Enter Rat Park at your own risk. Lose the cage. Find yourself. An L.A. power couple orders an A.I. sex droid to escape their marital prison. What happens to them could happen to you. With his fourth novel, Adam Novak shows us how it takes a village of automatons to augment your humanity, feed your deceptive compulsive sexual addiction, and forget why you ever got married in the first place.
Why a book on John O’Brien? This idea had its genesis when I was talking to John’s mother, Judith O’Brien, after a reading by Erin O’Brien when she released her book The Irish Hungarian Guide to The Domestic Arts at a gallery located in Lakewood, Ohio (John’s hometown). It was a brief conversation with Judith, I told her Leaving Las Vegas is a book that had a tremendous impact on me, and I spent several minutes explaining why. Judit...
“Had I mentioned the real intention behind my return home—eating myself to death—I’m pretty sure my grandmother’s reaction may have been more subdued…” So begins Teddy Rawski’s journey to his hometown of Buffalo, and to the end of the night. An obsessive eater, itinerant dreamer, half-hopeful novelist, reluctant food journalist, and a pathological football lunatic, Teddy ponders nascent adulthood’s quand...
AMERICAN STYLE HAIKU AND SENRYU Many of the poems in this collection are not haiku in the strictest sense. Yes, they are composed of three short lines in the present tense releasing a moment of revelation — outsight insight — in short, a verbal rendering of the “aha” moment of zen awareness. And they often depict that intersection between human and nature. But they do not employ a 5-7-5 syllable format which is, anecdotally anyway, t...
Growing up in suburban Cleveland, Judah Leblang felt a deep connection with his Uncle Jerry, an orally-educated deaf man who lived an isolated life between the deaf and hearing worlds. Like Jerry, Leblang felt different too, struggling with his sexuality and trying to find his place in society, finally coming out in the mid-1980s. Many years later, after working in the Deaf Community and later, losing much of his own hearing, the aut...
Kin to Penny Lane’s most postmodern of moments (though she feels as if she’s in a play / she is anyway) Chuck Joy’s Theme Of Line is much more than the sum of its parts. Its thematic narrative is driven by an engaging lyricism familiar to followers of his work and, though he may posit a cartoon life, no one, but no one, gets away without paying the piper. Cue the klaxon horn, sisters and brothers. Chuck Joy holds up the mirror, darin...
Paul Newcombe suffers the unlucky coincidence of seeing a ghost from his past on local television news. His old neighborhood pal, Gary Auro, now a deputy in a Portsmouth, Ohio, has been given the task of solving a mystery of a skull unearthed from a gravel pit. Driven by the need to restart old rivalries, Paul makes his way to Portsmouth to reclaim his past. Set against the backdrop of the annual Roy Rogers festival, a nostalgic c...
Russell Atkins, winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award winner is a poet, playwright, composer and editor. Born in Cleveland in 1926, Atkins was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt on the city’s east side. Perhaps best known for his work at Karamu House, considered the oldest African American theater in the United States, Atkins studied at Cleveland College, Cleveland Music School Settlement, Clevela...
In this engaging and thoughtful personal memoir, Kathy Ewing shows what it’s like to be raised by someone variously sullen, pleasant, angry, demanding, manipulative, and engaging—sometimes changing from one mood to the next in a single conversation. She writes of childhood memories, showing her mother’s troubling behavior, which mystified her until she discovered a name for it, putting it in the context of borderline personality diso...
After losing cushy employment in the pummeling economic tumult of ’08, and suddenly saddled with a half-drunk mood of vagrancy, Teddy Rawski has taken to the road. Heading west, to San Francisco, south to New Orleans, and east, to New York, and eyeing the clouds from his back in the easy-going Midwest, Teddy wanders with adroit purposelessness through the pages and the American night. It’s a trail between joblessness and ...
“Michael Salinger is one of the most gifted and loved performance poets on the circuit today, and like his other poetry, Well Defined has the style and attitude that young readers love. This approach to vocabulary can’t help but succeed because each poem’s story leaves an indelible image in the reader’s mind. Noah Webster is surely smiling.” James Blasingame, Associate Professor, Department of English Education, Arizona State Unive...
In her smart and sparkling new collection of poem, From the Park Bench, Sara Holbrook deftly switches personas from poet to provocateur, from teacher to trickster and from literary gumshoe to a shimmering shaman of the Spoken Word. Her work will be treasured by open-hearted children of all ages for years to come. -Michael Heaton, Minister of Culture, author, screenwriter
“There were three things that made me want to take a hard look back at where I came from and what I’ve done and try to make sense of it. The first was getting shot, the second was getting old, and the third was working on this book. Getting shot came first. It happened in Cleveland on April 26, 1976, and except for the fact that I was shot from ambush that evening, it was pretty much like any other day at that period of my life. I wa...
“During the 30 years I was active in politics I would read novels to relax, to reflect, or to just imagine myself anywhere other than in City Hall. I ain’t never read anything as honest, imaginative and utterly scary as CITI. At first I thought it was about me; shit, where has this guy been?” -Mike White. Former Mayor of Cleveland RA Washington’s new novel, CITI, simultaneously explodes and expands our notions of gender, race, iden...
“The Starlight Line, is a fascinating, complex, layer-cake of a book. The frame narra…tion is semi-autobiographical; the narrator is a frustrated writer from Cleveland, searching for inspiration. The other layers interpenetrate and enrich the frame story: Jack London’s drug-addled wanderings; Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico; a writer’s search for Jack Kerouac’s mysterious muse, Esperanza Villanueva. Marshall’s skillful ...
