Sit back and enjoy the parade as words speak their own minds, express their souls, finally articulate the life blood flowing through their hearts. What? You didn't know they had it in them? Listen in your own head. Aren't fusty old words lurking there ready to step out of the wings and up to the microphone? Listen while these ancient words break their long-held silence. The story they tell is an old one, but no matter. Who can narrate the tale of heartbroken youth searching for his lost lo...

Cement magnate Luca D'Angelo stole corpses from the morgue and used them in a macabre 'lost-wax' process to cast statues to adorn his mansion's grounds. Recoiling from the indignity, angry ghosts haunt the statues and make the park a dangerous place. They drive visitors insane, knock them unconscious, strike them blind. When William Kepler sets out to calm these angry spirits, he uncovers a century-old murder. Uninhibited Marci Moore and insightful Lisa Hart compete for William's affection...

Three people; three predicaments; one solution. Telli Trujillo survives a horrifying bank robbery but is haunted by the experience. What does he need to prevail over his fears? Joy Juneau is a plucky thirty-year-old boss's concubine trapped in a rut of cynicism. What does she need to reconnect with the hopeful young woman she once was? Donald Duffy is a high school senior stripped of self-confidence by his overbearing mother. What does he need to mature into a self-assured adult? The answe...

Adam's Apple is an eyebrow-raised look at sin and redemption in the postmodern world. Narrated by his press secretary in biography format, the plot carries Adam Ibsen from conception to election (the US House of Representatives--original to ultimate sin). He samples incest, patricide, lust, avarice, all of the top ten, savoring immorality like a sumo wrestler at the House of Tokyo's buffet. He labors in both sides of the culture war, juggles reality and illusion, meaningful and absurd; in ...

The conflict in Mikawadizi Storms arises when Grady Metals resolves to dig an open-pit mine in the idyllic forested hills that make up the ancestral homeland of La Roche Verde Indian nation. Many of the La Roche Verde oppose the mine and take a stand against it. Grady Metals prevails initially, and begins to dig the pit but, as the elders among La Roche Verde warn, the digging disturbs ancient mythical forces.The storm surrounding this mining project touches all of the characters i...

The novel's subject, A. J. Bluehart, a lightning rod for bad luck on the day of his birth in 1920, lives with his mother in a Chicago whorehouse until his sixteenth birthday, when the women of the house decide on a special birthday gift only they can give. Bluehart moves on to a lifetime of peculiar adventures, some fortunate, some not.At the other end of his life Bluehart's daughter, Seven, sorts through her fathers memoirs, searching for what makes him a chubby, smiley Buddha-man...

Literary Smut or Smutty Literature?Devin Post, principle character and narrator, is a twenty-something graduate student studying creative writing. As his story unfolds, suddenly, unexpectedly, up pops a steaming erotic episode with a Teutonic dominatrix who enjoys using her riding crop while...you get the idea. This happens not once, but a number of times (five, all with different women, but who's counting?). Are these simply a young man's erotic fantasies? Are they part of the over...

The novel takes its title from an entry in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebook: "If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake - Aye, what then?" This theme, vague yearning for a better place, better time, better circumstance, reverberates in many of the sources from which elements in this literary collage are drawn, including: Damien Andreas writes me...

Affairs of the heart, murder, suicide, riot, gossip, politics, heroism, cowardice--Witless bubbles over with the passionate extremes of life. Two peoples settle in Britts Mill, a small town in Southern Wisconsin, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first are fun loving, free-spirited people who build the town's dance hall and saloon. They love, they dance, they play cards, they pull off pranks, they build their dreams. The second are the congregation of the Church of the Bridge. T...

There is a world behind the world we experience, behind the world science considers. This back-stage reality is responsible for much of what we encounter and for all of the meaning we discover. Perhaps Plato was right. Perhaps this world is more real than material reality. The truths there persist while the truths of the material world are fleeting. The elements there remain what they are while the material world is a seething, churning, cauldron of short-lived things doing what they do fo...

Adam’s Apple is an eyebrow-raised look at sin and redemption in the postmodern world. Narrated by his press secretary in biography format, the plot carries Adam Ibsen from conception to election (the US House of Representatives--original to ultimate sin). He samples incest, patricide, lust, avarice, all of the top ten, savoring immorality like a sumo wrestler at the House of Tokyo’s buffet. He labors in both sides of the culture war, juggles reality and illusion, meaningful and absurd; in ...

Gurba grows up queer, Chicana, and take no prisoners. Her story is a revelation, a delight, and an eye-opener.True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy bo...