Bøker utgitt av Adelaide Books

This collection of poetic works articulates turning points that result in drastic change, realization, and understanding. From an Olympian ice arena to the cool cement floor of an Appalachian cellar, "PIVOT" takes the reader on a tour of poems spanning a broad spectrum of people, places, events, and time periods. From simple household chores to the emotional discovery of a mother's precious heirloom and "going for the gold," turning points channel, challenge, and change the course of our existence and clarify our purpose.

About Marc Frazier's poetry:"Frazier illumines the darkest corners of memory, bearing apt witness to remembered experience with uncommon clarity and sureness, each poem a gem cut and polished to a fierce brightness." -Angela Narciso Torres, author of Blood Orange, grand prize winner for poetry, Willow Books " With quiet, lucid observation, deceptive even with their ease and straightforwardness, Frazier's poems reconsider personal history and the shaping force of recollection. The poems too, after the reader closes the book, will become a thing of memory and like any important memory-potent, deeply embedded, and informing the reader's now." - Suzanne Parker, author of Viral, Lambda Literary Award Finalist " Frazier's poems are often rich with striking and dynamic questions and the result is often refreshingly human, urgent, and disarming." - Cyrus Cassells, author of The Gospel of Wild Indigo"There is a yearning for something more, perhaps only found in the art of poetry. - Robert Klein Engler, president NewTown Writers and author

The Changing Tide includes ten short stories and a novella. The works represent several visions of a changing United States and feature characters who either embrace or reject the changes they experience. Issues addressed include immigration, racial and ethnic divisions, and sexual identity, among others. For example, in "Amigos," a former Connecticut factory worker is on suicide watch in a hospital after his wife's death. His interaction with a Peruvian janitor helps him to sweep away his anger and bigotry. Another story, "Movement," which is featured in the 2018 Adelaide Voices Literary Award Anthology, focuses on an interracial family that becomes lost while visiting Brooklyn on the Fourth of July. A close call in an unfamiliar neighborhood causes the family members to assess their views on authority and race relations. And, in "Nude Beach," a young woman indulges her boyfriend's desire to visit Miami's Haulover Beach on his birthday. There, a memory and a chance occurrence spark her to question her sexuality. Some of the stories reach firm conclusions, while others end enigmatically-but all are intended to appeal to a reader's sense of empathy without being maudlin or dogmatic.

Where the Leaves Darken is Steven Pelcman's third volume of poetry. This diversified collection takes us on a journey of personal to universal experiences. Poems about a grandmother and her cat, to the streets of Paris, Istanbul, Marrakesh and Prague, the intimacy of a father's illness and a sister dying to WW II as well as everyday small and large experiences. From a bakery to the sea to the homeless, Where the Leaves Darken will enlighten on every page.

" Many poets can scratch words onto paper, but they lack the painter's eye that turns those words into images that rise from the page to take our breath away. Mr. Pelcman is what we might call a verbal cinematographer. His words often arrive with familiar experiences, causing us to nod our heads as we watch them unfold quietly, gently before us. And then, without warning, he delivers a sledgehammer's blow that slams an event before us--one that we don't deserve to share--and it hangs in memory like a fishhook in the mind's eye. A poet whose body and soul carry the baggage of his years with dignity and grace, Steven Pelcman's poetry has already made its mark. It will be read far into the future." (Dan Masterson, Award Winning Poet)

A collection of rhyming poems and haikus - Samuel believes that poetry has the power to change lives, and so he spends every day trying to write something worthy of that power. "All scars fade with time No matter how deep you cut The clock may tease you now But I promise you're in luck Because the next day always comes too soon Then you can look back and laugh Because time heals all wounds"

"In choosing the short stories gathered here I couldn't help but be reminded of Aristotle's prescriptive elements for drama: a protagonist, an antagonist, and a complicator. The reader of these stories might also note that Aristotle could have been writing as well about a three-person family: mother, father, and one child. This, of course, was the underpinning of my family's drama where Aristotelian lessons played out, lessons reinforced for me later in literature and on the proper stage in the plays of Ibsen, O'Neil, and Miller featuring conflicted families. Our drama emerged when my family abruptly left Minnesota to resettle on the west coast during the middle of my fifth-grade school year. Nothing compelled my family to move: no new job, no newly purchased home, none of the myriad events that might trigger a dramatic relocation. However, that sudden departure from the Midwest foreshadowed three decades of deepening discord between my parents. As I grew older I realized that whatever the stated reasons for relocating, a deeper desire on my mother's part had been hidden. She wanted to leave my father. This accounted for her anxiousness to depart even if we as a family were utterly unprepared for what lay ahead. While I was hardly surprised that my parents separated, the timing - late into their senior years - felt as bizarre and awkward as the abruptness of our hejira west so many decades earlier. My mother informed me thereafter that her life with Dad had been "A Greek tragedy." Aristotle again. The disintegration of my parent's marriage taught me not to ignore the daily opportunity to experience some personal truth. Though invisible, wounds left by unspoken longings and unsatisfied needs can be lethal. By exploring moments in which hidden personal yearnings are exposed and blind spots are illuminated (sometimes with discomfort but not without humor) perhaps we may see ourselves with humility and those about us with greater empathy and compassion. If one or more of my tales strikes you as having been successful in illuminating one of those moments I will be gratified." (Prolog - The Three of Us)

Headlines about displacement, identity, and alienation are in the news every day, but little real insight into these issues is available from Twitter feeds and short news items. The role of a fiction writer at the present juncture is not just to be always observing, as Henry James had it, but also to explore and analyze issues of global concern in all their richness and complexity. Michael Washburn's tales about the theme of "uprooted-ness" are reflections of our fractured world. They depict the adventures and trials of people unsure of their place in the world and desperate for a sense of belonging. Here are consistently surprising stories of incomparable power.

Lush Life is a collection of short stories that range from the adventures and creative play of girls dreaming in 1970s Brooklyn to the wanderings and aspirations of a poet in the fairylike forests of Finland. These stories will appeal to adult readers of all ages and gender that enjoy New York City stories as well as stories that capture the adventures and aspirations of dreamers and drifters, poets, artists, and near-do-wells wandering or at play in Brooklyn, Spain and Italy, and even as far away as the foggy forests of Finland.

Donny Barilla, a poet covering the realms: human intimacy, nature, mythology, theology, and man's relationship with death and the departed, has been writing for over three decades. He writes daily and strives to renew himself as an artist from page to page and body of work to body of work. Very seldom does he take a break from writing as he views it as a full-time job. He lives a reclusive lifestyle and finds himself clinging close to nature and all her elements. His home state of Pennsylvania strikes chords of poetic depth about him as he finds loveliness from cornfield to meadow. Whether it's feelings of love, intimacy, or a special closeness, he maintains the feeling that death does not take these with him/her to the grave. Emotions and feeling outlast the flesh of the human body. Human intimacy draws near an enigmatic spiritual passion which conquers all on the prismatic scale of experience. When speaking of mythology Donny says, "myths were created to make sense of feelings which are complicated by very nature. They are perhaps more easily understood through persons greater than oneself. As for theology, a disciplined aspect incorporates quite finely with passions and secured poetic comforts. Donny believes the sounds of the words chosen create the images, not the definition of the words. Therefore, clear images resonate through the palate of the reader. These ideas have the reader enjoying the poem in a more mysterious sense rather than a chore to probe one's way through.

Eddie Dodson has vanished along with Mia, the enigmatic android who helped him escape justice for the murder of his business partner and the framing of Lila, his company's first creation. Desi Lawrence is promoted to the co-president of Lawrence-Dodson Enterprises, and she strives to lead the company in a way that would make her brothers proud while dealing with night terrors, police suspicion, blackmail, and paralyzing flashbacks of being held at gunpoint by the man she loved. Meanwhile, her brother Derek, Lila, and Ravenna Mitchell pursue the truth behind Damian's murder and the shadowy government organization that played a hand in it, which leads them to the doorstep of Ravenna's aunt Clarisse-the original leader of the Division.

Lonely, despondent, and hopeless, Andrea, a junior in high school, is determined to become perfect. She sets out to master the scale, to smite her mother, and to bury depression in what becomes an all-consuming, life-threatening eating disorder. When her physician-father is unable to heal her as she hovers at 70 pounds and below, has manipulated all forms of counseling, has lost all friendships, and is terrified of ingesting the calories of food, her Greek family continues to rally around her, despite her caustic attitude towards them. When she stares death in the face during a hot summer run with purpose to destroy calories, she encounters God and it is her renewed faith in Christ - her hope in His will for her life - that enables her to slowly overcome her self-inflicted trauma and to embark on a journey towards health, wellness, and living not for the desires of self, but for the contentment of others. Set in the Western suburbs of Chicago, "Tatsimou, Hold On" is a retrospective memoir chronicling the psychological distortion of anorexia and its destructive wide-ranging effects on family relationships, personal growth, and spirituality. An obsession with control, family tension, resistance to cultural norms, grief, and unexpected triumph are predominant themes throughout this memoir. Told in a linear fashion with moments of flashback and foreshadowing to reveal character growth, it is a generative memoir with dynamic characters, a tangible setting, and the pulsing belief that through faith, fitness, and prayer, hope can remain in the cracking fissures of the human heart.

Of Love and War is divided into 4 parts: Fighting, Dying, Remembering, and Living. Each part represents a small chapter to the overall story of the book. Of Love and War is a mix of Free Verse, Prose, and Narrative poetry that gives specific focus to the combat stresses, PTSD, boredom, and losses associated with author's deployment to Iraq in 2005 as an infantry Marine. It also meshes this bold, intense, and sometimes unforgiving voice with that of a softer, gentler, and sometimes macho or alpha male tone about love and the failings of. With great insight into the mind of a warrior, and the deteriorating affects that war has on the mind and body, Of Love and War is a book just as much about life, as it is about the struggles of war. Full of wit, grit, honesty and sacrifice, Of Love and War brings a new, fresh, smack-you-right-in-the-face voice of a common man meant to experience extraordinary things.

In this commercial fiction novel with an historical backdrop, The Sons and Daughters of Toussaint, Isaac Breda seeks to renew the revolution of his famous forefather, Toussaint Louverture. He is depressed that a revolution which had so much potential, and which had cost so much, seemed to have so little to show for it. He resolves to start a non-violent revolution to make their freedom real. In the first half of the novel, the story is told by alternating chapters between historical sections, telling the story of Toussaint and his compatriots, and contemporary sections, where Isaac seeks to renew Toussaint's spirit in his people. Isaac's story intersects with that of his best friend's beautiful sister, Marie-Noëlle. At first she is mainly focused on moving to the United States and making her fame and fortune in modeling. But her character develops into a powerful agent of change herself. When Isaac dies at the hands of entrenched interests in Haiti, the revolution falls on her shoulders. The immense challenge transforms both her and her country.

Blaze Pascal and the Courage of Being, is set in Los Angeles. It is philosophical, lyrical, and transcendent, written in free modernistic verse. Blaze Pascal is a philosopher and broods on the brokenness of the world. He is drawn to a Platonic mysticism of truth, compassion for all beings, and the courage to be in the face of non-being. But he is a lonely old soul who loves music and dancing. He tells no one of his night visits to the big city, the city of music, movie stars, and mean streets. It is the tension between the bright road of philosophical reflection and the dark road of human desire that drives the novel forward. It is a novel of big ideas, East and West. It risks pushing the boundaries of mainstream expectations in astonishing ways.

"In my reading of Growing With the Shadows , most of all I visualized a man of infinite suffering, greatly affected by Life or Death, nonetheless without losing hope and that ceaseless struggle towards the light... Many times, Fenech is a man bordering on the grim reaper's realm, yet also a concerned environmentalist worried about the relentless action of his fellow men against nature and the conservation of places, as well as the lost values, both material and spiritual... I was enraptured by Fenech¿s poems because he took me on a time traveling experience at roller-coaster speed. A cursory read of the book would lead any impromptu reader to want to separate some poems from others but after you read them all, you realize that it cannot be done: the poems stand and flare on their own right as a necessary and sweeping monolithic comet. They belong with each other, and with the author. Each seems to have been carved with Fenech¿s blood, entrails and experiences of a sensitive poet slit by what he sees and feels, and his need to display things as they are, crude and raw, presenting characters and events as they happened." (Prof. Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias, Associate Professor at the Holguin University, Cuba)

THE HOLDOUT is a philosophical novel set in modern-day Mississippi treating religion, sexuality, academic life and academic freedom, sports and sports culture against the backdrop of the quotidian daily malaise (named 'torpor' in the work) afflicting all people. The story is told through the first person viewpoint of Rhett Lawson, an ex-NFL player finishing up graduate school. Rhett is a sincere Catholic although obsessed with women and sex and finds himself often trapped in "the torpor." His two main companions are his friends Brent (an atheist) and David (an Evangelical Protestant). The three have wide-ranging discussions on various topics throughout the narrative. Additionally, issues of race (Rhett is white, his aunt Shelby, a central figure to the story, is black), the nature of contemporary academia, and commentary on life in twenty-first century Mississippi (something largely unplumbed in comparison to the plethora of works that have tackled the Civil War South of the 1860s or the Civil Rights Era South of the 1960s) underpin the story.

Following WWII, Japan is broken and in ruins, the people are starving. Nobuko Ito, a Japanese-American trapped in Japan by the war, and temporarily denied the right to return to her home in California, decides to remain in Japan after learning both her parents have died. Meanwhile, back in America, Keiko Ugawa and her father return to Portland, Oregon, after their release from Camp Minidoka in Idaho, where they spent three years behind barbed-wire with nearly ten-thousand other Japanese-Americans. Back in Portland, they face suspicion and 'No Japs' signs. In Idaho, Virginia Franconi marries John Sato, and together, with Virginia's brother Marc, turn the old farm into one of the state's biggest and most prosperous. Back in Japan, Nobuko is saddened by her failure to become pregnant. Masato surprises her with tickets to America, where they are to witness the marriage of Nobuko's brother, Mako, to Keiko Ugawa, who had met at Camp Minidoka. LOTUS BLOSSOM UNFURLING fills in the years and unites the families from Morgan's two previous novels, ECHOES FROM A FALLING BRIDGE and HARVEST THE WIND.

Virginia Franconi left home at eighteen, like the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. Now, in her mid-twenties, she returns to the family farm in Idaho. Her sour, belligerent father, once an iron-fisted ruler, is weak and frail, no longer a threat. Marc, Virginia's brother, runs the farm. Virginia is pregnant, a secret she doesn't initially share with Marc or her father. With most young men off fighting the war in Europe or the Pacific, Marc worries who will help grow the food demanded by a hungry nation. When President Roosevelt orders all people of Japanese descent removed from the West Coast, Keiko Ugawa and her family find themselves in a crowded, tar-papered barrack, surrounded by barbed-wire and guard towers, where temperatures reach 130F in summer and minus 30F in winter. Dust and wind are constants. Her mother dies and Keiko's anger at authorities intensifies. Marc's worries about who will help him are solved when the government allows internees from nearby Camp Minidoka to work on surrounding farms. A saddened and still angry Keiko comes to the Franconi farm, along with several young men. While Keiko works in the house with Virginia, now approaching her due date, the young men join Marc in the fields. Keiko helps deliver Virginia's baby. The two women gradually become friends.

The stories in Truth Hurts explore the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of human beings as they confront everyday situations-situations at times baffling, uncomfortable, and complex-but always honest, intense, and unpredictable. This collection, featuring fifteen raw and vivid narratives, will remind the reader that truth hurts-more than we realize.

In this collection of lovingly-crafted stories, I Heard a Fish Cry, Carolyn Light Bell portrays animals as witness, alter ego, adversary, and foil to illuminate human fallibility. These satirical, often playful, stories leave us questioning our own intelligence. Light Bell is far-reaching in her scope and is unafraid to take on the subtleties of class, animal rights, generational differences and sex. People in these stories advocate, fear, exploit, or defend a variety of creatures, including wolves, cats, dogs, birds, cougars, and bulls, dead or alive. Animals, in turn, reveal particular qualities in human behavior that leave us vulnerable. As the stories evolve, the reader discovers that within the heart and soul of every human being lies a deep, biological connection to all animals.

During the turbulent sixties, the call for Quebec independence created a political and social maelstrom in Canada. For nearly ten years, riots, bombings, labor strikes and violent street scenes-many even worse than what we're seeing today-were part of everyday life in Montreal, the epicenter of battle. PATRIMONY represents the essence of that still-smoldering conflict. Told from the viewpoints of two brothers and a sister, PATRIMONY is about what happens in a country when political ideology resorts to terrorism. It's about what happens in a family when one brother believes in responsible political action to achieve his goals, and the other brother, a time-bomb ticking toward an explosion, will do anything to get what he wants, including using his own sister for blackmail. From PATRIMONY'S opening chapter, a trip to North Carolina where brother and sister buy explosives from gunrunners, to a factory bombing and a symbolic attempt to blow up a bridge, the plot moves quickly. It weaves through cultural differences, family and political conflicts, and ends in an unprecedented political crisis-Quebec under martial law.

Before he died, Henri Morais thought changing his name to Henry Maris, doing good deeds and surrounding himself with the splendor of the mountains in northern Idaho was enough. He thought that his guilt over being part of the violence of the Quebec separatist movement would be buried with him. It wasn't. A woman who comes to the funeral, a stranger, turns out to be the loose thread that begins to unravel his hidden past. Ellen Maris, isn't sure whom she's most upset with: her daughter, for going to Montreal and digging up what had happened so many years before; her son, for encouraging his sister; or Henry, for dying and leaving her. In desperation, she starts a small baking business from her home, all the while brooding over what Marie might find out in Montreal. Montreal during the violence-prone sixties; a bomb thrown into a crowded café in Bahrain; two helicopters burned by eco-terrorists in Idaho. TWO-HEARTED CROSSING tells the story of a flawed family, struggling to move forward in their suddenly upside-down world. It also tells a story of resilience, of survival, of hope and of love.

"There was a sub that day in freshman Latin class at St. Aloysius High in suburban San Antonio, Texas, so all hell had broken loose. Spitballs were flying, there were arm wrestling matches on desks, a trash can basketball game had broken out in a corner. Desks were rearranged for impromptu conference groups. The sub was a painfully-thin, prematurely-balding man who lost control of the class immediately. His protruding Adam's Apple bobbed up and down spasmodically. The underarms of his starched white discount store dress shirt were soaked in perspiration, his shiny black polyester slacks were hiked up high over white sports socks and brown tasseled loafers. His name was Mr. Waldo, the name itself the inspiration for put-downs and derision. I felt sorry for Mr. Waldo. I pitied him. I identified with him. He was somebody who was never going to command respect or command an audience. He had a wife and young child, he had told us, and I felt sorry for them, too. You could only hope they would be blinded to what a dufus their husband and father was."

"Reading Living Among Strangers is like watching a series of Beckett plays recast in the percussive, irreverent voice of a writer who takes nothing for granted, who follows the possibilities inherent in language and in everyday human failings. Here are characters estranged from the world: unparented kids walking the train trestle, a widowed mother whose pack of daughters push her toward assisted living, an alcoholic trying to give up drink by questioning the very root of desire. It is in the characters' estrangement that the reader finds kinship. As with the manicured Floridian lawns of Bahia Vista Estates in the title story, in this collection, "[t]here are rumors, things under the surface, things man-made and not." Richard Schmitt is a writer who digs beneath the surface to yield up beauty in the coarse, wisdom in the baffled." Jessie van Eerden , the author of a novel Glorybound "Richard Schmitt is a storyteller. His stories seem not to start so much as startle, drawing us into a world that might feel familiar, but that we've never seen quite this way. Like one of his narrators, he knows to ignore the map, point his nose, and go. The magic is in his sentences, which at their best are sleek and strange and urgent, surprising and illuminating." Peter Turchi, the author of A Muse and A Maze Linked by fear and yearning, awash with spirituality and its opposites, Richard Schmitt's Living Among Strangers covers all: from children perplexed by the aims of classmates and adults, to adults perplexed by the world of living creatures. These are stories to be read and reread, with many epiphanies in between. George Singleton, The Half-Mammals of Dixie

"The spiritual part of my body had taken over the rest of my mortal self...My whole perception of life was totally changed. I felt detached from all material things and was thinking only of the long voyage ahead, a voyage from which no one has ever returned. Even my sleep had been disturbed by dreams of family members who had passed away. They were beckoning me to join them. The scene was like a huge jigsaw puzzle falling into place, it was the picture of my life on earth at its end." The writing style, the flow of the stories, introduction and development of the complex characters, intense and multilayered plots with exciting twists and turns, original setting of each of the stories - everything about this collection of short stories and essays is a compliment to a wordsmith's craft. (Stevan V. Nikolic, Editor, Adelaide Literary Magazine)

"It's rare to find a character like Luther van der Loon who makes such a rich and lasting impression-so vividly wounded, exuberant in characterization. Luther embodies the anxious, angst-ridden neurotic we are afraid we will become, or maybe who we aspire to be. In his grief over his mother's accidental choking vis-à-vis death, his obsession with what is the point of life is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. I could read this novel a hundred times and never tire of it." - Amy E. Wallen, Author of When We Were Ghouls: A Memoir of Ghost Stories"An original and very funny novel about a man's obsessive longing and guilt after his mother accidentally chokes on wonton soup. We follow the endearing protagonist through a period of morning, cleverly interwoven with musical theory and an attempt to sue the Chinese take-out restaurant, all brought to a hilarious finale with a last symposium on medieval music." - Sheila Kohler, Author of numerous award-winning novels

In 1939, Nobuko Ito, a young Japanese-American woman, travels from her home in California to Japan, where she is to learn the culture of her ancestors. Tensions grow between the two countries. Soon her country and the country she has grown to love are at war. The next four years are brutal, both for those who go to fight (Hirotaka Katsuragawa, a young art student, Masato Abi, the son of local merchants, Toshio Hara, a farmer turned soldier), and those who remain behind (Nobuko, Yoko Yoshida, who manages the local pottery factory while her husband is fighting the war, and the women and children of Nishimi). In 1997, these characters are in their twilight years. Nobuko is a widow. Yoko is reduced to dusting and serving tea in the factory she once ran. Toshio has gone mad. Hirotaka has become the sensei, honored teacher. While the pottery factory is the heart of the village, Hirotaka is its soul. When a murder is committed, the motive is found buried beneath the rubble of a bridge destroyed in New Guinea, fifty-five years earlier. The noise of its fall still echoes...

"How could she wash herself of the blood and the semen? How could she cleanse herself of the betrayal? Would the memories of being raped and sodomized ever leave her mind or would they always be entrapped in her subconscious to present themselves in nightmares? Yes, the physical pain would eventually go away, but the mental anguish would never disappear. She knew that for a fact, and she shuddered at what her life would now become. She knew she was to blame for what had happened because she had been so stupid-so, so stupid to allow herself to trust those who should be trustworthy but weren't. All her life she had trusted so readily, so easily, and consistently she had been hurt and disappointed. She thought that something must be wrong with her to never learn from the painful lessons that had steadily followed her from early childhood, but she was an optimist and her heart went out to others too easily. "

Lila has no memory of who she is or how she ended up walking the streets of Manhattan alone in July of 2232. She only knows she is being hunted by day and haunted through the night by dreams of a man she can't remember apart from when her subconscious self holds him at gunpoint. Still reeling from the death of his brother, Derek seeks justice. When he views footage incriminating Lila, the woman he's come to care for perhaps too greatly, Derek knows something is very wrong. Derek's sister Desi blames herself for Damian's death, unable to forget how unkind she was to him at their last meeting and how she never repaid him for taking care of her after the death of their parents. In her guilt, she turns to Ravenna, a trained assassin and Damian's fiancée, to ensure that Lila is brought to justice while Desi herself seeks comfort in her brothers' business partner Eddie. Derek vows to find Lila before the police-and Ravenna, who is resolute that murder should be punished.