobs—one as a yarn sales representative and the other as a CIA field agent. Now, she has to move home to live with her mom and a terrier mix who hates her. Resigned to a boring slog back to solvency, she instead discovers more secrets about her hometown than she ever imagined.

Leslie Stahlhut lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has worked as a crochet designer, a teacher of English and mathematics at all levels of instruction, and as a paralegal. She is the author of the chapbook The Borderlands of the Heart and Other Stories, wrote a crochet design blog (crochetbug.com) for over a decade, and writes crochet affirmations and true crime at Medium.

Fictions: The Beak Doctor: Short Fiction, 1972–1976 & Bartholomew Fair by Eric Basso

Pre-Order pending

This book collects the completed fiction of Eric Basso (1947–2019).

When Basso’s novella, “The Beak Doctor,” appeared in the Chicago Review in 1977, less than a year after its completion, it was the longest work of fiction published by that magazine.

For years, Eric Basso’s novella, “The Beak Doctor,” has sustained a cult reputation among a hard core of avant-garde writers.This collection of short stories begins with a tale of death and hideous resurrection, moves on through a quest for the “great horse” who rules a subterranean polar kingdom, an atmospheric cycle of short prose pieces, a tragicomic roman noir set in exotic Istanbul (in which the “great horse” appears in a new guise), and concludes with the harrowing odyssey of a masked man in a fogbound city turned upside down by a plague of sleeping sickness: “The Beak Doctor.” Other stories in the collection include “Gothick Eschatology,” “Equus Caballus, “Logues, and “Equestrian Scenes.”

Set in London during a killing heat wave, Eric Basso’s 1982 novel, Bartholomew Fair, unfolds as a terrible cataclysm is about to devastate the city. Begun in the Middle Ages as a religious festival in commemoration of St. Bartholomew the Great, over the centuries Bartholomew Fair passed through several metamorphoses. Now it has gone “underground.” Its lone survivor recounts the story of the Fair’s final, sordid incarnation, and the bizarre odyssey which brings him face to face with the unspeakable.

Rich in texture and atmosphere, this extraordinary novel is also a stylistic tour de force in which the history of Bartholomew Fair, whose long-dead voices come to life in these pages, haunts the clandestine activities of its modern-day performers and their obsessed patrons. Its strange cast of characters do their best to unravel the fabric of expectations. Basso has created a world that is darkly comic, sinister, moving and, in the end, unforgettably disturbing.

Eric Basso (1947–2019) published numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, many focused on weird, gothic, and surrealist themes. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland and lived in Maryland his whole life. His novella “The Beak Doctor” appeared in the anthology, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

Pipe Dreams: The Drug Experience in Literature edited and with an introduction by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Pre-Order pending

“From antiquity to the present, men have sought artificial paradise in the stimulations and insights afforded by the use of intoxicants. Famous literary figures, in the tradition of Huxley and de Quincey, often have been first to experiment with little-known drugs, and to champion their unique fascination upon the human imagination.” This volume collects 41 prose works—of both fiction and non-fiction—by Charles Baudelaire, William James, Thomas de Quincey, Stephen Crane, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, Peter Mark Roget, Aleister Crowley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horacio Quiroga, and Marie Corelli, illustrating the breadth and depth of the drug experience in literature.

Gilbert Alter-Gilbert is a well-known anthologist, translator, and historical fabulist. His hoax history Poets Ranked by Beard Weight caused a minor sensation among coastal facial-hair afficiandos.

Current Books

Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems by Lawrence MillmanFinalist, 2020 Southwest Book Design and Production Awards

Toothpaste with Chlorophyll / Maritime Hot Baths: Stories by Elias Papadimitrakopoulos; Translated by John Taylor; Illustrated by Alekos Fassianos

Rumi’s Mathnavi: A Theatre Adaptation by Joe Martin

Forthcoming Books

The Book of Tasks: Volume I: Atlantean Undertakings by Christopher Spranger

Parabola: Shorter Fictions by Joe Martin

Green Leaves: New and Selected Poems by Eric Paul Shaffer

The Secret of the Old Cloche: An Agatha Christine Mystery by Leslie Stahlhut

Fictions: The Beak Doctor: Short Fiction, 1972–1976 & Bartholomew Fair by Eric Basso

Pipe Dreams: The Drug Experience in Literature edited and with an introduction by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems by Lawrence Millman
Finalist, 2020 Southwest Book Design and Production Awards