Bøker av Paul Kocak

Months before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, a retired American took his first trip to Italy. Traveling as a solo explorer, he sampled the sights, sounds, and tastes of Tuscany. It's a love story. A story of love lived and love imagined. Love lost and love sought. And it's a love song to Italy and Italians: an aria of affection and hope.

Experience a unique fan's-eye view of a night that many have called the most exciting night in the history of Major League Baseball. Going beyond a standard retelling of the balls and strikes and homers and webgems, the book hears from 20 fans in their own words. Loyal fans of the St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves, Boston Red Sox, and Tampa Bay Rays provide exciting and deeply personal eyewitness accounts -- either from the stadiums or their living rooms. This critically acclaimed book is for casual and serious fans alike."This is a magical book about a magical night. This beautifully told story captures baseball at its very best." - Doris Kearns Goodwin

In this follow-up to The Dog-Eared Book of Dog-Eared Quotations, readers are again invited to delight in a compilation of quotes from dog-eared pages of personal reading (fiction and non-fiction) as well as gems taken from movies, TV shows, overheard conversations, public utterances, poems, songs, and articles in newspapers or magazines. My selections are quirky and wildly subjective. Most are modern. For readability, I have taken some liberties with respect to capitalization, punctuation, spacing, and line breaks. I sometimes removed "and" or "but" at the start of a quote so that it's more, well, quotable. In some cases, I have converted British spellings to American spellings for consistency, but not if it involved a title. Nevertheless, in all instances, I have faithfully tried to respect the authors or speakers and have labored to avoid doctoring the quotes or altering them to serve my purposes. I have tried to stay true to the original text or spoken words, but recognize that by the nature of what I am doing words are taken out of context. I am giving them a new and prolonged life. For consistency and continuity, I organized the quotations into the same categories as in the dog-eared predecessor. Even within my chosen framework, quotations could have been slotted into any number of alternative categories. Each was a judgment call. Again, I invite readers to ruminate over, recoil from, debate, ponder, brood over, or savor these morsels. But above all, quote them! Let them be conversation starters (or enders); let them find new life in accordance with each speaker or writer who cites them.

People say they know when chemistry exists between them. "Sparks fly," as the saying goes. They can feel it almost instantly. Is that possible after fifty years? Or is it merely wishful thinking or feeling? Memory competes with hope. In this generous, wry, and absorbing little novel ("novelita"), two individuals reconnect after an absence of decades, and they don't know what hit them. But they're willing to find out. Along the way, readers are invited to consider, or reconsider, youth, aging, identity, and fate.

In a compilation of work spanning years, this work offers poems that touch on discovery and miracle. It invites readers to see splendor in simplicity, to find transcendence in the ordinary. These poems are accessible. One need not fear the word "poetry." Think of each work as an episode or a conversation. Imagine each page as an opportunity. The book has three sections: Still Lives, Cries and Whispers, and Evening Shadows. The first is like a series of still-life photos; the second portrays laments and challenges of our times, the last reflects on aging and end-of-life scenes. Taken together, these poems entertain, celebrate, mourn, and hope. Their words and images shimmer and resonate.

What was life like in the Age of Coronavirus? What was it like Before Coronavirus? And what comes next? Acclaimed author Paul Kocak ventures out of his quarantined isolation and takes a walk in the neighborhood (with face mask affixed). He wanders in and out of the new realities. Come along. Stay socially distanced or socially proximate. Your choice. Flash fiction. Sly humor. Paranoiac eavesdropping. Poetic fantasy. Imaginary voices. It's all here. What a short, strange trip it's been: to Coronavirusville and back . . . maybe. Read in one sitting. Or read in bite-size chunks. Wash hands with soap for 2 minutes afterward.

A man and a woman meet by mysterious circumstances. Shedding their past lives, they reinvent themselves. Or do they? They love, they argue, they discover, they survive. They travel far and wide like vagabonds, but to what end? In 22 micro-episodes that resemble screenshots, this nano-novel reveals glimpses of two lives. It can be read in one sitting - in any order, if you don't mind a heavy dose of mystery and uncertainty. On the other hand, you may choose to read the episodes in the order presented. That's fine, too. Many matters are left up in the air, unresolved, messy. Not every "T" is crossed; nor are all loose ends tied together. Just as in life. Enjoy the ride.

An entertaining and evocative compilation (the third such collection) of musings, reflections, observations, and snarky verbal snapshots of life in America in the 21st century. These mordant morsels may make some readers "laugh out soft" or merely roll eyes out of sockets. Either way, these are original and digestible tidbits that can be read as your clothes are in the dryer. Or while you are on a very long elevator ride.

You have stumbled upon a collection of poems or prose poems, a compilation of real or imaginary conversations, a bunch of digressive monologues of the mind. All that and more. Composed during the Age of Coronavirus pandemic, these released-from-quarantine offerings mimic how we talk, to others and ourselves. Snippets, shifts, interruptions, fractures, fragments, meanderings. Rarely do we speak in perfectly parsed sentences. Read in any order, in whole or in part. Or recite aloud. Translate backwards into Sanskrit, if you prefer. Incidentally, within the text you are invited to conjure up your own invented monologues or conversations. We can keep them between ourselves. But you'll feel much better getting them off your chest.

What is a collection of dog-eared quotations? I fold the upper corner of a page I am reading if something of the author's prose strikes me. I spot something worthy of an aphorism or an epigram, a phrase or more that I would like to remember - and possibly quote. I dog-ear the page, as this habit is so richly termed, because underlining is beyond my physical powers as I drift off to Sleepytown, plus it would mar the book. I sheepishly admit that I perform this ritual not only on my own books, but library books as well. (I do fold the corners back to their original positions before placing a book in the outdoor Book Returns chute in hopes of mitigating or remediating any potential damage.) This habit, shunned by many book connoisseurs as rude to the books, reveals me, whether I want that or not. It unintentionally creates a ghostly gestalt, a mirrored mosaic, of one reader. If you have a similar habit or predisposition, this book is for you. My selections are quirky, idiosyncratic, undemocratic, and wildly subjective. I didn't plan this book. It wasn't a research project. You might say it has been lying in wait, like a dog on the porch in August, its tongue lolling as it napped. In the spirit of a dog's finely attuned ear, I have included snippets not only from books but also from TV shows, movies, and songs. (Would that be called aural dog-earing? Dog-auraling?) But the vast majority of the quotations here are from my personal reading, collected without much thought of ever doing anything with them. Categorizing and classification proved challenging. Early on, I felt that arranging the quotations alphabetically according to authors' last names would be boring and would expose my limitations as a reader. Instead, I concocted categories and chapter headings, aware that such an organizing factor could have gone in a thousand other directions. Even within my chosen framework, quotations could have been slotted into any number of alternative categories. Each was a judgment call. This collection begs for an index, but I decided against it with some misgivings to save costs. This may be a rationalization, but I also decided that an index restricts aimless browsing. Finally, I had to draw a line somewhere, a line in time and space. If this effort were ever to see the light of day, I had to stop adding quotations to the manuscript in progress. That was hard. Without my doing that, you would not be reading this. I invite you to ruminate over, recoil from, debate, ponder, brood over, or savor these morsels. Read them in any order, or in no order. And please fold back those pages if this is a library book.