New Publications
Forthcoming in December 2024:
Amy Boaz
BECAUSE YOU ARE MINE
A Novel
346 pp; 5 x 8”; ISBN 978-3-949271-06-9; LP US-$13
The setting: a barren landscape in a town in northern New Mexico at the crossroads of three different cultures. We meet three people in transition who must redefine themselves, trying to find their place in the world.
After a carefree life together until their money ran out, George, a 20-something, classically trained violinist who now plays folk music, and California-born Truley, a dancer unsuccessfully looking for work, have moved in with George’s mother Louise, a ferociously independent divorcee who has left the New York suburbs to forge a new life for herself as a writer for the local newspaper.
As the novel opens, Louise, who is in love with a sketchy, much younger man, has disappeared without a trace, like so many women. For George, the narrator, who was born as Louise’s daughter but is now a transgender person, the search for her is simultaneously one for identity and a foray into the past.
In her new novel, Boaz, “a superb stylist” (Entertainment Weekly) whose writing has been aptly characterized as “satisfyingly subtle” and “evocative” (Kirkus Reviews), “compelling,” “beguiling” and “touching” (Publishers Weekly), has woven an intriguing web of human relationships that is filled with misunderstandings and hazards, but also with compassion and joy.
Amy Boaz is the author of two novels, A Richer Dust (winner of the Washington Irving Award) and Beat. She worked as a writer, journalist, and teacher in New York, was a maestra of English in Mexico City, and has taught composition, rhetoric, and literature. She is back in her native New Mexico and is the book critic for Taos News.
Further praise for Amy Boaz:
“… brave, heartfelt, intelligent …” (Small Press Reviews)
“… dazzling, smart, dynamic writing …” (Herald de Paris)
“… unusual, compelling and historically absorbing …” (The Independent)
“Boaz beautifully renders the complicated relationship between mothers and their children.” (Kirkus Reviews)
Evelin Sullivan
NO RETURN
A Novel
141 pp.; 5 x 8”; ISBN 978-3-949271-05-2; LP €9.75/ US-$10
The new novel by “a daring, adventurous writer who works in a luminous, compelling prose”
(Gilbert Sorrentino)
“I’ve never understood self-loathing or what it might mean in the grand scheme of things, whatever that might be. My best guess is that it’s an unholy brew of self-serving masochism laced with a heady delight in having free rein to hurt others.” Thus begins No Return. It is triggered by a tragic event—the death of the narrator’s best friend since childhood. Their friendship is not only marked by mutual fondness but also by obsession. It takes them hiking, swimming, skiing. We witness a rowboat ride more than halfway across the North Pacific and a trip to war-torn Iraq, and we listen in on their intriguing discussions about randomness and coincidence. The friends’ story is a gripping journey that eventually arrives at a dark secret.
Once again Evelin Sullivan’s uncanny ability to probe even the deepest crevices of the human soul gives us profound insight into her characters. Ironically, we are at the same time made to wonder whether we can ever really understand anyone, including ourselves, and how we can ever forgive ourselves for the harm we do others.
Evelin Sullivan, the author of five novels and a book on lying, has been hailed as one of the great stylists in American literature who knows how to “keep her readers hooked” (Kirkus Reviews). She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Evelin Sullivan
TIME IS UP
A Novel
217 pp., ISBN 978-3-949271-04-5, LP €9.44 / US-$9.95
The new novel by “a masterful storyteller” (Goodreads)
The time: the very near future. David Holbrook is an attorney in the middle of a highly publicized murder trial. His client: one Steven Yankov, a computer geek who mysteriously disappeared after a mission abroad, only to resurface under a false identity and kill, for no apparent reason, Dr. Vincent Kim, a chemistry Nobel laureate and CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Bizarrely, he flatly refuses to explain his motive and help Holbrook with his defense.
After a stranger has tricked him to implant a device in him that embedded someone else’s memory in his brain, Holbrook is haunted by terrifying dreams. In his quest to find out what drove Yankov to commit murder and uncover the secret behind the frightening memories, he relies on his best friend since childhood days, Alexandra Corvino, a brilliant scientist who had happened to earn her PhD under Dr. Kim, the murder victim. Soon they come across a mysterious company dealing in death. Holbrook realizes that his client is burdened by an enormous sense of guilt, and that at the heart of the mystery lie unspeakable crimes on a massive scale. When an attempt is made on his life, Holbrook knows he is dangerously close to uncovering a truth that is even more horrific than his nightmares.
“. . . one of the graceful and imaginative stylists in American fiction . . .” —The Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Ms. Sullivan’s accomplished use of language . . . [is] ‘a source of conscious delight.’” —New York Times Book Review
Evelin Sullivan is the author of four highly acclaimed novels and a nonfiction book on lying. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Thomas Wolfe
THE STORY OF A NOVEL • DIE GESCHICHTE EINES ROMANS
Bilingual edition
Translated and with a preface by Thomas Thornton
137 pp.; 5 x 8”; ISBN 978-3-949271-02-1; LP €9.90
The classic of literature about the writer's life in a new translation
It is the American author’s credo, the literary declaration of dependence and independence in our day. —New York Times
In this confessional essay, Thomas Wolfe describes his development and career as a writer, from the publication of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929 until the appearance of his second novel, Of Time and the River, six years later. They were years of great anguish and despair, marked by loneliness and feverish writing—but also of his friendship with arguably the most famous editor in American publishing history, Max Perkins.
Wolfe was less interested in objective facts but in the truth that lies behind them. In writing he managed to transform the objective facts . . . into something that he considered to be on a higher level . . . It is no wonder that he is still ready today and that The Story of a Novel is still standard reading for many writers. It is, however, also a literary treasure for all those who are interested in the creative process itself. —From the Preface
Pete Pescatore
SIDEWALK CONFESSIONAL • DER BEICHTSTUHL AM BÜRGERSTEIG
Eine Kriminalgeschichte • A Crime Story
Bilingual edition
Translated by Thomas Thornton
51 S.; 5 x 8”; ISBN 978-3-949271-03-8; LP €3.80
A new case for Pete Pescatore
Milan. A sixteen-year-old boy is shot dead in the street. Drugs? That is what people instantly assume. Pete Pescatore is supposed to report about the case for the newspaper for which he writes. But for him it is more than just another sensational news item, the story affects him personally: he was friends with the boy, he knew his dreams and ambitions. In order to understand what happened, he also must find out about his past. Yet what he encounters is a wall of silence.
After Suicide Italian Style, “Sidewalk Confessional” is Pete Pescatore’s second case and the first to appear in German. The crime novel Suicide Italian Style was published in 2015.
Pete Pescatore is a pseudonym of Phil Haddock, an American writer and sculptor living in Milan. His novel The Book of Dog appeared in 2017 under his real name.
Earl Derr Biggers
SIEBEN SCHLÜSSEL ZUM BALDPATE INN
Ein Kriminalroman
Translated by Thomas Thornton
328 pp.; 5 x 8”; ISBN 978-3-949271-01-4; LP €10.95
A classic crime novel by the creator of Charlie Chan, for the first time in German translation
It is the time when the suffragettes are on the rise. Familiar clichés are shattered. Billy Magee is a writer who earns enough money writing dime novels to live a comfortable life in New York City. Because he finally wants to prove to himself that he can also write a serious novel, he leaves the city that never sleeps: he has procured the key to a remote upstate hotel that is closed in winter.
Yet hardly has he arrived at the Baldpate Inn when he finds out that his is not the only key. One after the other, characters appear who correspond to some of the stereotypes he wanted to escape to begin with: the shady crook, the power-hungry politician and his henchman, the absent-minded professor, the hermit who wants to get away from the noise of the big city and from women. But above all, there is also the mysterious beauty who just doesn’t seem to fit into the picture at all. Almost all of them appear to be after a money package, and some of them will stop at nothing to get it.
In his search for the secret behind all this, Magee is completely in the dark. He can’t solve it on his own. To be sure, he knows whom he absolutely wants to trust—but can he?
Before he created his immortal detective Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers wrote a crime novel that was so successful upon its first publication in 1913 that it also became a hit as a Broadway play and even in Hollywood: the novel was made into a film no less than seven times.
Phil Haddock
THE BOOK OF DOG
A Novel
Original American edition
326 pp.; 5-3/8 x 7-7/8”; ISBN 978-3-949271-00-7; LP €11.62 / US-$12.95
A TALE TOLD BY A DUMMY FULL OF SOUND & FURY
West Coast, USA, early 1950s. The Crump brothers, Sam and Harry, are growing up together, with a father close to the bottle and a mother close to religion. As the ‘50s turn into the ‘60s, a war breaks out in a faraway country, splitting the nation – and the Crump family.
The brothers form a band touring California, where the counterculture is in full bloom. They are joined by Eddie, a wooden dummy carved by Sam but brought to life by Harry, who lends him his voice. Or is it the other way round?
It is Eddie who relates the story, and fortunately for us, he has a dry, flippant sense of humor. Conflict is building, and following a bitter argument with his brother, Sam goes off to Vietnam, never to return. All Harry receives is a tin can, supposedly with his brother’s ashes. Or does it contain something else? And who is Billy-Dee, a veteran who suddenly appears, claiming he was a friend of Sam?
In his quest for what happened and his stubborn search for his dog, who has run off amidst a warlike bursting of firecrackers, Harry gradually goes off the deep end. His marriage in pieces and his job lost, he must face his ghosts in all the madness around him, and find his own voice.
It’s like the doc said, Eddie tells us, somewhere, way down deep inside, Harry’s left a light on. The Book of Dog is an intense, and at the same time wildly funny, imaginative and unrelenting journey toward this light.
Phil Haddock is an American author, translator, and sculptor. Born in Seattle, he grew up in Vancouver, B.C., lived in Germany for a long time and has made his home in Milan, Italy, for many years.
“The novel is devastatingly effective . . . riveting . . . a compelling tale told by a wooden dummy with a broken heart and a dry sense of humor. Deeply moving, what we get is a call-to-arms morality tale about souls struggling for hope and redemption in a fiery pit of their own making and finding as much solace as life is willing to grant them.” —Kyle Pika
“A madcap elegy – often disturbing, frequently funny, always compelling . . . a very satisfying conclusion.” —Stephen Ferron