Varhaiset kirja-arvostelijatAnna Faktorovich

The launch of Britain’s “Anglo-Saxon” origin-myth and the first Old English etymological dictionary.

This is the only book in human history that presents a confessional description of criminal forgery that fraudulently introduced the legendary version of British history that continues to be repeated in modern textbooks. Richard Verstegan was the dominant artist and publisher in the British Ghostwriting Workshop that monopolized the print industry across a century. Scholars have previously described him as a professional goldsmith and exiled Catholic-propaganda publisher, but these qualifications merely prepared him to become a history forger and multi-sided theopolitical manipulator. The BRRAM series’ computational-linguistic method attributes most of the British Renaissance’s theological output, including the translation of the King James Bible, to Verstegan as its ghostwriter. Beyond providing handwriting analysis and documentary proof that Verstegan was the ghostwriter behind various otherwise bylined history-changing texts, this translation of Verstegan’s self-attributed Restitution presents an accessible version of a book that is essential to understanding the path history took to our modern world.

On the surface, Restitution is the first dictionary of Old English, and has been credited as the text that established Verstegan as the founder of “Anglo-Saxon” studies. The “Exordium” reveals a much deeper significance behind these firsts by juxtaposing them against Verstegan’s letters and the history of the publication of the earliest Old English texts to be printed starting in 1565 (at the same time when Verstegan began his studies at Oxford). Verstegan is reinterpreted as the dominant forger and (self)-translator of these frequently non-existent manuscripts, whereas credit for these Old English translations has been erroneously assigned to puffed bylines such as Archbishop Parker and the Learned Camden’s Society of Antiquaries. When Verstegan’s motives are overlayed on this history, the term “Anglo-Saxon” is clarified as part of a Dutch-German propaganda campaign that aimed to overpower Britain by suggesting it was historically an Old German-speaking extension of Germany’s Catholic Holy Roman Empire. These ideas regarding a “pure” German race began with the myth of a European unified origin-myth, with their ancestry stemming from Tuisco, shortly after the biblical fall of Babel; Tuisco is described variedly as a tribal founder or as an idolatrous god on whom the term Teutonic is based. This chosen-people European origin-myth was used across the colonial era to convince colonized people of the superiority of their colonizers. A variant of this myth has also been reused in the “Aryan” pure-race theory; the term Aryan is derived from Iran; according to the theology Verstegan explains, this “pure” Germanic race originated with Tuisco’s exit from Babel in Mesopotamia or modern-day Iraq, but since Schlegel’s Über (1808) introduced the term “Aryan”, this theory’s key-term has been erroneously referring to modern-day Iran in Persia.

Since Restitution founded these problematic “Anglo-Saxon” ideas, the lack of any earlier translation of it into Modern English has been preventing scholars from understanding the range of deliberate absurdities, contradictions and historical manipulations behind this text. And the Germanic theological legend that Verstegan imagines about Old German deities such as Thor (Zeus: thunder), Friga (Venus: love) and Seater (Saturn) is explained as part of an ancient attempt by empires to demonize colonized cultures, when in fact references to these deities were merely variants of the Greco-Roman deities’ names that resulted from a degradation of Vulgar Latin into early European languages. Translations of the earlier brief versions of these legends from Saxo (1534; 1234?), John the Great (1554) and Olaus the Great (1555) shows how each subsequent “history” adds new and contradictory fictitious details, while claiming the existence of the preceding sources proves their veracity. This study also questions the underlying timeline of British history, proposing instead that DNA evidence for modern-Britons indicates most of them were Dutch-Germans who migrated during Emperor Otto I’s reign (962-973) when Germany first gained control over the Holy Roman Empire, and not in 477, as the legend of Hengist and Horsa (as Verstegan satirically explains, both of these names mean horse) dictates. The history of the origin of Celtic languages (such as Welsh) is also undermined with the alternative theory that they originated in Brittany on France’s border, as opposed to the current belief that British Celts brought the Celtic Breton language into French Brittany when they invaded it in the 9th century. There are many other discoveries across the introductory and annotative content accompanying this translation to stimulate further research.

A poetic satire of ghostwriters being hired to write puffery of and by patrons and sponsors, who pay to gain immortal fame for being “great”, while failing to perform any work to deserve any praise.

This volume shows the similarities across Gabriel Harvey’s poetic canon stretching from his critically-ignored self-attributed Smith (1578), his famous “Edmund Spenser”-bylined Fairy Queen (1590), and his semi-recognized “Samuel Brandon”-bylined Virtuous Octavia (1598). This close analysis of Smith is essential for explaining all of Harvey’s multi-bylined output because Smith is an extensive confession about Harvey’s ghostwriting process. Harvey’s Fairy Queen is his mature attempt at an extensive puffery of a monarch, which has been (as Harvey predicted in Smith and Ciceronianus) in return over-puffed as a “great” literary achievement by monarchy-conserving literary scholars across the past four hundred years. The relatively superior in its condensed social message and literary achievement Smith has been ignored in part because the subject of its puffery appears trivial from the perspective of national propaganda.

Smith: Or, The Tears of the Muses is a metered poetic composition that can also be performed as a multi-monologue play. The central formulaic structure is grounded in nine Cantos that are delivered by each of the nine Muses; this formula appeared in many British poems and interludes after its appearance in “Nicholas Grimald’s” translation of a “Virgil”-assigned poem called “The Muses” in Songs and Sonnets (1557). The repetitive nature of this puffing formula is subverted not only by the satirical and ironic contradictions that are mixed with the standard exaggerated flatteries of “Sir Thomas Smith” (Elizabeth’s Secretary), but also with several seemingly digressive sections that puff and satirize other bylines, including “Walter Mildmay” (King’s Councilor) and “John Wood” (“Smith’s” copyist and nephew). The central subject of the satire in Smith is Richard Verstegan’s career as a goldsmith, who forged antiques, and committed identity fraud that included ghostwriting books under multiple bylines, including passing himself (as Harvey points out) as at least two different “Sir Thomas Smiths”. The introduction to this volume includes matching handwritten letters that were written by Smith #1 (who died in 1577) and Smith #2 (who died in 1625) and by Verstegan under his own byline. In Smith’s conclusion, Verstegan responds with ridicule of his own directed at Harvey.

This is the first full translation of Smith from Latin into English. The accompanying introductory matter, extensive annotations, and class exercises hint at the many scholarly discoveries attainable by researchers who continue the exploration of this elegant work.

The first English self-labeled “tragicomedy” about Octavia’s failed attempts to win back her inconstant husband, Antony, from his Egyptian lover, Cleopatra, and to prevent her brother, Octavius, from waging retaliatory war on Antony and Cleopatra.

This volume presents overwhelming evidence for the re-attribution of the “Samuell Brandon”-bylined The Virtuous Octavia (1598) to Gabriel Harvey. The introduction raises questions about potential attribution leads and revealing relevant sources, which are answered with the evidence in the “Primary Sources” section that includes: three letters exchanged between William Byrd and Harvey while both were teaching at Cambridge, the “Octavia to Anthony” poetic epistle from the Arundel Harington Manuscript, and fragments from Plutarch’s “Mark Antony” chapter. The “Exordium” includes sections that present revealing clues in seemingly mundane details, such as this play’s typesetting. Another introductory section explains how Gerard Langbaine created the first “Brandon” biography solely based on the evidence presented in the Virtuous play, and without any evidence to support that “Brandon” was indeed a real author, and not merely a fictitious pseudonym. The imaginative process Langbaine used to manufacture “Brandon’s” biography is used to explain how scholars have communally arrived at the erroneous current attributions for the texts of the British Renaissance.

A section on Harvey’s literary style explains how the texts Harvey ghostwrote differ from the patterns seen in the other Workshop ghostwriters’ texts. Another section presents visual examples of Harvey’s handwriting in his signed annotations on Domenichi’s Facetie, on “J. Harvey’s” A Discursive Problem Concerning Prophesies, and on Nicolai Machiavelli Princeps, and matches these to the handwriting styles currently assigned to two bylines Harvey ghostwrote under: “Edmund Spenser’s” poem on a copy of Sabinus’ Poëmata and “Elizabeth I’s” letter in Italian to Don Ferdinando de Medici, Grand-Duke of Tuscany. Another section explains how the two dedications to “the virtuous… Mary Thynne” and “the virtuous Lady Lucia Audley” are subversive clues that explain Virtuous Octavia as Harvey’s rebuttal to Percy’s at first anonymous and later “Shakespeare”-bylined Romeo and Juliet (1597). Romeo’s plot has long been suspected to be grounded in the contemporary story of Mary Thynne’s marriage to a member of a rival family, as well as the subsequent violence and litigations over this star-crossed-marriage between Mary’s mother, Lady Audley, and other members of their two clans. And a section on imitation-clusters explains that Virtuous Octavia falls into several sub-genre clusters that turn into an original formula when they are mixed together. These clusters include imitations and translations of the French dramatist Robert Garnier; adaptations of historical plotlines from Plutarch’s Lives; and imitations of Seneca’s tragedies. One of the latter tragedies by Seneca is also called Octavia, and it is about Emperor Nero’s wife of this same name, which had been translated into English by “T. N.” back in 1581. There are also explanation for the seemingly deliberately misdated historical details, such as the mixed references to events that involved M. Marcellus (270-208 BC; 5-time Consul) and G. Marcellus (88-40 BC; 1-time Consul; first husband of Octavia). And sections summarize Virtuous Octavia’s critical reception, give ideas to directors on approaches to its staging, and present an extensive synopsis of its narrative.

This verse tragicomedy begins after the Treaty of Tarentum has been signed, renewing the power-split of Roman territories between three Emperors: Octavia’s brother Octavius is awarded the West, Octavia’s husband Antony is awarded the East, and Lepidus receives Africa. Octavia receives news that Antony is living with Cleopatra. When Octavia attempts to bring military reinforcements and to speak with Antony to convince him to return to her, Antony refuses to allow her to come near him. The news of this infidelity enrages Octavius, who decides it is an affront on his own honor, and uses it as a pretext to wage war against Antony, despite Octavia’s continuing petitions for peace and reconcilement. Civil and foreign wars are raging in the background, but most of the play focuses on Octavia’s philosophical and emotional struggle to comprehend why Antony has chosen to sin, and how she is stoically determined to remain constant and virtuous. In a brief mention in the resolution, Cleopatra causes Antony’s tragic death by tricking him into believing she has killed herself, before indeed killing herself. In the forefront of this conclusion, Octavia explains why she continues to be committed to virtuous conduct, despite all that has happened, and to take care of Antony’s children, even when she has to do so outside of Antony’s house (from which he has forcefully evicted her).

A comparative anthology of all of the variedly-bylined texts in William Byrd’s linguistic-group, with scholarly introductions that solve previously impenetrable literary mysteries.

This is a comparative anthology of William Byrd’s multi-bylined verse, with scholarly introductions to their biographies, borrowings, and generic and structural formulas. The tested Byrd-group includes 30 texts with 29 different bylines. Each of these texts is covered in a separate chronologically-organized section. This anthology includes modernized translations of some of the greatest and the wittiest poetry of the Renaissance. Some of these poems are the most famous English poems ever written, while others have never been modernized before. These poems serve merely as a bridge upon which a very different history of early British poetry and music is reconstructed, through the alternative history of the single ghostwriter behind them. This history begins with two forgeries that are written in an antique Middle English style, while simultaneously imitating Virgil’s Eclogues: “Alexander Barclay’s” claimed translation of Pope Pius II’s Eclogues (1514?) and “John Skelton’s” Eclogues (1521?).

The next attribution mystery solved is how only a single poem assigned to “Walter Rawely of the Middle Temple” (when Raleigh is not known to have been a member of this Inn of Court) in The Steal Glass: A Satire (1576) has snowballed into entire anthologies of poetry that continue to be assigned to “Raleigh” as their “author”. Matthew Lownes assigned the “Edmund Spenser”-byline for the first time in 1611 to the previously anonymous Shepherds’ Calendar (1579) to profit from the popularity of the appended to it Fairy Queen. And “Thomas Watson” has been credited with creating Hekatompathia (1582), when this was his first book-length attempt in English; and this collection has been described as the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, when actually most of these poems have 18-line, instead of 14-line stanzas. Byrd’s self-attributed Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs (1588) includes several lyrics that have since been re-assigned erroneously to other bylines in this collection, such as “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” being re-assigned to “Sir Edward Dyer”. The Byrd chapter also describes the history of his music-licensing monopoly.

The “University Wit” label is reinterpreted as being applied to those who completed paper-degrees with help from ghostwriters, as exemplified in “Robert Greene’s” confession that “his” Pandosto and Menaphon were “so many parricides”, as if these obscene topics were forced upon him without his participation in the authorial process. “Philip Sidney’s” Astrophil and Stella (1591) is showcased as an example of erroneous autobiographical interpretations of minor poetic references; for example, the line “Rich she is” in a sonnet that puns repeatedly on the term “rich”, has been erroneously widely claimed by scholars to prove that Sidney had a prolonged love-interest in “Lady Penelope Devereux Rich”. Similarly, Thomas Lodge’s 1592-3 voyage to South America has been used to claim his special predilection for “sea-studies”, in works such as Phillis (1593), when adoring descriptions of the sea are common across the Byrd-group. Alexander Dyce appears to have assigned the anonymous Licia (1593) to “Giles Fletcher” in a brief note in 1843, using only the evidence of a vague mention of an associated monarch in a text from another member of the “Fletcher” family.

One of the few blatantly fictitiously-bylined Renaissance texts that have not been re-assigned to a famous “Author” is “Henry Willobie’s” Avisa (1594) that invents a non-existent Oxford-affiliated editor called “Hadrian Dorrell”, who confesses to have stolen this book, without “Willobie’s” permission. Even with such blatant evidence of satirical pseudonym usage or potential identity-fraud, scholars have continued to search for names in Oxford’s records that match these bylines. “John Monday’s” Songs and Psalms (1594) has been labeled as one of the earliest madrigal collections. 1594 was the approximate year when Byrd began specializing in providing ghostwriting services for mostly university-educated musicologists, who used these publishing credits to obtain music positions at churches such as the Westminster Abbey, or at Court. An Oxford paper-degree helped “Thomas Morley” become basically the first non-priest Gospeller at the Chapel Royal.

The section on “Morley’s” Ballets (1595) describes the fiscal challenges Morley encountered when the music-monopoly temporarily transitioned from Byrd’s direct control to his. “John Dowland’s” First Book of Songs or Airs (1597) is explained as a tool that helped Dowland obtain an absurdly high 500 daler salary from King Christian IV of Denmark in 1600, and his subsequent equally absurd willingness to settle for a £21 salary in 1612 to become King James I’s Lutenist. And the seemingly innocuous publication of “Michael Cavendish’s” 14 Airs in Tablature to the Lute (1598) is reinterpreted, with previously neglected evidence, as actually a book that was more likely to have been published in 1609, as part of the propaganda campaign supporting Lady Arabella Stuart’s succession to the British throne; the attempt failed and led to Arabella’s death during a hunger-strike in the Tower, and to the closeting of Airs. “William Shakespeare’s” The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) has been dismissed by scholars as only containing a few firmly “Shakespearean” poems, in part because nearly all of its 20 poems had appeared under other bylines. Passionate’s poems 16, 17, 19 and 20 are included, with an explanation of the divergent—“Ignoto”, “Shakespeare” and “Marlowe”—bylines they were instead assigned to in England’s Helicon (1600).

Scholars have previously been at a loss as to identity of the “John Bennet” of the Madrigals (1599), and this mystery is solved with the explanation that this byline is referring to Sir John Bennet (1553-1627) whose £20,000 bail, was in part sponsored with a £1,200 donation from Sir William Byrd. “John Farmer’s” First Set of English Madrigals (1599) is reinterpreted as a byline that appears to have helped Farmer continue collecting on his Organist salary physically appearing for work, between a notice of absenteeism in 1597 and 1608, when the next Organist was hired. “Thomas Weelkes’” Madrigals (1600) is reframed as part of a fraud that managed to advance Weelkes from a menial laborer £2 salary at Winchester to a £15 Organist salary at Chichester. He was hired at Chichester after somehow finding around £30 to attain an Oxford BA in Music in 1602, in a suspicious parallel with the Dean William Thorne of Chichester’s degree-completion from the same school; this climb was followed by one of the most notorious Organist tenures, as Weelkes was repeatedly cited for being an absentee drunkard, and yet Dean Thorne never fired him. “Richard Carlton’s” Madrigals (1601) also appears to be an inoffensive book, before the unnoticed by scholars “Mus 1291/A” is explained as torn-out prefacing pages that had initially puffed two schemers that were involved in the conspiracy of Biron in 1602.

The British Library describes Hand D in “Addition IIc” of Sir Thomas More as “Shakespeare’s only surviving literary manuscript”; this section explains Byrd’s authorship of verse fragments, such as “Addition III”, and Percy’s authorship of the overall majority of this censored play; the various handwritings and linguistic styles in the More manuscript are fully explained. “Michael Drayton’s” Idea (1603-1619) series has been explained as depicting an autobiographical life-long obsession with the unnamed-in-the-text “Anne Goodere”, despite “Drayton’s” apparent split-interest also in a woman called Matilda (1594) and in male lovers in some sprinkled male-pronoun sonnets. “Michael East’s” Second Set of Madrigals (1606) is one of a few music books that credit “Sir Christopher Hatton” as a semi-author due to their authorship at his Ely estate; the many implications of these references are explored. “Thomas Ford’s” Music of Sundry Kinds (1607) serves as a gateway to discuss a group of interrelated Jewish Court musicians, included Joseph Lupo (a potential, though impossible to test, ghostwriter behind the Byrd-group), and open cases of identity-fraud, such as Ford being paid not only his own salary but also £40 for the deceased “John Ballard”.

“William Shakespeare’s” Sonnets (1609) are discussed as one of Byrd’s mathematical experiments, which blatantly do not adhering to a single “English sonnet” formula, as they include deviations such as poems with 15 lines, six couplets, and a double-rhyme-schemes. The poems that have been erroneously assigned to “Robert Devereux” are explained as propaganda to puff his activities as a courtier, when he was actually England’s top profiteer from selling over £70,000 in patronage, knighthoods and various other paper-honors. “Orlando Gibbons’” or “Sir Christopher Hatton’s” First Set of Madrigals and Motets (1612) describes the lawsuit over William Byrd taking over a Cambridge band-leading role previously held by William Gibbons, who in retaliated by beating up Byrd and breaking his instrument. This dispute contributed to Byrd and Harvey’s departure from Cambridge. Byrd’s peaceful life in academia appears to be the period that Byrd was thinking back to in 1612, as he was reflecting on his approaching death in the elegantly tragic “Gibbons’” First songs.

The first verse English translation of the Book of Job, and a fantasy epic poem about the woeful love between the Woodman and the Bear.

Computational, handwriting, and other types of evidence proves that Josuah Sylvester ghostwrote famous dramas and poetry, including the first “William Shakespeare”-bylined book Venus and Adonis (1593), the “Robert Greene”-bylined Orlando Furioso (1594) and the two “Mary Sidney”-assigned translations of Antonie (1592) and Clorinda (1595). Sylvester is also the ghostwriter behind famously puzzling attribution mysteries, such as the authorship of the anonymous “Shakespeare”-apocrypha Locrine (1595), and behind controversial productions such as the “Cyril Tourneur”-bylined Atheist’s Tragedy (1611). All of the famous texts that Sylvester ghostwrote have previously been modernized and annotated.

In contrast, most of Sylvester’s many volumes of self-attributed works have remained unmodernized and thus inaccessible to modern scholars. This neglect is unwarranted since under his own name, Sylvester served as the Poet Laureate between 1606-12 under James I’s eldest son, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. This volume addresses this scholarly gap by translating two works that capture Sylvester’s central authorial tendencies. As “John Vicars’” poetic biography argues, Sylvester was a “Christian-Israelite” or a Jew who converted to Christianity, which caused his exile from his native England and his early death abroad. Sylvester’s passion for his Jewish heritage is blatant in the percentage of texts in his group that are based on books in the Old Testament, including the “George Peele”-bylined Love of King David (1599) and the “R. V.”-bylined Odes in Imitation of the Seven Penitential Psalms (1601). This volume presents the first Modern English translation of the only verse Early Modern English translation of the Book of Job. The original Hebrew version’s dialogue is in verse, so that it can be sung or recited during services, and yet there still have not been any scholarly attempts to translate the Old Testament, from versions such as the Verstegan and Harvey-ghostwritten King James Bible, into verse to better approximate this original lyrical structure. Sylvester precisely translates all of the lines and chapters of Job, adding detailed embellishments for dramatic tension and realism. In the narrative, God is challenged by Lucifer to test if Job would remain loyal to God even if he lost his wealth and other blessings; God accepts the challenge and deprives Job of all of his possessions, his family, as well as his health. Job is devastated, but he remains humble and continues to have faith in God. Job’s faith is further challenged by extensive lectures from his friends, who accuse him of suffering because God has judged him to be sinful and in need of punishment.

Sylvester also specialized in dreamlike rewriting and remixing of myths from different cultures, as he does in Orlando Furioso, where the narrative leaps between Africa and India, and warfare leads Orlando to go insane. The title-page of Sylvester’s Woodman’s Bear warns readers of a similar trajectory with the epithet: “everybody goes mad once”. In this epic, Greco-Roman-inspired, mythological rewriting, a Woodman has proven to be uniquely resistant to Cupid’s love-arrows, so Cupid disguises himself in a Bear and makes both the Bear and the Woodman fall into desperate love for each other, out of which the Woodman only escape with a magic potion. Woodman’s Bear has been broadly claimed to have been Sylvester’s autobiographical account of a failed courtship, but the analysis across this volume reaches different conclusions and raises ideas for further inquiry.

A fragmentary comedy about the corruption of the judicial and monarchical systems in charge of granting aristocratic titles based on appearance instead of merit.

This comedy includes several devices that are uniquely typical of Jonson’s authorial style, including the extraordinary number of five marriages in the resolution, and the intricate descriptions of the significance of outward appearance (in dance, clothing, makeup and gossip) in distinguishing anybody in Britain as superior or inferior. At the onset of the plot, Sir William is hoping to marry the wealthy-widow, Lady Beaufield, to gain access to her fortune. In parallel, Simpleton’s wealthy-widow Mother is hoping to marry a knight so she can gain the aristocratic title of a Lady. Meanwhile, Simpleton is courting Beaufield’s daughter, Lucy, who clearly favors her other suitor, Newman. Simpleton devises several schemes to win an advantage by hiring jeerers to ridicule Newman, as well as hiring Voluble to give Newman a false prophecy to manipulate him toward whoring and drinking. By the end, Simpleton even attempts to kidnap Lucy to force her into marriage.

In the background of these various courtships, the French dance teacher, Galliard, is tutoring his wealthy students in dance. And Voluble and Nice are teaching proper manners, dress and other outward signs of aristocratic breeding in their Female Academy. These seemingly silly and pretty tropes are clouding the fact that Galliard confesses he has escaped being executed for attempting to overthrow the French King in 1632, and Voluble is repeatedly accused of witchcraft. More importantly, the narrative explains the corrupt process that was involved in bribing judges and administrators into allowing a wealthy gentry landowner, like Mother, to purchase her way into the aristocracy through a vacant baronet title. Mother merely has to choose between going through the ladyfying schooling herself, or completely negating her burden by hiring an actress, such as Nice (the chambermaid), to pretend to be her in public appearances. The dialogue refers to several people who were granted aristocratic titles by this corrupt process, starting with the 1st Lord of Lorne of Scotland in 1439, and as late as the Duke of Buckingham in 1623. Many of the contextual references mention the Percys’ Northumberland estate’s Scottish neighbors, as well as other Percy-associated places and people in the Buckingham Palace and Newcastle; thus, this play is likely to have been closeted by Percy until after his death because Jonson was criticizing the Percys’ involvement in these title-purchasing schemes.

Percy (as the primary ghostwriter) and Jonson (as the secondary) had written about knighthood-purchasing and James I’s trade in titles to his Scottish and Scottish-adjacent comrades in Eastward Ho! These frank confessions about corruption in the monarchy led to Jonson’s temporary imprisonment in 1605. This volume includes translations of all of Jonson’s authentic letters. These include the letter he wrote in 1605, during this Eastward imprisonment, wherein Jonson asks Percy to help free him from being implicated in seditious remarks that he claims were Percy’s portion of the composition. The annotations across Variety provide a myriad of scholarly revelations, supported with precise evidence. One of these is new proof for the misdating for several antique-like forgeries of broadsheet ballads. Introductory sections explain why this play has been mis-attributed to “William Cavendish”, and the complex biographical overlaps between the Jonson and “John Donne” bylines and handwriting styles. The historical introduction to the types of dance-instructors Variety is satirizing is assisted by the translation from French into English of fragments from Apologie de la Danse or Apology for the Dance by “Par F. de Lauze” (1623).

The first accurate quantitative re-attribution of all central texts of the British Renaissance. Describes and applies the first unbiased and accurate method of computational-linguistics authorial-attribution. Covers 284 texts with 7,832,156 words, 104 authorial bylines, a range of genres, and a timespan between 1560 and 1662. Includes helpful diagrams that visually show the quantitative-matches and the identical most-frequent phrases between the texts in each linguistic-signature-group. Detailed chronologies for each of the six ghostwriters and the bylines they wrote under, including their dates of birth, death, publications, and other biographical markers that explain why each of them was the only logical attribution. A full bibliography of the 284 tested texts. All of the raw and processed data, not only in summary-tables inside of the book, but also in-full on a publicly-accessible website: https://github.com/faktorovich/Attribution. One table includes all of the data from the first-edition title-pages (byline, printer, bookseller, date, proverbs), and the first-performance (date, troupe). A table on structural elements across all “Shakespeare”-bylined texts summarizes their plot-movements, character-types, settings, slang-usage, primary sources, and poetic design (percentage of rhyme and hendiadys). To explain why these are the first truly accurate re-attributions, numerous reasons for discrediting previous attribution claims are provided throughout. Re-Attribution of the British Renaissance Corpus describes a newly invented for this study computational-linguistics authorial-attribution method and applies it and several other approaches to the central texts of the British Renaissance. All of the attribution steps are described precisely to give readers replicable instructions on how they can apply them to any text from any period that they are interested in determining an attribution for. This method can be applied to solving criminal linguistic mysteries such as who wrote the Unabomber Manifesto, or theological mysteries such as if any of the Dead Sea Scrolls might have been forged by a modern author. This method is uniquely accurate because it uses 27 different quantitative tests that measure a text’s dimensions and its similarity or divergence to other texts automatically, without the statisticians being able to skew the outcome by altering the experiment’s analytical design. Re-Attribution guides researchers not only on how to perform the basic calculations, but also how to perform the biographical and documentary research to derive who among the potential bylines in a single signature-group is the ghostwriter, while the others are merely ghostwriter-contractors or pseudonyms. Reliable accuracy is achieved by also performing other types of attribution tests to check if these alternative approaches validate or contradict the 27-tests’ findings. Non-quantitative tests discussed include deciphering the hidden implications of contemporary pufferies, as well as comparing structural elements such as characters, plot, and element borrowings. Part II presents a revised version of the history of the birth of the theater in Britain by reviewing forensic accounting evidence in Philip Henslowe’s Diary, and the documented history of homicidal lending practices and government corruption connected with troupes and theaters. Parts III-VIII explain precisely how this series derived that the British Renaissance was ghostwritten by only six linguistic-signatures: Richard Verstegan, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, Benjamin Jonson, William Byrd and William Percy. The parts on each of these ghostwriters, not only explain how their biographies fit with the timelines of the texts being attributed to them, but also provide various types of evidence that explains their motives for ghostwriting. And Part IX returns for an intricate analysis of a few pseudonyms or ghostwriting-contractors who were uniquely difficult to exclude as potential ghostwriters; in parallel, these chapters question the reasons these individuals would have needed to purchase ghostwriting services.

Like his earlier book, Before I Forget, 80 Poems is the compilation of a life. The number of poems is significant, Jacobs is at once celebrating and lamenting his 80th birthday. Consistent with that, the poems among the 80 focus on the function and content of memory, and the uncertainty of life, particularly at advanced age. Throughout the book there is a spiritual tone of faith in the goodness of life. In 1962 Lloyd Jacobs was honorably discharged after four years of active duty in The United States Marine Corps. After undergraduate study at Miami University of Ohio, Jacobs attended The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and postdoctoral study at three institutions. He practiced Surgery for twenty years, becoming Professor of Surgery at The University of Michigan. He was appointed President of The Medical College of Ohio in 2003 and became president of the combined institution when the Medical College merged into The University of Toledo. He served in this role until 2014. At that time, he renewed his commitment to poetry and now writes poetry daily.

Jory Post has been an educator and writer for 40 years as well as making handmade books and journals with his wife, Karen, as JoKa Press. He participates in a playwriting group, a fiction writing group, and a poetry workshop with Santa Cruz County poet laureate, Danusha Laméris. He is the cofounder and editor of phren-z, an online literary magazine, serving Santa Cruz County writers for 8 years. His fiction and poetry have been published in Catamaran Literary Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Porter Gulch Review, Red Wheelbarrow, 82 Review, and upcoming in The Sun. Of Two Minds is the second in a trilogy of poetry books dedicated to the thoughts and meanderings of a born-again poet who carries with him not only a desire to hunt and gather and collect everything he can but also a persistent pancreatic tumor that provides a hauntingly realistic filter through which to observe the world and the people and animals that inhabit it. “More than any book I can think of, Jory Post’s prose poetry collections incant the brief and brilliant present moment. Illness is the dark side of the dharma of now, and Post takes us along to the oncologist and the operating room while also surging through days with the artist’s eye, missing no bloom or bowl of oatmeal or vicarious mountain hike. Each poem sends out a blinking light that sets the next one in motion, and the work becomes a remarkable record of the way a mind recovers the pieces of a life as a daily practice, the way it multiplies and holds an accordion of thought. In these compressed narratives befitting of urgency, he floats above canyons, is a burning star, a search light, beckoning us to make a bright spectacle of ourselves, one more time. Of Two Minds is an invitation, an ephemera room, a memory garden, a singular moment where a cabinet of surprise awaits.” —Jennifer K. Sweeney “Jory’s second book of poems astonishes with the lightness with which it lands on heavy subjects. It takes the smallest observations of the world—the medical rigamarole of chemo treatments, unusual number correspondences, overhead phrases, an invasion of butterflies, French toast with real maple syrup at the Silver Spur, a friend’s tomatoes, seeing faces in the pot de crème—and turns them to see what light they’ll refract. These poems are fearless, whimsical, and deeply spiritual. For instance, ‘Buzz,’ starts as a meditation on a saw’s new gizmos, invented to protect life, turns towards one thing the saw might make, and then dismantles it: ‘For my next project, I’ll take the coffin I’ve been imagining, cut it into small strips. Carve matchsticks. Add sulfur tips. Burn my future into something new.’ Such imaginative leaps surprise with the happy rightness of their discoveries. These poems face death but celebrate life, with all its quirky, quotidian joys, pulling us in to celebrate what writing can conjure—both in the speaker, and in all of us willing to slow down and listen. Dip in. Travel with Jory. His words hold us. Together.” —David Allen Sullivan, Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz county “In Jory Post’s Of Two Minds everyday objects and animals set the poet’s mind in motion, leaping from memories to the measurements of the body to the stories of the stars. This collection of prose poems knows how to savor the repetitions of the daily. Acutely aware of time and its passage, these poems remind us to ‘take a look inside, watch the then, now and later.’ Post is a collector who searches through flea markets and conversations and gives everything—bright or dull, new or used, present or timeless—a second look.” —Traci Brimhall

This collection is all about the magic of ordinary things, darks clouds and silver linings, the beautiful things found in both the natural and the manmade world. The point of writing, for me, has always been to transport me to a time or place, and to share those times and places with those who read my work. Poems from this collection have appeared in publications around the world, including Art:Mag, Spindrifter, and Palace Corbie. Holly Day has worked as a freelance writer for over 30 years, with over 7,000 published poems, short stories, and articles and 40 books and chapbooks. Her writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, an Isaac Asimov Award, a 49th Parallel Prize, nineteen Pushcart awards, five Best of the Net awards, and a Rhysling Award, and she has received two Midwest Writer’s Grants, a Plainsongs Award, a Sam Ragan Prize for Poetry, and a Dwarf Star Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

While all readers want to be entertained and captivated by stories that sing, this collection of five novellas, all set in the deserts of the American Southwest, are stories that zing. A zinger is an amusing remark, and even more than that, refers to an outstanding person or thing. Come on this journey that stretches from the shores of the ill-fated Salton Sea of Southern California, all the way to greed riddled Las Vegas, Nevada, and every arid region in between. This cast of characters that ranges from the lowly and destitute to the richest of the rich real estate developers also includes guerilla marijuana growers, star crossed lovers, and professional gamblers. Whether the conniving or the innocent, all are weaved together by one thread of commonality: they are subject to the whims of a harsh desert environment that paradoxically torments and nourishes them at every turn. John C. Krieg is a retired landscape architect and land planner who formerly practiced in Arizona, California, and Nevada. He is also retired from the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) where he was a certified arborist. Krieg currently holds seven active categories of California state contracting licenses, including the highest category of Class A General Engineering. He has written a college textbook entitled Desert Landscape Architecture (1999, CRC Press). John has had pieces published in A Gathering of the Tribes, Alternating Current, Blue Mountain Review, Clark Street Review, Conceit, Homestead Review, Line Rider Press, LOL Comedy, Lucky Jefferson, Oddball Magazine, Palm Springs Life, Pandemonium, Pegasus, Pen and Pendulum, Saint Ann’s Review, Squawk Back, The Courtship of Winds, The Mindful Word, The Writing Disorder, and Wilderness House Literary Review. In conjunction with filmmaker/photographer Charles Sappington, John has completed a two-part documentary film entitled Landscape Architecture: The Next Generation (2010). In some underground circles, John is considered a master grower of marijuana and holds as a lifelong goal the desire to see marijuana federally legalized. Nothing else will do. To that end he has two books coming out in 2020 from Red Dashboard LLC Publications: More Marijuana Tales and It’s Just Marijuana.

This is Jason Holt’s first book of new poems in five years. Along with his usual penchants for wordplay and rhythm, for exploring the tensions between reality and possibility, intellect and emotion, hope and despair, Holt also (for the first time) titles his poems throughout—in ways that stress the context-sensitivity of our encounters with meaning in life as on the page. Jason Holt lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia with his wife Megan and their cats Ruby and Jasper. He is a philosopher and Professor in the School of Kinesiology at Acadia University. He is the author of over a dozen literary and academic books, and his essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poetry books include Inversed (2014) and Up Against Beyond: Selected Poems, 1994-2017 (2017), also published by Anaphora.

A collection of seven of Dr. Pandey’s essays on contemporary fiction and poetry, written between 2014 and 2019. They either developed out of his Doctorate of Philosophy dissertation or cover subjects that fascinate him. The topics explored include: Evolutions in Magical Realism in America and India, the Problem of Voice in some of Sylvia Plath’s Poems, the Post-Modern Hero as conceived by Michael Ondaatje and Gautam Malkani, the Masculine World of The Kite Runner, Narrative Skills in Londonstani, the Post-Truth World in relation to Culture and Language, and the Biographical and Autobiographical in poems by Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. These essays are intended to assist college students with furthering their understanding of literature. They might also interest a general reader of literary texts. Dr. Abhimanyu Pandey is teaching as a Guest Faculty in the Department of English & MEL at the University of Allahabad. He got his doctoral degree in Contemporary Multicultural Fiction in June 2018. He has worked and published on Multiculturalism, Contemporary Literary Theories, Gender, Shakespeare, Tagore, Kamala Markandaya, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje, Gautam Malkani, Khaled Hosseini, Robin Gregory and others. His varied scholarly articles have been published in national and international journals.

This is a compilation of elegies in the memory of Ravi Singh’s deceased son, Yuvaraaj Singh, who passed away prematurely at the age of twenty on October 30, 2016, the Diwali night which is the Hindu festival of lights and crackers. Though these poems center around a single theme, they can be roughly divided into four categories. First category, which comprise the major part, are an expression of Everlasting love for a son. The second category comprises a dialogue with the Almighty. In the third part, Ravi has brought in Elvis, his Labrador, whom he adopted after the demise of his son. The fourth category is again an expression of anguish where imagination is at play and references have been made to nature in the form of trees, oceans, and skies. These poems are an attempt to immortalize a beloved son. Ravi Pratap Singh is a Professor of Political Science in Allahabad Degree College, University of Allahabad (Prayagraj), Uttar Pradesh, India. He has been teaching for twenty-eight years and his specialization is in International Relations. He has published many research papers in reputed national and international journals. Apart from his subject, he has a passion for English Literature and Poetry. This is his first compilation of poems in elegiac form. You can contact Ravi at RPSingh2164@gmail.com. Check out the book trailer: https://vimeo.com/332057982

Raefe and Lina are two twenty-somethings trying to start a life in the mid-21st century. He’s beset by crippling migraines, she’s trying to outpace the horrors of the genocide she escaped as a child. Their lives are upended by floods that turn 10 million people on the East Coast into refugees. But all is not lost. Twenty light years away, a group of ancient and advanced alien civilizations known as the Guardians works to nudge intelligent life in the galaxy past the point of self-destruction that humans are teetering on. They realize that Raefe’s headaches stem from his particularly strong empathic nature, a clue that can be the key to human survival. They make contact with Raefe and begin to show him how to use those powers for good. But all is not well among the aliens either. A rogue Guardian seizes control of the group, perverting its aims and sabotaging their mission on Earth. What follows is a 30-year adventure in which Raefe and Lina ultimately lead a billion refugees around the world to gradually become a new kind of nation, with new kinds of economic and social relationships. Inside the Guardians, Diver and her allies lead a guerrilla campaign to restore the group to its mission and continue to mentor Earth. It all comes to a head in 2082 in an inspiring showdown that changes history forever. “An imaginative and inspiring look at how we might meet the challenge of climate change and escalating social dissolution. If only everyone in Washington would read it!” —Stanley Weisser, Screen Writer for the critically acclaimed Wall Street, W, Project X and others Mark Schlack is a Boston-area journalist who has covered science and technology for more than 30 years. He’s been following climate science, advanced physics, evolutionary biology and the chaos of American politics, all of which play a role in Replay Earth.

Lucinda Thoso, the new Murder Beat reporter, joins the busy newsroom of Cherub Daily. She is immediately thrust into the heart of Los Angeles’ gangs, vindictive lovers, corrupt bureaucracy, unintended bloodshed, and convoluted conspiracies. The hunt for the truth becomes personal when Lucinda receives a cryptic newspaper-clipping note in her own mailbox at Cherub that warns of an impending murder. When Lucinda arrives, the threat is proven true: the slashed body of a social worker is an unusual victim that shocks the city. Why would a killer leave a note inviting the discovery? Who would want to kill a lonely caseworker in her home, and yet leave her expensive possessions? Just as answers begin emerging, Lucinda and her police contact, Detective Clovis Pesupetep, are faced with a new gruesome murder of an administrative nurse. With her decades of experience with the macabre, Lucinda finds clues where a slew of techs and detectives fail to see them. On top of their oversights, Clovis’ partner, Didier, resists each clue Lucinda uncovers, blocking her progress. Despite great strides, Clovis and Lucinda discover that the realities of crime investigation within the LAPD are such that only subterfuge can lead to the hidden truth. Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She taught college English for three years before focusing entirely on publishing. She has a PhD in English Literature. She published two scholarly books: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (McFarland, 2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (McFarland, 2014). She published two additional scholarly books with Anaphora: Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing: Mimicking Masculinity and Femininity and Wendell Berry’s New Agrarianism and Beyond. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and the Brown University research fellowships.

Everyone will readily agree that overcoming a mental illness is absolutely essential to be happy in life. This book takes it a step further, emphasizing that even Mind Problems, the more common psychological predicaments, though well below the clinical bar, can affect a person’s thinking, behavior and wellbeing in profoundly negative ways and bring down the structure of harmony and health. The book is intended to educate the public on the importance of overcoming these problems by employing self-help strategies, psychotherapy, and, if needed, taking medications. For those concerned with overvaluing life’s mundane problems, thus trivializing the real medical disorders, there are plenty of thought-provoking evidence throughout the book, to calm their nerves. C.J. Jos, M.D. is board-certified physician trained in Medicine, Neurology and Psychiatry, and currently a Professor at St Louis University, St Louis and a Medical Director at COMTREA, a large non-profit organization treating the ill children and adults. Dr. Jos is ideally suited to write this book, since during his long professional career, he has witnessed the limitations of Diagnostic Manuals and the intrinsic power of Mind Problems to erupt and disrupt human lives.

Nevin Montgomery, a young lawyer with a prestigious Boston law firm, is dispatched to the Cape Cod compound of Andrew Windsor, the most acclaimed artist in America, to update Windsor’s will. Nevin arrives to the news that a woman who had secretly modeled for Windsor for decades has been found dead. Nevin, who is battling a hidden drug addiction, is asked to remain at the Windsor compound to complete his assignment because the health of his law firm’s most famous client is deteriorating rapidly. Nevin is introduced to the secretive art world, and he becomes smitten along the way with Catina Cruz, a beautiful young Portuguese-American woman he meets at the compound. Nevin eventually learns that Catina models for James Windsor, Andrew Windsor’s son. James is a painter in his own right, albeit not nearly of the stature of his father. When Andrew Windsor finally dies, a will contest ensues. At Andrew’s request, Nevin had cut Andrew’s wife and son out of the will and they challenge the will in court. Nevin is instructed by his law firm to defend the will, but he has some further investigating to do before he can: investigating that reveals more than he ever wanted to know about the woman he has come to love… and about himself. “The Art of the Law is a page-turning murder mystery and legal thriller that rises above the genre’s conventions to also be a deft exploration of class-struggles, family and redemption. I was hooked from the first page, and still thinking about what I’d read when I finished the last.” —Adam Mitzner, author of Never Goodbye “In The Art of the Law, author Scott Douglas Gerber has come up with a legal thriller that truly is… a thriller, a will contest that proves to be an extraordinary contest of… wills, flawed ones at that.” —Ronald S. Barak, author of The Puppet Master and The Amendment Killer, Brooks/Lotello thrillers “The Art of the Law is that unusual combination of a page-turner and an accurate picture of what lawyers do in real life. Scott Douglas Gerber has the experience to walk you straight into the world of a death-watch estate planner who faces an explosive will contest at the same time that he’s trying to keep from losing everything that matters to him.” —David L. Crump, John B. Neibel Professor of Law, The University of Houston Law Center, and author of The Emerald Rose: A Courtroom Novel Scott Douglas Gerber is a law professor at Ohio Northern University and an associated scholar at Brown University’s Political Theory Project. His eight previous books include, most recently, Mr. Justice: A Novel.

Charlton is born into slavery on a South Carolina plantation in 1837. Belle, the master’s daughter, intervenes to save the tiny baby’s life when her father contemplates killing off the runt. Belle’s relationship with Charlton progresses from nurturer to teacher to friend to childhood love. She promises to marry him if she can use the words of the Declaration of Independence to convince their master that Charlton has rights. These events sets him on an irrevocable course to understanding the vicious and unjust world of the American South, where innocent childhood dreams lead to unthinkable cruelty. Dan Cassenti is the author of The Mental Representation of Goals (VDM-Verlag), a non-fiction research study. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Penn State and uses the insights from his education to give his characters mental depth and richness. He lives in Maryland, the home state of his two greatest heroes, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who risked their lives to defend the rights of others.

An invitation to discover poetry in the everyday experience. Following in the footsteps of David Lehman’s The Daily Mirror, Frank O’Hara, and Emily Dickinson, this collection offers a poetic journal crafted out of life. Began in 2016 in an aqua notebook, this book of poetry chronicles one year. Locating the poetry and tiny moments of transcendence in our commonplace existence, Cotter crafts poetry from life, revealing the strange beauty that often exists in our daily lives. Approachable, conversational, and immediate, this collection offers poems that are at times spontaneous, but always carefully crafted. Locating moments of real joy and peace, Cotter illuminates our lives, asking us to look carefully for the poetic that’s often in plain sight. She shows us how the smallest moments can elevate and inspire us. She writes, “Tonight I discovered what I discover / Each day: all along I wanted this / Exact miraculous thing.” These poems will challenge and inspire you. Tasha Cotter is the author of the poetry collection Some Churches (Gold Wake Press, 2013) and the chapbooks That Bird Your Heart (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Girl in the Cave (Tree Light Books, 2016). Winner of the 2015 Delphi Poetry Series, her work has appeared in journals such as Contrary Magazine, NANO fiction, and Thrush. A graduate of the University of Kentucky and the Bluegrass Writers Studio, she is included in the 2018-2019 Kentucky Humanities Speakers Bureau. A recipient of grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Kentucky Center, and the University of Kentucky Women’s Forum, she makes her home in Lexington, Kentucky where she works in higher education and serves as the president-elect of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. You can find her online at http://www.tashacotter.com.

Roman Garreis was born in the 1950’s in Philadelphia, PA amidst the energy of turbulent change and civil unrest. He grew up as the oldest child of two and found the depth of his heart and soul in the energy of the hippie subculture of the 60’s and was heavily influenced by and idolized such artists as the Rolling Stones, The Doors, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the Beatles. Whispers of an Old Soul: Between these energies Roman’s fundamental ethos of world peace, love and happiness formed—including harmony with nature, communal living and artistic experimentation. Whispers of an Old Soul is an expression of these energies as experienced on the many paths walked and through the very caring, loving interaction of those whose paths were crossed.

The story of a man turning to stone. Following his young son’s death, Henry Dunstan yearns to become insentient and impervious to sorrow. He turns to boulders, marble, and flint to gain wisdom, guided by a decades-old vision he experienced while visiting with a carnival psychic in St. Louis. Michael Smith is a writer and Francophile residing in Salt Lake City, Utah. His short works of fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Hopper, The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles, The Baltimore Review, The Delmarva Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Drunk Monkeys, Blue Lake Review, and other literary journals. Michael is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee.

The body is in pain. So around the world the massage industry is booming, from ubiquitous airport massage bars and upscale spas to risqué outcall and down-market parlors. Enter into these pages massage therapist Ingrid Swanson’s mission to open a grandiose health spa, Massage World, against the wishes of a wild parlor lord. The all-too cunning antagonist Jack Cobb dispatches a corrupt undercover vice detective to solicit unlawful massages transcribed in delirious police reports. Cobb goes on to manipulate zany media coverage, which incites a rollicking raid of the premises and neighborhood organizations to picket and protest so he can take over Massage World. Until the cavalry comes in the form of a lesbian biker gang… The war of the sexes writ large. Eric Madeen’s writings have appeared in such diverse publications as Time, Asia Week, The East, Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo Journal, Kyoto Journal, Mississippi Review, Japanophile and All Nippon Airways’ WINGSPAN, to which he contributed several feature stories. His first novel, Tanga, was inspired by a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Gabon, Africa and garnered nominations for AWP and L.A. Arts Council awards. He is currently associate professor of modern American literature at Tokyo City University and adjunct professor at Keio University. His website is at ericmadeen.com.

Within lies a shakeup of the traditional introductory literature course textbook formula, with a unique perspective on literature. You will find some theories that have not even been published in scholarly journals before, like the examination of the merchants’ language that Swift uses to disguise his meaning. Each of the sections on fiction, drama and poetry provides the most essential commentary, definitions and concepts. The readings include three short stories from Edgar Allan Poe, novel segments from Don Quixote, and Gulliver’s Travels, various poems, and a classic Greek play, Lysistrata. The uniting elements in these pieces are satire, sarcasm, and other forms of humor. This dense political, social and cultural content should inspire students with questions and a desire to write about it. Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. Previously, she taught for over four years at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014). She edits and writes for the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and the Cinematic Codes Review. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.

Lily Chaidee was never at home with herself, her family, or her geography, and as a hybrid-Asian growing up in the Texas Panhandle during the 1960’s, she was ill-equipped to face the challenges that would inevitably come. Amarillo, an inhospitable place for an ethnically diverse family, was only part of the problem. Mental illness, sexual predation, addiction, and hypocrisy lay formidable difficulties in her path. But Lily was smart, and smart people often find ways to triumph over horrific circumstances. Even if she could claim her joy, sometimes the worst enemy dwells within. Lily must seek her peace and her place in order to rise above the things that bind her. Lily Lewis is a warrior in the battle against ignorance and injustice both in the classroom and in the community. She is active in catalyzing positive change and strives to leave the world a better place. Three extraordinary children and four luminescent grandchildren illuminate her path and provide joy. World travel, the arts, great food, and music are sources of delight, and the deep blue sea remains her place of power, awe, and wonder. She is a survivor, living one day at a time, with her life partner and two cats, Sophie and Sylvester.

Research writing courses in colleges across the world have a tendency to be dull, and similar to each other. They typically review the elements of the research paper and ask students to draft formulaic papers that fit the set guidelines. There have been plenty of textbooks written for these classes that repeat nearly identical information. This market is definitely over-saturated. One alternative is a Research Writing class that focuses on audio-visual entertainment (such as film or music) and other cultural artifacts, as well as diversity-related topics. This class offers more engaging topics for research than the repeating political or social topics that fit the formula of a traditional college research writing class. Students are likely to be more interested in researching films they watch for fun than dusty topics they are not personally invested in. More colleges are likely to start teaching these types of classes especially with help from textbooks like this one that suits this curriculum. American students are reading less, and watching media more, a class that accepts this shift can embrace the students’ preferences, stimulating their imagination and desire to learn. This textbook combines the rigor of a Research Writing class with the imaginative and culturally significant realm of Cultural Studies. Concepts that are typically discussed in Research Writing textbooks, like close reading, thesis statement, and clichés, are covered in full. Complex rhetorical concepts are explained simply and fully. Additionally, the elements of a proper argument are not only digested for students, but are also assisted with discussions of political, economic, social and other types of cultural concepts such as communism or feminism. Teachers who are looking for ideas to inspire their plans, will find assignments across the book to utilize. This book is deliberately short and meant to be a cheap paperback, so that it can be utilized as a quick reference guide and idea book for cultural studies related topics (if not as the primary textbook for a course that entirely combines Research Writing with Cultural Studies). Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. Previously, she taught for over four years at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014). She edits and writes for the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and the Cinematic Codes Review. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.

Military contractor, Abram Jacobson, is tasked with returning to the third dimension to prevent the Red Mage from crossing sides and obliterating all life in the seven dimensions. Unlike his first visit to the Third, Abram is assigned a small team to assist him. They cross over but barely a day goes by before his first teammate dies. Disaster follows Abram and his team at every turn, and certain doom looms on the horizon when they are told the Red Mage has already crossed to their home. Abram is granted precious little time to bathe in the magical arts of the Third in an attempt to save all life in the aggregate dimensions. Despite his newfound abilities, he soon realizes that the Red Mage’s forces are too powerful to defeat using righteous tactics alone. With everything he values in jeopardy, Abram’s darker side surfaces, demonstrating that he is capable of far viler things than he had ever imagined. Jeremie Guy graduated from Towson University with an English degree and a creative writing minor. He has written and edited freelance for a number of organizations, and he sometimes dabbles as a ghostwriter for fiction and nonfiction. He has won first place in a handful of writing contests, and his creative works have appeared in a variety of publications, including an appearance in Earthbound Fiction’s short story anthology Dark Stars. He is a member of Lambda Iota Tau, international literary honors society.

Iconoclastic inventor, Al Sharpe, loves his canyon home in Southern California’s Saint Angel Valley. He builds his teenage daughter a tree house in a giant oak and invents the Sharpe Smoke Scrubber to detoxify wood smoke. When wealthy developer Ches Noonan, a fellow member of the Desert Green Lawn Association, sets out to fill the valley with houses and appropriate its precious water supply to fill swimming pools during California’s worst drought, Al and his quixotic pals rebel. In the Realty Revenge, they halt development through madcap high jinks and the help of local Indians, ancient demon Tahquitz, and mother nature. Welcome to Saint Angel is a dead-serious comedy about development gone mad and townsfolk’s attempts to protect their rural Arcadia from bulldozers and climate change deniers. Part environmental fiction, part social satire, it speaks to exurban sprawl and the heedless development of fragile natural areas and to the power of communal resistance in the face of calamity. “Every time we allow ourselves to settle back into the deep currents of William Luvaas’ Welcome to Saint Angel, imagining we see what he’s doing and where he’s going, we find ourselves in new waters, trying to master different strokes. And what an amazing ride this accomplished writer takes us on—through heartache and mystery, laughter and sweet vengeance. Beyond everything, he makes us truly welcome, welcome inside an endangered environment that asks from us what so many here in Saint Angel have to offer. Without ever hectoring us, Luvaas reforms our thoughts and our capacities to fit a world both harder and more loving than we had previously ever supposed. It is a word badly overused, but this novel really is the product of a true brilliance.” —Jim Kincaid, Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California William Luvaas has published three novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach, Going Under, and Beneath The Coyote Hills, and two story collections, A Working Man’s Apocrypha and Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle, The Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, first place in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest, The Ledge Magazine’s Fiction Contest, and Fiction Network’s 2nd National Fiction Competition. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Antioch Review, The American Fiction Anthology, ¬Glimmer Train, Grain Mag., North American Review, The Sun, Texas Review, The Village Voice and The Washington Post Book World. He has taught writing at San Diego State University, U.C. Riverside, and The Writers Voice in New York, and is Online Fiction Editor for Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. Luvaas lives in Los Angeles with his wife Lucinda, an artist and film maker. Website: www.williamluvaas.com.

Barbi Leifert is a painter and dancer and was both of these from a very young age. Growing up in New York, the best of both of those worlds were available to her. She studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum and dance under the innovators and masters of this art in New York City. She was awarded scholarships to California state university, Skidmore College and the new school of social research. After university she performed as a dancer and visual artist in SoHo in downtown Manhattan in Avantgarde productions that were both original. She moved west and focused on painting and had success with California galleries. National awards and accolades followed. This work deals with creating the connection of humans and animals to nature by placing them in motion in abstracted landscapes where the figure merges with their environment. In this new series, Moving Meditations, creates this symbiotic connection. There is a vibration that unites every living thing and she uses color to raise that awareness. She blends the moving figures with the changing landscape to signify our close affiliation with it and that we are all going to change together. After a lifetime of dance, as a painter, Leifert focuses on figures to incorporate an aesthetic of movement with the line it draws in space.

The poems explore states of consciousness triggered by the author’s connections to the land where he resides in Central Vermont and the cityscapes that he is intimate with in Brooklyn, New York. They are also informed by his long-time practices of zazen meditation and t’ai chi and his ongoing study of western and eastern philosophy and psychology. Peter Schneider is a poet and psychotherapist who lives in Brooklyn, NY and Rochester, VT. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AMP: The Journal of Digital Literature (Hofstra University); The Buddhist Poetry Review; Mobius: The Journal of Social Change; The Shot-glass Journal; Kairos; and in the broadside collection, A Midnight Snack. His MFA is from Columbia University School of the Arts and his PhD is in clinical psychology from New York University.

After his much-acclaimed short story collection Dangerous Obsessions, which had war as a common background, Belgian/Flemish author Van Laerhoven surprises again with five stories that shed piercing light on our most self-destructive impulses. A steroid-spiked Syrian mercenary of Bashar-al-Assad is determined to become a “martyr,” after the loss of his right arm by “friendly fire.” A retired London tube-driver becomes obsessed by his desire to revenge the vicious killing of his parents in Croatia on his half-nephew. A Belgian travel-writer gets entangled in the madness of the Kosovo-war during the nineties and witnesses its dramatic consequences many years later in New York. A jaded art brut painter in Brussels betrays his best friend, a Rwandese art forger, to the Mafia, opening the door to guilt, lust, and murder. A born liar with the nickname Johnny di Machio seeks in the seventies, in Poona, India, salvation in Bhagwan’s ashram for his sexual problems, but gets trapped in a maze of long hidden violence. Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World (1932): “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly— they’ll go through anything.” This is precisely what Van Laerhoven does, relentlessly exposing our inner solitude and voracious egos. Heart Fever goes way beyond heartache. YouTube Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/LRf6ujQPJB8 “Not recommended for a read on public transport unless you don’t mind crying in public.” —Sarah Jackson in 2016 Book Reviews “Each story is a lot more than just a tale; they are all profound studies of the human soul.” —David Ben Efraim in Quick Book Reviews “Van Laerhoven writes about the cold and the cruel aspects of human nature with unflinching truth.” —Hubert O’ Hearn in The 2015 Books of the Year: San Diego Book Review Bob Van Laerhoven: a fulltime Belgian/Flemish author, Laerhoven published more than 35 books in Holland and Belgium. Some of his literary work is published in French, English, Italian, and Russian. Three times finalist of the Hercule Poirot Prize for best mystery novel of the year with the novels Djinn, The Finger of God, and Return to Hiroshima. Winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize for Baudelaire’s Revenge, which also won the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category “mystery/suspense.” His collection of short stories Dangerous Obsessions, first published by The Anaphora Literary Press in 2015, was hailed as “best short story collection of 2015” by the San Diego Book Review. Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish translations of Dangerous Obsessions will appear in 2018.

Animal allegory in the tradition of Animal Farm by George Orwell. The story reflects American political culture before and during the presidency of Donald Trump. The new leader of the lake nation of Swanville, simply called the Trumpeter, promises an ambitious agenda. He will dismantle the Swan Care Act of his predecessor, President Lulu. He will drain the Swamp where the left-wing oligarchy eat the very best protein and vegetation. He will increase shoreline habitat by bringing down the beaver wall on the North River. And he will ban migratory birds from Swanville because they are looters and moochers and not part of the Great Swan’s plan. Eventually, the new president becomes cob-in-chief of a nation at war with its neighbors and itself. TrumpeterVille is political satire that wags a cautionary tale. Dean Gessie was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. Gessie won Honorable Mention in the Press 53 Novella Competition. Also, one of his short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize. Most recently, Gessie published Guantanamo Redux, dystopian fiction about the near future in America and the byzantine complications of survival in an authoritarian state. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist.

Public schools are a vast money pit. Education officials seem to prefer inefficiency and mediocrity. We could have better schools at less cost. This book explains how. Bruce Deitrick Price is the country’s most prolific and aggressive writer on education. He is good at explaining the root causes, the problems that typically occur, and the ideological obsessions that lead our Education Establishment astray. This book presents 65 articles divided into 10 themes: Reading; Math; Weird Theories and Methods; Common Core; Historical Background; Guilty as Charged; Where Are Our Leaders; and What to Do Now. You can read the articles in any order and dip in wherever you want. This is pleasant reading about grim topics. If we don’t save the public schools, we’re not going to save very much else. Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. He graduated with Honors in English Literature from Princeton and lived for many years in Manhattan where he ran a graphic design business. Along the way he was fascinated by the counterproductive practices so common in public schools. He founded Improve-Education.org in 2005.

A fictional memoir that unpacks blood sport in the marketplace. The narrator finances many years of post-secondary education by taking summer jobs of dizzying variety. As he documents his experiences, he becomes porte-parole for a generation in the grips of precarious work. More broadly, however, he illuminates personalities of intriguing emotional and psychological complexity in circumstances that are obviously or discreetly desperate. These are dispatches from the front lines, stories that present an ironic and critical portrait of economic activity and human imperfections. Adversity and anguish burn in the atmosphere as do humor and heroism. The workplace is a dangerous environment to earn a living. Dean Gessie was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. Gessie won Honorable Mention in the Press 53 Novella Competition. Also, one of his short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize. Most recently, Gessie published Guantanamo Redux, dystopian fiction about the near future in America and the byzantine complications of survival in an authoritarian state. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist.

New York City, late 1860s. When young Chris Harmony learns that members of his family may have been involved in the illegal pre-Civil War slave trade, taking slaves from Africa to Cuba, he is appalled. Determined to learn the truth, he begins an investigation that takes him into a dingy waterfront saloon, musty old maritime records that yield startling secrets, and elegant brownstone parlors that may have been furnished by the trade. Since those once involved dread exposure, he meets denials and evasions, then threats, and a key witness is murdered. Chris has vivid fantasies of the suffering slaves on the ships and their savage revolts. How could seemingly respectable people be involved in so abhorrent a trade, and how did they avoid exposure? And what price must Chris pay to learn the painful truth and proclaim it? Clifford Browder is a writer living in New York. He has published a critical study of the Surrealist author André Breton, and biographies of the Wall Street financier Daniel Drew and the notorious abortionist Madame Restell. His novel, The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), is the first in his Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. A collection of posts from his blog, No Place for Normal: New York/ Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015), won first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. His poetry has appeared in various reviews, both online and in print.

The mainstream publishing industry has popularized the stereotype that “self-published” books are inferior to “traditional” ones because the author does not receive an advance and the services provided are less professional. The reality is that the Big Four publishers attained their enormous market share by at least initially relying on author subsidies. This book describes the road some of the world’s top authors took to self-publication. Charles Dickens self-published A Tale of Two Cities in his periodical, All the Year Round. Sir Walter Scott published most of his fiction and poetry with Constantine and Ballantyne, who publishers in which he was heavily invested. Scott’s self-publications included his best-selling Waverley series, which established the historical novel genre with Ballantyne. The Liberal only survived for a few issues, and yet its founders, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, published outstanding radical works in its pages: “The Vision of Judgment” and “Lines to a Critic.” Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published nearly all of Virginia’s writings; these works are still used by feminists and birthed the stream of consciousness movement (a style that was too unique for “mainstream” publishers). Edgar Allan Poe spent a lifetime working to create his own independent journal, only succeeding in a brief ownership of the Broadway Journal, a power he used to speak out against plagiarism with pieces such as, “Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War.” Herman Melville paid Harper $29,571 for 350 copies of Clarel. Mark Twain spent $1.3 million (in today’s money) to print Old Times on the Mississippi with J. R. Osgood. Henry Luce and Briton Hadden started Time Inc. and Time because they were frustrated reporters seeking more power and independence. Dudley Randall founded the Broadside Press in part to publish his own books like Cities Burning. Alice Walker published an introduction to The Spirit Journey after founding a press with her lover, Wild Trees Press, and might have kept it going longer if major publishers did not start snatching up all of her own innovative full-length works. Without author-publishers: the sun would still revolve around the earth (Galileo) and book printing would lack exquisite artistic details (Rembrandt). And Americans would still be living in the colonies of the United Kingdom (Benjamin Franklin). It is harder to find an innovative scientist, politician or creative writer who did not self-publish than those who did. Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. Previously, she taught for four years at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014). She edits and writes for the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and the Cinematic Codes Review. She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.

Carrigan approaches the millennium New Year craving climax and culmination. What he finds instead is constant anti-climax, and lack of definitional consequence for his failures and failings and genius. A conceptual heir to Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, this novel explores everything from Carrigan’s past in the spelling bee as a contemptuous 12-year-old, to his father’s death in Ireland years before, to the depth of mystery, violence, and secrecy that he returns to, both existentially, and literally, as he becomes 21, and then 22, without proper fanfare or notice. “An instant classic. A major new talent has arrived.” —Da Chen, New York Times best-selling author and former recipient of The Washington Post best book award Joseph M. Reynolds did his graduate work in Creative Fiction under the tutelage of acclaimed novelist and memoirist Da Chen. He teaches college in New England, and at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland during the summer term. As an undergraduate, he was a speechwriter and intern in the U.S. Senate office of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

The trauma of retiring early forces FBI Special Agent B. Clare Ryan to conduct an unsanctioned investigation into one of her first cases for the Bureau back in 1988. After an unfavorable verdict that was the culmination of eight years of litigation over claims of sexual harassment of Ida Callaghan by the management at the Bedford Bank in Manhattan, her father, Bradley, shot the judge over the case, Vincente Brunetti, to death at his suburban residence before committing suicide. The case is outrageous enough on its own, but Ryan is more interested in why her supervisor at the FBI forbade her from investigating it and destroyed the suicide note that Bradley left behind. This clue leads her to a diary that accuses many powerful men in New York of corruption. Now in 2013, the trail might be cold, but Ryan digs up ancient records and does everything possible, including breaking into private vaults and morgues to get to the truth, which turns out to be more explosive than she predicted. Ryan reproduces original diaries, notes, letters, police reports and other documents that finally sufficiently prove the case that both Bradley and his daughter lost. Ryan takes on the burden of persuasion and brings this case to the public at large, hiding under the veil of fiction what she cannot expose in the court of law. What was the connection between this federal Judge and a major bank like Bedford? What drove Bradley to homicide instead of another appeal? Why were there five hundred sparkling-new, but unused, Bronx-made Vachengrais autos parked outside Bradley’s precinct in 1969? What was Bradley’s boyhood friend, Terry, who later became the Chief of NYPD, doing on a military base in East Germany in 1955 that sent everybody in this story on a violent collision course? This mystery begins after the whodunit is long solved. Only hidden personal confessions can display what corruption has obstructed from the eyes of justice. Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She is currently teaching college English at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Previously, she taught for three years at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014). She published two poetry collections Improvisational Arguments (Fomite Press, 2011) and Battle for Athens (Anaphora, 2012). She published two fantasy novellas with Grim’s Labyrinth Publishing: The Great Love of Queen Margaret, the Vampire (2014) and The Campaigns against the Olden: Kingdoms of Laruta (2014). She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and Brown University Military Collection fellowships.

This book comprises 121 poems selected from two dozen years of Jason Holt’s work, including poems from six previous books and verse appearing here for the first time. Holt’s poetic trademarks—rhythmic stress, syntactic variation, wordplay, neologism—are apparent throughout in service of the aesthetic moment that is, for so many, as elusive as it is worthy of pursuit. Jason Holt lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia and teaches at Acadia University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Western University in 1998. His books include Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness, which was shortlisted for the 2005 CPA Book Prize. Inversed is his sixth book of poetry.

The second novel in the Metropolis series. New York City, 1870s: From his cell in the gloomy prison known as the Tombs, young Bill Hope spills out in a torrent of words the story of his career as a pickpocket and shoplifter; his scorn for snitches and bullies; his brutal treatment at Sing Sing and escape from another prison in a coffin; his forays into brownstones and polite society; his brief career on the stage playing himself; his loyalty to a man who has befriended him but may be trying to kill him; and his sojourn among the “loonies” in a madhouse, from which he emerges to face betrayal and death threats, and possible involvement in a murder. In the course of his adventures he learns how slight the difference is between criminal and law-abiding, insane and sane, vice and virtue—a lesson that reinforces what he learned on the streets. Driving him throughout is a fierce desire for better, a yearning to leave the crooked life behind, and a persistent and undying hope. Clifford Browder is a writer living in New York. He has published a critical study of the Surrealist author André Breton, and biographies of the Wall Street financier Daniel Drew and the notorious abortionist Madame Restell. His novel The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011) is the first in his Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York. A collection of posts from his blog, No Place for Normal: New York/ Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World (Mill City Press, 2015), won first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. His poetry has appeared in various reviews, both online and in print.

The novella uses the techniques of speculative fiction and science fiction to create a dystopian vision of the near future in America. Here, most any kind of dissent is criminalized and individuals are routinely charged with terrorism offences. The L. A. Mercy Killer is incarcerated in the Bay of Frisco, a center for domestic terrorists, after the third terror has destroyed much of Los Angeles. Special Agent Orwell and Judge Dan believe the girl whose face you can’t see was deeply involved in not only the Mercy Killer’s crime, but, also, the massive terror attack on Los Angeles. In Part II of the novella, a flashback, we retrace the steps of the girl whose face you can’t see prior to the third terror. Who is she and what does she represent? Did she know the L.A. Mercy Killer? Was she responsible for his crime and for her own? The conclusion of the novella is a chilling expose of how conformity and authoritarianism threaten freedom, imagination, language, life and limb. The L.A. Mercy Killer stands in the long tradition of dissidents who rage against the security state. Dean Gessie enjoyed a long career as Head of the English Department at Pickering College in Newmarket, Ontario. While there, he was also Director of the award-winning Joshua Weinzweig Creative Writing Program. As a teenager, Gessie’s play won best entry for Northern Ontario in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s playwriting contest. Gessie also won Honorable Mention in the 2008 Press 53 Novella Competition. Most recently, one of Gessie’s short stories was selected to the list of Highly Commended Stories in the international Manchester Fiction Prize, England’s biggest literary award for unpublished creative writing. Gessie has also written and served extensively as a social justice activist.

Follows the adventures, and frequent misadventures, of two New York City dentists as they embark on a Kenyan safari. Individuals throughout the ages have contemplated the seemingly incongruous relationship between the almost limitless possibilities of man and the inherent frailties and imperfections of our human nature. The main characters in Safari also attempt to understand this distinction on their journey of discovery. Safari is a deeply personal story in which the author searches for the proper meaning of perfection and for the answer to whether or not true perfection is present at all in our world. He struggles to reach his full potential, all the while knowing what he should reasonably expect of himself, and he looks to nature’s equilibrium for answers. Safari provides the reader with vivid imagery of the magnificent wildlife of Kenya, a sense for the excitement and danger of a safari, humorous stories from the trip and a taste of the special peace, enlightenment and acceptance that can only be found in the unspoiled African savanna. Dr. William J. Maloney is a clinical associate professor at New York University College of Dentistry. He is a fellow of the Academy of Dentistry International, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Royal Society of Medicine and the Pierre Fauchard Academy. Dr. Maloney is the author of over 270 professional publications. He has also been presented with the Award of Excellence from The Floating Hospital of New York City. He has also been inducted into various prestigious organizations and societies, such as The New York Academy of Medicine and The Royal Society of Medicine.

In post-hurricanes, post-earthquake Haiti, a rich American on an impulsive mission trip meets and falls in love with a nurse practitioner who doctors for a whole area of the Haitian massif. When his love is kidnapped for ransom by a vuoduo-influenced dispossessed villager, he is drawn back to Haiti to pay the ransom and rescue her. At times a romance, at times a kidnap thriller, but always a work of global social consciousness, The Uses of Money explores the potential for humanitarian aid to the world’s poorest heart of darkness. William J. Palmer is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University. The Uses of Money is his eighth novel. The four novels in his “Mr. Dickens” series of Victorian murder mysteries have been chosen as selections by numerous national book clubs, and have been translated into Spanish and Japanese. The three novels of his The Wabash Trilogy include a sports novel, a crime novel and a comic novel, all set in the Wabash valley of Indiana in the late 20th-Century. Website: wjpalmernovelist.wordpress.com

This frightening event occurred in present day Egypt. All the case computer files and people have since disappeared. It involved five countries and the world knows nothing about what really happened. An ambitious Air Force commandant, oil-rich Saudis, fearful Israelis, CIA operatives and an Egyptian government, corrupt and avaricious from top to bottom, together fuel the rage and deceit that eventually became the Arab Spring. “A first rate thriller. Colbert brilliantly draws you into the action. Get ready for a hell of a ride!” —Robert R. Maldonado, Lt Colonel (ret) US Air Force Special Operations, and author, Atlantis: Keepers of the Crystal Skull Bruce Colbert is author of a short fiction collection, another novel and two poetry volumes. He lives on the Gulf Coast.

#1 New Release in Military Encyclopedias: Amazon This monograph represents the first comprehensive study dedicated to the interdisciplinary French philosopher Michel Serres. As the title of this project unequivocally suggests, Serres’s prolific body of work paints a rending portrait of what it means for a sentient being to live in the modern world. This book reflects Serres’s profound conviction that “philosopher c’est anticiper”/ ‘to philosophize (about something) is to anticipate’ (“Philosophie Magazine”). According to Serres, a philosopher is someone who possesses an extremely broad base of knowledge coupled with the uncanny ability to envision what might transpire based upon his or her astute observations concerning phenomena that are already starting to unfold in a given society. Serres’s explanation of what engaging in philosophical inquiry entails encourages us to imagine all of the present and future ramifications of certain trajectories that are clearly visible all around us. From 1968 to the present, Serres has been generating forceful, “prophetic” visions in his works that mingle philosophy, religion, theology, contemporary science, and literature. “In this comprehensive and insightful introduction, Keith Moser travels the highways and byways of Michel Serres’s thought to show how it both illuminates pressing contemporary issues and presages potential futures-to-come. This is a remarkable achievement and a genuine gift to readers both new and old to Serres’s work.” —Steven D. Brown, Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology, University of Leicester, United Kingdom “At a time in which overspecialization hangs over all disciplines, thinkers who have a global, interdisciplinary base of knowledge are quite rare. Therefore, I would like to laud Keith Moser’s initiative to dedicate an exhaustive study to one of these thinkers, Michel Serres, who thanks to his ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge, has the ability to understand a rapidly changing world and to predict ‘the shape of things to come.’ In short, an essential book for becoming aware of the threat of a return of obscurantism—despite the development of new technologies—and of the necessity of a new century of Lumières.” —Issa Asgarally, Associate Professor, Mauritius Institute of Education, Linguist, author and co-founder, along with J.M.G. Le Clézio, of the Foundation for Interculturality and Peace “A much needed English language introduction to the ideas of a major French eco-philosopher and pacifist whose prophetic work spans the period from the late 60’s to the present. Moser’s engaging prose makes this study a great read, and he demonstrates a formidable grasp on the connections within Serres’ work, as well as the links between Serres and other major twentieth century thinkers.” —Tom Trzyna, Professor Emeritus of English, Seattle Pacific University “Professor Keith Moser’s treatment of Michel Serres’ philosophy in the context of contemporary 21st-century globalization is both timely and thorough. His provocative critique of societal malaise, from our relationship to the planet, to ourselves, to each other, and to technology, as well as the solutions envisioned through an erudite and thoughtful analysis of Serres’ entire philosophical corpus is a remarkable contribution to both the fields of Philosophy and French Studies.” —Isaac Joslin, The University of Denver “Entertaining, gloomy, and sharp, Moser’s careful and exhaustive exploration of Michel Serres’ encyclopedic philosophy unveils the eccentricity of a rare thinker who has managed to shake the insularity of academic specialty. The range of topics tackled in this book – with the help of a diverse arsenal of disciplines – leaves the reader better able to think about a world in which the more technological and scientific advancements arise, the more unknowable it becomes. Moser believes that the world we’re coming into was not only foreshadowed by Serres, but necessitates his thinking to best wrestle with it.” —Zachary Siegel, Independent Researcher, Journalist, and Contributor to Critical-theory.com “Keith Moser’s pioneering vision of the post-Marxist era, as reflected in the syncretism of philosophy, religion, theology, science and literature in Michel Serres’ body of work during the last half a century, transforms human consciousness beyond its illusory genophobia that has damaged the very semiotics of life. Moser’s monograph taps into a tremendous flow of energy that evokes a passionate desire in a dead humanity to re-live and re-think.” —Professor Ananta Ch. Sukla, Editor, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Keith Moser is Associate Professor of French at Mississippi State University. He is the author of four other books including A Practical Guide to French Harki Literature, J.M.G. Le Clézio: A Concerned Citizen of the Global Village, J.M.G. Le Clézio dans la forêt des paradoxes (co-editor with Bruno Thibault), and ‘Privileged Moments’ in the Novels and Short Stories of J.M.G. Le Clézio: His Contemporary Development of a Traditional French Literary Device. Moser has also contributed approximately forty essays to peer-reviewed publications such as The French Review, The International Journal of Francophone Studies, Romance Notes, Dalhousie French Studies, Les Cahiers Le Clézio, Modern Language Review, French Cultural Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford UP), Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Oxford UP), and The Pennsylvania Literary Journal.

Intrigue, Romantic Rivalries and Mistaken Identities Abound in This Engrossing Victorian Drama. In a style reminiscent of nineteenth-century authors, Forever Gentleman is a sweeping saga of suspense, romance, mystery, and music. Travel back in time and experience Victorian London at its best and worst—a city of beauty and brilliance, and a city steeped in filth and despair. Meet Nathan Sinclair, a struggling young architect and gifted pianist who lives in the two vastly different worlds, mingling in high society while dwelling in suffocating debt and poverty. While performing at a gathering of London’s elite, Nathan meets Jocelyn Charlesworth, a breathtakingly beautiful but temperamental celebrity heiress. Although smitten, she publicly humiliates him; their paths will intersect again in a most shocking manner. Meanwhile, Nathan makes the acquaintance of Regina Lancaster, a woman of remarkable inner beauty, despite her pedestrian appearance. He must decide whether to follow his heart and pursue Regina, or flee England altogether to avoid imprisonment from a miserly creditor. In his darkest hour, Nathan is offered a tantalizing proposition that might change everything, but that comes at considerable risk. Nathan must play his role perfectly, or he may lose his reputation, livelihood, and very life to the powerful echelons of Victorian society. Full of unexpected twists and turns, the book races towards a thrilling climax that will determine Nathan’s ultimate destiny. “Intrigue, romantic rivalries, and mistaken identities abound in this Victorian drama... an exciting read, packed with mysteries and unexpected twists... engrossing novel...” —Kirkus Reviews “Readers who like atmospheric, sweeping historical sagas... will relish Forever Gentleman’s special ability to turn out a rollicking good read while remaining true to the history and influence of the times. It’s a romance, it’s a mystery, and it’s a history all wrapped up into one satisfyingly beautiful production, and is highly recommended for anyone who appreciates a depth and attention to detail that results in a powerful story line.” —Midwest Book Review Roland Colton was awarded a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah and a juris doctorate from the University of San Diego School of Law. He has had a long career as a litigator and trial attorney. Trained in his youth as a classical pianist, he is a frequent performer at public and private gatherings. He also possesses a passion for architecture and the French language. Colton lives with his family in Southern California and France.

Ralph Crosby’s Memoirs of a Main Street Boy tells the tale of growing up at a tempestuous time in U.S. history – from the Great Depression, through World War II and the Cold War – in a town where America’s colonial history was even more tempestuous, amid classic homes and institutions that still exist. The story takes you through the author’s interplay with these historic places and events that helped shape U.S. history, as well as shaping his life and those of his generation. You will discover: How Annapolis became the first capital of the United States. Why the Revolutionary War officially ended in the Maryland State House. Why John Paul Jones’ body waited seven years in Annapolis to be buried at the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel. How a young Francis Scott Key, attending school in Annapolis, became the poet who would write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” How much George Washington liked to gamble in card games and on the races in Annapolis. How the author and his friends, like youngsters throughout the U.S., contributed to the Second World War effort. Why the U.S. Naval Academy was located in Annapolis and why it almost left. Why Annapolis stayed calm while cities around it erupted in flames when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. Why the tiny Annapolis port once supplied the world with tobacco and oysters. What it was like when radio was king of entertainment media. How religious and social discrimination impacted a small town in the mid-20th century. That, before he became famous as the symbol of press freedom, John Peter Zenger managed one of America’s earliest newspapers in Annapolis. Why some view the Annapolis burning of the ship Peggy Stewart more critical to the Revolution than the more famous Boston Tea Party. What it was like to be a school boy when the fearful nuclear age began. And much more... This is not an autobiography. It is a memoir of growing up in one of the country’s most disruptive yet most dynamic eras—from the end of the Great Depression, through World War II to the Cold War. That the growing up occurred in and around places where Washington, Jefferson and Franklin and their comrades planned war and made peace gives the story a unique perspective. Ralph W. Crosby has enjoyed great success in a multifaceted career as journalist, author, and marketer. A graduate of the University of Maryland College of Journalism, Ralph began his professional life as a newspaperman in Baltimore, later becoming a Washington Correspondent and magazine writer during the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson era; culminating his journalistic career in 1972 as an editor with the Kiplinger organization. All the while he lived in his hometown, Annapolis, Maryland, where he still resides with his wife, Carlotta. Currently, he is chairman of Crosby Marketing Communications, an award-winning advertising and public relations firm he founded in 1973. The firm, with 50-plus employees, has offices in Annapolis and Washington, D.C. Memoirs of a Main Street Boy is his third published book.

A Novelization of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution in Maidan. A novel-requiem based on real stories, heroes and monsters. This is the first fictional verbal portrayal of the galactic-scale events in Maidan, in the heart of Kyiv, Ukraine that have left their mark on world history. From this apocalyptic perspective, angels and demons in human flesh operate on the 21st century stage of Maidan, a sacral place of the Earth. The protagonist of the novel, Yarko, feels that he can no longer stay at home, as he watches the capital of his country being absorbed by the revolution on TV. He takes a leave of absence at the institute where he works as a researcher, and leaves his family, rushing at dawn to catch a train to Kyiv. Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the country, in Donetsk, a gang, which includes the current president of Ukraine, gathers for a meeting. In Maidan, Yarko serves as one of the architects of a set of barricades because the chances of the Republic of Liberty being attacked grow daily. Despite a severe frost, he lives in a tent, like tens of thousands of rebels. Before the climax of this conflict, a Heavenly Hundred of peaceful, unarmed protesters will have given their lives for the Revolution and thousands of others would suffer in their defense of freedom and the independence of Ukraine. The citizens of the Free World will feel as if they are at the brink of a bloody Armageddon when they hold this requiem book in their hands. Vasyl Baziv is a prominent Ukrainian political scientist, former diplomat and academic. He was one of the organizers of the National Democratic movement in 1989-1990 and the recent 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. He is a professor at the “Ukraine” International University and holds the Ukrainian Diplomatic rank of ambassador. He is a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine and the author of many books, including a collection of essays in four volumes The Path from Slavery, and in addition to his two Anaphora novels two other novels: The Saga of Humanity’s Cosmic Destiny: the End of the World and After and Brothers, or the Grave of a Turncoat. Includes 45 color photographs by Valerian Antonovych and Lesia Lutsiv.

George Washington has three problems. One is the fact that the British have landed 20,000 troops to fight him on Long Island. The second is that the British navy is at his back, blocking any hope of retreat and the third is that two children, Eddie and Angie, claiming to be from the year 2014 have just been captured and brought to him by Lieutenant Collins. Eddie and Angie do not paint a hopeful picture of the upcoming battle. They claim to be lost, having been accidentally sent there by their eccentric Uncle Sol. Unknown to Washington, a British spy wants to kidnap the children and use them to help the British war effort. The challenge Eddie and Angie face is to stay out of the hands of the British and to find a way to get home. Uncle Sol and his assistant, Vernon, are frantically trying to find the children. The only problem Sol and Vernon have is that they are not sure of the exact time or place the children were sent. Fortunately, Vernon has a plan. Paul G. Varnas has been a practicing chiropractor in the Chicago area for over 30 years. He has written many journal articles and several books about health and nutrition, including Practical Magic and Fifty Ways to Lose Your Blubber. He currently provides written content for Whole Health America and WholeHealthWeb.

Tight, taut and shocking, these stories all have warped love as the source of violence. Belgian/Flemish author, Bob Van Laerhoven, winner of the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category “Mystery/Suspense” and the Hercule Poirot Prize with his controversial novel, Baudelaire’s Revenge, connects the fate of individuals with profound social changes. Van Laerhoven has been a travel writer in conflict-zones from 1990 until 2003 and echos of his experiences trickle through these confronting and thrilling tales, set in civil war-torn Algeria in the fifties, in a gypsy-populated Nazi-German concentration camp in occupied Poland during WWII, in a Peruvian border-town where stealing is a deadly art, in Liberia during the civil war in the nineties, and in Belgian Congo during the bloody uproar in the sixties. Omnia vincit amor—Love conquers all—the saying goes. But not our Dangerous Obsessions. Bob Van Laerhoven: a fulltime Belgian/Flemish author, Laerhoven published more than 30 books in Holland and Belgium. Some of his literary work is also published in the US, Canada and France. Three times finalist of the Hercule Poirot Prize for best mystery novel of the year with the novels Djinn and The Finger of God. Winner of the Hercule Poirot Prize for Baudelaire’s Revenge, which also won the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category “mystery/suspense”. Short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Conclave, journal of character, the British literary magazine Wasafiri and in the compilation Brussels Noir in the renowned Noir-series of Akashic books. His last novel, De schaduw van de Mol is currently being translated into English as The Shadow of the Mole. The 2015 Books of the Year! Short Fiction: “This was very nearly the last book I reviewed this year before making this column’s selections. Of the dozen or so stand-out individual short story collections I enjoyed in 2015, the Belgian author Bob Van Laerhoven’s was the standy-outiest. There are only five stories in this hardcover, but then again a filet mignon is a lot smaller than a meat loaf and given your choice of fine beef, which would you pick? (I suppose for vegan readers there must be some similar comparison available involving lentils and watermelons, but dammit I’m a reviewer not a metaphor generator.) Van Laerhoven’s stories always surprise without descending into the cheap thrills of fakery and he uses his journalistic experience to write about the cold and the cruel aspects of human nature with unflinching truth. Previous to reading Dangerous Obsessions the only author I have ever compared positively to my old favourite is Canada’s Dan Vyleta. Now there are two.” —Hubert O’Hearn, San Diego Book Review “***** The Belgian/Flemish writer Bob Van Laerhoven’s collection of powerful, often graphic short stories is a refreshing read. My favourite has to be the third – Lillies of the Valley, a tale of one young gypsy woman’s survival at all costs in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two. What most people forget is that the camps weren’t only for the extermination of European Jews. Many other groups like the gypsies suffered the same fate, like the Jews, deemed to be subhuman by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. I would recommend reading this collection to anyone who likes a story well told.” —Jack Eason, The Seventh Age, Amazon Book of the Week: “**** This collection of short stories presents personal accounts of people amid the horrors of World War II. In each story the author presents an intimate view of a person thrust into an emotionally charged situation and forced to navigate their war-torn circumstances. The narrator draws a complete picture of the culture, personal history, dreams and failures faced…situations rich in color, setting and emotion. Readers won’t be able to keep their distance as they follow each person’s fight to survive their specific ordeal.” —Patricia Gitt, BooksGoSocial Book Review Club

A subtly linked series of stories that chronicle two generations of a family from the Depression to World War II to the Vietnam War to the present. Characters include a jazz trumpeter, a Ukrainian teenager taken by the Nazis for slave labor in Germany, soldiers from World War II and the Vietnam War, and a strange crew of college professors and their wives from a small college in the Midwest. Lucas Carpenter was born in Elberton, Georgia. He was educated at the College of Charleston (B.S.), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D.). He is the author of John Gould Fletcher and Southern Modernism (U. of Arkansas Press, 1990) and general editor of a seven-volume series devoted to Fletcher’s work. He has also written a chapbook of poetry, A Year for the Spider (UNC Pitcher Poetry Award, 1973), and a book of poetry, Perils of the Affect (Mellen Press, 2002). His poems, stories, articles and reviews have appeared in thirty-seven periodicals, including Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, College Literature, Kansas Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Concerning Poetry, Poetry (Australia), Southern Humanities Review, College English, San Francisco Review of Books, Callaloo, Chronicle of Higher Education, and New York Newsday. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to lecture and write in Belgium during the 1999-2000 academic year. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English at Oxford College, Emory University.

Chester Milosz, a very minor American poet who teaches at a very minor American college and aspires to win the Nobel, receives an invitation to a meeting of global high-flyers at the Otto Nabokov Foundation’s Ardor Haus estate in Caravaggio, Italy. The organizers are Dickey Lemon, a British billionaire who made his fortune in hamster bedding, and Joe Zsasz, an ex-communist functionary-turned-international consultant. The participants are a sundry collection of business people, policymakers, journalists, and academics involved in shady dealings with a corrupt Eastern European president who closely resembles Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych. Chester decides to go in the hope that a trip to northern Italy will help overcome his writer’s block. While at Ardor Haus, he experiences cultural misunderstandings, comic misadventures, near-encounters with inspiration, and three earthquakes. It eventually dawns on Chester that he’s been confused with the Nobel Prize winner, Czesław Miłosz, and that the conference is an elaborate scam. After a major earthquake destroys Caravaggio, Chester finds his Muse on the rooftop of the Duomo in Milan. Alexander J. Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008 and 2013, he is the author of seven novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, My Orchidia, Sweet Snow, and Fall River, and a collection of poems, Vanishing Points. Motyl’s artwork has been displayed in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto and is part of the permanent collection of the Ukrainian Museum in New York and the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and is the author of six academic books, many articles, and a weekly blog on “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.” “Buy the Book: Russia’s Macho Leader Exposed: True Confessions from Vovochka, Putin’s Best Friend and Confidant” “Motyl’s story succeeds on two levels: it overlays actual events with a slightly skewed fictional story, and it exploits the bombast of Russian officialdom by pretending to take it seriously. The result is a parody in the great tradition of free expression.” —The American Spectator “Mr. Putin’s Russia has changed little. Holy Russia is back in vogue. The tsar has returned from the grave. Only a miracle can prevent Russia and its people from sliding back to its deep-rooted ways.” —The Ukrainian Weekly

Told in a wry, understated voice, the novel satirizes the travails of Leopold Plotkin, a failing kosher butcher with a pathological aversion to conflict. After Plotkin commits an act that ignites a crisis in his Republic, he is propelled into conflicts with every branch of government. When he refuses the government’s demands to undo what he did, he is indicted by a Secret Blind Jury, arrested by the National Constabulary, and consigned to the notorious Purgatory House of Detention, where he languishes next to a defrocked insane lawyer whose nocturnal machinations threaten to drive him crazy. After months of languishing in prison, Plotkin is prosecuted by the Republic’s ethically-challenged Prosecutor General, tried before a congenitally pro-prosecution judge, and defended by a reclusive lawyer who has never been in a courtroom. The butcher’s only witness in the highly anticipated trial is an unhinged resident of the Warehouse for the Purportedly Insane. Everybody, including Plotkin and his small circle of supporters, expects a conviction and imposition of the longest sentence allowed by law, if not longer. Among other things, the novel lampoons prosecutors, public defenders, judges, juries, expert witnesses, high courts, low courts, trials, and potential perjurers. “…The uproarious novel is first and foremost a comedy, rife with absurdist humor…[e]nough jabs at law and criminal justice to make a point, all packaged in a courtroom drama that’s pure entertainment.” —Kirkus Reviews “4/5*: You’re moving along at steady clip, completely immersed in Plotkin’s unwitting journey towards public damnation, and properly outraged by the irrational and illogical flavor of the evidence that’s stacked against him. Delightfully satirical, the author takes a jab at everything from judges, to juries, to lawyers, to public manipulation and ignorance, oftentimes with hilarious results.” —Manhattan Book Review, “Humor,” Heather Clawson “It’s easy to imagine a former civil-rights attorney who’s worked extensively in the criminal-justice system writing a book inspired by the experience. But you might not foresee the result as this comic burlesque of a novel. It takes place in the fictional republic of Fettig, a setting that could pass for a circa-1900 Lower East Side. It’s populated by European ethnic types including protagonist Leonard Plotkin, a Jewish butcher who despite his ‘pathological aversion to conflict’ ends up facing trial on absurd criminal charges./ With its wide-angle aim at a deranged republic’s corrupt institutions, and its feel for a punchline, Something Is Rotten is hardly the earnest treatise you might expect from a lawyer whose résumé includes (as Pittsburgh resident Krakoff’s does) the ACLU National Prison Project and a local legal-aid program. Instead, the novel is sort of Dickens by way of Woody Allen, featuring characters with names like Emile Threadbare and Primo Astigmatopolous, and a writing style and approach to jokes that suggests Allen’s satirical short stories. (One artist character, for instance, is described as ‘an untalented abstractionist who occasionally sold her impenetrable works to customers who appreciated confusion.’) Each chapter begins with one of Krakoff’s own caricatures of this highly populous novel’s main character, all adding to the impression of a society where palms are greased and egos readily flattered, but justice is seldom served.” —Pittsburgh City Paper, Bill O’Driscoll “5/5*: Something Is Rotten in Fettig wittily satirizes a legal system that is very similar to our own…this fast-paced work is filled with good writing, presented in highly readable prose…characters are well developed…very enjoyable.” —Midwest Book Review: Molly’s Bookshelf; AuthorsDen Prior to writing Something Is Rotten in Fettig, Jere Krakoff was a civil rights attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington, D.C., the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Mississippi, and a legal aid program in Pittsburgh. The book was inspired by people, places, and events he encountered while litigating, and a lifetime of observing both the best and the worst of the human condition.

The events depicted incorporate historical incidents to create an alternate history of a violent anti-corruption rebellion in the fictional town of Sparta, Tennessee, in the aftermath of World War II. It is based in part on the rebellion by veterans against the Mayor’s office in Athens, Tennessee, as well as on the Chicago Haymarket Riot. In Sparta, thousands of veterans return to the States from the War, and are confronted by crippling corruption, as they attempt to drink away the trauma of the War. Faced with bribes and a heap of misdemeanor tickets, the GIs try to retaliate by aggressively supporting the Democratic ticket, but soon discover that elections are not won by voters in Sparta. The Sheriff and his army of untrained deputies go on a killing spree, as they work to steal the election, until the Democrats are compelled to pick up arms to defend their lives and their civil rights. “A riveting account of corruption in politics from the interesting mindset of disgruntled post-war veterans. A combination that will intrigue readers throughout the story.” —David Walpuck, Administrator for the National Registry of Food Safety Professionals “Naive, impressionable, patriotic young men from Anna Faktorovich’s fictitious Sparta, Tennessee joined the fight against Fascism during World War II. They confronted death, cruelty, deprivation and returned home not as heroes but outsiders. Sparta had no use for them—no jobs, no place in society, only bars and the local jail. Finally enough became too much. Outrage triggered rebellion and a new war began. Like the one the returned G.I.s had left in Europe and Asia this one also was for freedom from oppression. “The novel is based on events that occurred in southern Tennessee in 1946. Faktorovich populates The Battle for Democracy with variety of characters—rich, poor, white, African-American—and glimpses of shantytown life, Southern mansions, trips to Hawaii. Among the most fascinating personalities are the members of a Cherokee family that migrated to Sparta after their Oklahoma house was razed to make room for a military installation. Another is Giorgio, whose wilder instincts are tamed by his relationship with the sensible and attractive Haley. Less agreeable are the Ku Klux Klansmen the author describes, the opulence of the town mayor reigning over his miniature fiefdom, the bartender turned cop with an eye for profit at whatever cost. The novel is told with journalistic veracity and with vivid descriptions of places and events. Reading it one believes in what is taking place and participates along with the characters and their struggles to achieve equality and justice.” —Robert Joe Stout, winner of national journalism awards for news writing, author of Hidden Dangers: Mexico on the Brink of Disaster “An intriguing and often funny depiction of widespread governmental corruption in a mid-1940s southern city and the political efforts of a band of World War II veterans and their allies to address it.” —Jere Krakoff, retired civil rights attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington, D.C. “The Battle for Democracy, Anna Faktorovich’s second historical novel, focuses on events that transpired in Athens, Tennessee, in the wake of World War II, when returning veterans revolted against a corrupt city government. Athens becomes the mythical town of Sparta in Faktorovich’s riveting narrative. She takes a number of liberties with historical fact, reflecting her intent, as she puts it in her provocative introduction to the novel, to ‘step away from historical accuracy and into symbolic truth.’ In doing so she explores the frontier of historical fiction and the critical issue of how far an author can stretch or embroider historical truth in order to create a more artistic and meaningful story. Her characters, especially the returning veterans, are vividly rendered and her style in general is inventive and engaging. As the title indicates, The Battle for Democracy is representative of all those points on the historical timeline when democratic forces have battled greed and corruption, while also speaking directly and forcefully to our world today.” —Lucas Carpenter, C.H. Candler Professor Emeritus of English, Oxford College of Emory University “Anna Faktorovich’s historical novel The Battle for Democracy illuminates a little-known but highly representative incident in American labor history—the battle of returning World War II veterans against the corrupt political machinery of Athens, Tennessee. A timely reminder that the greatest threats to democracy come not from abroad but from our homegrown ideologues and zealots, whether of party, creed, or avarice.” —Robert Begiebing, founding director of the Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction, and Professor of English Emeritus at Southern New Hampshire University “…Veterans of World War II returned from the front and were caught in a storm of wild corruption at home. Two conflicting morals cannot coexist. As a result, they stage a revolt of front-line soldiers against the corrupt Mayor and Sheriff. Social conflict heats up until they are forced to use weapons, and people are killed and injured. The President of the United States and the Governor of the State do not intervene because it is a battle for democracy. The insurgency is victorious. The novel is brilliant and enlightening.” –Vasyl Baziv, organizer of the Ukrainian National Democratic movement (1989- 1990), professor at the “Ukraine” International University, and ambassador Anna Faktorovich is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She taught college English for three years before focusing entirely on publishing. She has a PhD in English Literature. She published two scholarly books: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (McFarland, 2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (McFarland, 2014). She published two additional scholarly books with Anaphora: Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing: Mimicking Masculinity and Femininity and Wendell Berry’s New Agrarianism and Beyond. She also published two poetry collections Improvisational Arguments (Fomite Press, 2011) and Battle for Athens (Anaphora, 2012), an illustrated children’s book, The Sloths and I (Anaphora, 2013) and two novellas, The Great Love of Queen Margaret, the Vampire and Campaigns Against the Olden (Grim’s Labyrinth Publishing). She won the MLA Bibliography, Kentucky Historical Society and the Brown University research fellowships. PDF links to the book will be provided for all 100 winners - honest reviews are warmly invited in exchange.

The Romances of George Sand: takes the heroine from a childhood in the aristocracy amidst the Napoleonic Wars, to an unhappy early marriage and eventual divorce, to her careers as a country doctor, a pharmacist, a lawyer, and most successfully as a romance novelist. This is a story about the revolutions in a woman’s heart as she goes through dozens of love affairs. It is also about George’s involvement in violent, political revolutions of her time, including the July and June Revolutions and the 1848 Revolution; in the latter, she served as the unofficial Minister of Propaganda. The story is full of military battles, coup d’etat maneuvers, duels, malevolent plots, infidelity, artistic discussions, monumental legal cases, and reflections on the nature of love, family, romance, rebellion, and femininity. The history behind each of the events depicted is researched with biographical precision, but liberty is taken with some events that have been contested by historians, including the lesbian affair George had with Marie Dorval and the identity of the real father of her second child. Students of literature and history will recognize many of the names of the central characters, as George had close personal encounters with Napoleon I and III, Alexander Dumas pere and fils, Frederic Chopin, Alfred de Musset, and a long list of other notable figures.