Guernica World Editions

From the Australian Outback, where she meets a young Aboriginal man, to racist, rigidly segregated South Africa during World War II, to the midst of a pogrom in Lithuania, and then all the way back to the Babylon of biblical times, Emily has deep encounters with the young women she meets and ultimately, the histories that have mysteriously and yet powerfully shaped her own soul.

Making coal patties. Selling liquid soap. Shopping at a glittering shoe mecca. She's done them all living half her life in deprived-post-war-communist-Vietnam-turned-free-market. It's life in a vacuum when strange types of brainwashing happened. Part memoir and part social criticism, Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl? is a provocative read about a full-fledged bilingual who fights to get free from the dead past and her ancestors' sins.The story starts with her grandmother's prison visit and moves to a journey through the jungle carried out for family reunion. Drawing strength from her, Hoàng completes her transformation in America from an international student to a free naturalized being. As she sheds her adoration for the impeccable American logic, oscillates between languages, and crosses oceans, she confronts the power play and biases, cultural inhibitors and prejudices that condition human behaviors, be it in Vietnam, America or Thailand. All along, she claims justice for her under-appreciated grandma, straightens male and white patronization, tears down tradition and brainwashing, uncovers the Asian submission to western iconography, and resists the attraction of a white guy. In lucid prose and with a hint of quiet humor, Why Do You Look at Me and See a Girl? is an unflinching pursuit of questions about family, finding one's voice, home, and freedom.

Fans of Anne Tyler's quirky characters and her attention to family life, or Pete Hamill's depiction of diverse, ethnic, urban neighborhoods will connect to Most Precious Blood, set in the eleventh-hour of a declining Italian-American neighborhood where complex and often destructive loyalties have dire consequences. Hard Luck Lenny is the quintessential good son, brother, and father, and he fears a calamity will derail his son's future the way his own dreams were derailed years ago, but Frankie is preoccupied with thoughts of Gennaro DiCico, the son of a small-time mobster. Lenny's fears are realized when a cabdriver's son avenges his father's murder.

Evie knows she must put the good of the community before all else-that is the only way to fix the problems that led to the Great Flood. But when she is sent as a spy to a society less restrictive than her own, she must choose between loyalty to all she knows, and freedom in the world outside. Many years later, Evie's name has become a symbol of revolution. But Bertram uncovers a secret that changes everything he thought he knew. He must decide whether to reveal the truth, or protect the fragile peace of his society. In his journey, he encounters time-travelling historians intent on preventing apocalypse by communicating with Laura, a woman from before the Great Flood. Laura is convinced her newborn baby speaks to her, and must decide whether to trust herself, or the doctors telling her she is crazy. Through these three intertwined stories, The Red Hairband explores the inhumanity that is brought about when we are too certain of our beliefs.

An animal adventure with setting in the transition from the ice age to the present epoch, Shadowshine, with all the philosophical musings of its quirky yet remarkable characters, is a story of perseverance and of camaraderie, of the battle between good and wickedness, and of strong and lovable players who never give up. And by an open-minded, intellectual approach, these players (known as the forest-folk) begin to uncover a dangerous flaw in the human species, the absence of its own identity when face-to-face with nature.

The Archeology of a Good Rag offers a unique take on the recovery narrative. A damaged but savvy author finds new wholeness by way of a fascinating old city: Naples, Italy. John Domini's exploration of the place- little known to North Americans, yet rich in culture and challenge- draws on decades of research, living with local friends and family. His work has appeared previously in the New York Times and elsewhere, and he's published award-winning Neapolitan novels. This memoir will take readers into the back alleys and hidden beaches. It will examine intricacies of both romance and crime, and provide insight into the latest Naples immigrants, African refugees. Overall, Archeology of a Good Rag turns the city into a prism that throws its colors across both urban and spiritual experience, everywhere.

Dori's narrative is a heart-touching and zany blend of actual events in the life of a young Boxer. With edgy charm, she takes us on a romp through her world in such a way we can't help but reconsider our lives. Through her we get a dog's-eye view on human exploitation of animals. This unique approach is hauntingly effective.

Daniella believes her lost mother is a World War II hero, but is terrorized by a dream of a war-torn jungle, raining fire. At forty, with her life and career stalled, Daniella is visited by four dead ancestors, who try to help her put her life back together. When this fails, propelled by curiosity about her recurring dream, she travels to the nuclear testing grounds at the Bikini Islands, to find out her mother's real role in the war and its aftermath.

The two true life stories contained in Tenacity span decades -- and two worlds, Australia and Britain. Told through the painful words of mothers Julie Rose and Marilyn Cowell (as recorded by her daughters, Michelle and Sarah), this compelling read has no sugar coating as it takes you through Julie's and Marilyn's struggle to get their sons off drugs -- and the tragedies that ensue. These stories highlight the harrowing fact that addiction can happen to anyone and can strike even the best of families. Powerful and hard hitting, this must read serves as an information and education tool for both young people and parents, a lesson not to be ignored.

Caminos tells the story of Mercedes González Conde and her daughter, granddaughter and great-grandson. Each of them live and love, cope with and compound their inner troubles as issues of abandonment, attachment, identity and rootlessness circle around and through them. The novel is set in the northwest Spanish province of Asturias and the eastern United States -- primarily West Virginia and Ohio -- with scenes in Mexico, Canada, Prague and Berlin.

A Life Out of Whack has two parts. The first part is autobiographical and sketches the atypical early life of a future academic scholar from family poverty to marriage and divorce at nineteen, from eight years in big-city and federal law enforcement to starting college at the age of twenty-six, culminating with a doctoral fellowship in French Studies at Brown U. The second part presents an alternative critical look at contemporary life and ethos: aging, nature, corporate capitalism, and American, French, and global cultures.

Side Effects: A footloose journey to the apocalypse is a novel about the post-World War II baby boom generation and the factors that have led to climate catastrophe. The novel provides a portrait of the boomers by following the lives of a zany, idealistic couple and their growing family through the '50s, '60s, '70s. Beginning on a honeymoon motorcycle trip the couple sets the goal of putting down roots in California, the land of wild beauty, abundance, and political activism. The music, art, science, and politics of the era are palpable throughout the book.

In Kissing a Tree Surgeon, worlds traverse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in New Jersey. Southern women get kidnapped by North Koreans. A Dutch girl solicits money on OKCupid. A young woman meets Golda Meir on an Upper East Side bus in New York City. A character believes he's the biological son of Frank Sinatra. Zionist-Hasidic lesbians protest anti-Semitism at a women's Catholic college. A stalking moviegoer takes her dead grandmother to a Bertolucci film. A daughter meets her father's mistress at his grave. An employee is banned from calling her boss in the office. An adult woman visits the radio store in Lakewood, New Jersey, of the boy who didn't invite her to his bar mitzvah.

Céline Vaillancourt saw the untamed forest in shades of apprehension: a dark, trackless wilderness that ran from the shore of Lake Superior to an unknown boundary on an unnavigable map. But Edmund, her 11-year-old son, was possessed of a different vision, as though, having been brought into that country as a child in his father's arms, he had put the very same brooding colors together and produced a painting shot through with adventure and the light of discovery. There was no talking to either of them, husband or son. But talk no longer seemed to matter. Now they were in the maw of the great recession. Now her husband's construction business, built on the housing boom in the lake-side village of Port Landing, Wisconsin, was failing. And now, on a cold, moonless night in December, on the brink of the worst that Lake Superior could throw at them, Edmund was alone in the woods, the temperature plummeting, a killing storm bearing down, with little more than his beloved Border Collie, Breeze, to keep him warm.

"Two friends two friends, how close could they get without being one man … one in love with a ghost, the other … longed for the son who'd more than likely already become a ghost." Rubén Arenal, nicknamed Rocket by his close friends and family, and Ernesto Cisneros are longtime friends, as close as brothers, living in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua.  Rubén is a potter who lives alone in his studio apartment. Ernesto is married to Guadalupe and they have one son, Coyuco, who is training to be a teacher. Out of these bald facts spins magic. Rubén falls in love with an eerily lifelike mannequin in a shop window, widely rumored to be more flesh and bone than mere artifice and modelled on a local beauty nicknamed La Pascualita, who died young many decades ago. Rubén trails after her ghost while Ernesto leaves their hometown to go in search of his son, kidnapped and disappeared by the police while out on a student protest with forty-two of his comrades from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College.

This is a book about a small Southern Italian village and its offshoots in Toronto. It's about bread and figs and food in general, about Carnival and pilgrimages to religious sanctuaries, about fathers, mothers and children, about migrating and about remaining, about yearning to leave if you've stayed and yearning to make the trek back if you've gone, about how both those who travel and those who never stray from home change. But it's also about what it may mean to write an ethnography of the place you've chosen to continue to inhabit and about how an array of houses in one of the most forlorn backwaters of Europe can actually be in the thick of current history. Mixing fiction and non-fiction, autobiography, portraits of friends and co-villagers, anecdotes, short tales and the reflections of the specialist, it's also about how anthropology can be literature and literature anthropology. In short, it's a book sure to become a classic.

Quarantine of The Mind: Preventative Imprisonment for Crimes Not Yet Committed is grounded in W. Strawn Douglas' personal battle with mental illness and his experiences with it at the mental institution where he's lived for almost three decades. Different portions of it were created in different times, with Douglas in a variety of different mindsets, and it concerns itself mainly with the hoops that the government wants people who are mentally ill to jump through in all too often vain hopes of regaining their freedom. Some of the hoops are admittedly linked to reasonable goals and ideals. Unfortunately, too many others only serve the whims of our captors, serving the traditions of abuse in the oxymoron of "forced care."

When thirty-two-year-old Eric Boulanger returns to his Vermont hometown to care for his mother, he attempts to revive the town's failing economy by drumming up a contest that will offer a free wedding. The winner is Bostonian Ryan Toscano whose fiancé has left to become a Jesuit, but whose beloved, outspoken, Jewish grandmother insists she find a substitute in time for the gala affair. Eric's well-intentioned brainstorm sets three millennials on an –at times hilarious at times painful– odyssey of self-discovery, one, full of surprises amid deceptions, that forces them and an entire town to confront their notions of faith and death, love and acceptance.

This is a flip book with two novels: A Place In The Dark braids history, fiction and politics. It is set in Utica with substantial passages of painful, site-specific memories of the characters of both the Vietnam war and the American engagement in Iraq. These memories are carried by a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Utica, who suffered in Saigon, an American Marine and Italian-American Utican who committed an atrocity during the siege of Khe Sanh, and an Iraqi who administered torture and worked as translator and interpreter in Baghdad on America's behalf. The Glamour of Evil deals with how, some males, especially literary/intellectual types, are drawn to violent men in organized crime; and secretly desire intimacy with such people whom they find charismatic, powerful and uniquely free inside a world where the freedom of the individual is in much doubt. The novel features a legendary American Mafioso, Crazy Joey Gallo and his dark world. This is combined with a whodunit involving Eliot Conte's daughter, a crisis that a connected man of literary flair promises to resolve for Conte for an unusual price.

The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald's novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby's great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.

Alina has red hair, green eyes and an extraordinary intelligence: at the age of two, she can already read and count. She loves to surgically dissect the world around her and listen to the stories that her grandfather Giuseppe tells her, as they wander through the alleys and rocky coastline of Polignano. Hers is an atypical childhood, always poised between genius and discomfort, skipped life stages and looming bullying. Because she is always the youngest one, the best one, the strongest and most fragile one at the same time. A fish out of water with intellectual and sensory "superpowers", with depression and anorexia always lurking. Until Nicola arrives to break her crystal ball. A love that is as strong as it is socially unacceptable and that will mark the beginning of her real life, of her forced growth, of her precocious blossoming into a strong woman, capable of loving and suffering. This is the story of Alina and of her way of being, living with Asperger's syndrome, in a crescendo of emotions "differently" felt between Polignano, Milan and Paris, to then return to the starting point: the twelfth room.

If small-town reporter Polly Stern has to cover one more manure runoff story, she's going to lose her already unmindful mind. Polly thought she'd end up as a serious photojournalist, traveling the world, meeting important people, and documenting significant environmental and social events. Life didn't turn out as expected. With her career at a standstill, her marriage over, her nest empty, her spiritual foundation precarious, and her family keeping a vital secret from her, Polly is desperate for answers. And change. She sets out on an unintended journey, stumbling upon story after story that for some reason-coincidence, fate?-all occurred in 1937. Polly's path leads her to: a troubled teen on a stone bridge high in the Green Mountains of Vermont, a political refugee on a kosher farm carved out of the Dominican Republic jungle, a tribal chief near a remote hut in uncharted Papua New Guinea, a volunteer soldier in a foggy olive grove in Spain, an artistic Italian savant in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and to a Tibetan boy and his snow-white mastiff as they begin their trek across the Himalayas. As the lines blur between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between present and past, Polly writes about these inspiring characters, and others, in nine short stories-all set in 1937-embedded throughout the novel. Her compelling international literary voyage reveals clues that allow Polly to uncover the truth about her own history, opening a new path for understanding, forgiveness, and love.

If small-town reporter Polly Stern has to cover one more manure runoff story, she's going to lose her already unmindful mind. Polly thought she'd end up as a serious photojournalist, traveling the world, meeting important people, and documenting significant environmental and social events. Life didn't turn out as expected. With her career at a standstill, her marriage over, her nest empty, her spiritual foundation precarious, and her family keeping a vital secret from her, Polly is desperate for answers. And change. She sets out on an unintended journey, stumbling upon story after story that for some reason-coincidence, fate?-all occurred in 1937. Polly's path leads her to: a troubled teen on a stone bridge high in the Green Mountains of Vermont, a political refugee on a kosher farm carved out of the Dominican Republic jungle, a tribal chief near a remote hut in uncharted Papua New Guinea, a volunteer soldier in a foggy olive grove in Spain, an artistic Italian savant in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and to a Tibetan boy and his snow-white mastiff as they begin their trek across the Himalayas. As the lines blur between reality and fantasy, between truth and fiction, between present and past, Polly writes about these inspiring characters, and others, in nine short stories-all set in 1937-embedded throughout the novel. Her compelling international literary voyage reveals clues that allow Polly to uncover the truth about her own history, opening a new path for understanding, forgiveness, and love.

This is an apprenticeship novel, the story of Isabel Cooper, 17, and her 15-year-old brother, Frederick. In early 1911, they leave their Georgetown home after the sudden death of their Mexican mother. They are determined to find their father, a college professor who – like many American leftists – had joined the Mexican revolution a few months earlier. They travel by train, stagecoach, and wagon, at first put off by what they see of turn-of-the-century American South. But they soon learn of the quiet dignity of their mother's homeland. After an ugly incident not of their making, they escape the federales with the help of Pepe, a lad of many talents. He leads them to refuge with a ragtag militia on its way to join Carranza's Army of the North, commanded by a woman known as La Maestra

Poor Russell Dean, golden boy of American advertising. His meticulously crafted career has brought him wealth, fame, an idyllic lifestyle and a beautiful wife. But now his wife is divorcing him, he's surrounded by fools and Russell is in a tailspin. A golf vacation to a remote Ontario resort town is exactly what he needs to skate through a rare rough patch. Or not. Mysterious natural forces far beyond his control and the eclectic characters he meets -- including three skilled, powerful women and a mirthful Ojibwe fishing guide -- have decidedly different plans. Welcome to the Canadian wilderness, Mr. Dean. Welcome to Kamini: Danger, Suspense, Mysticism, Romance and Live Bait.

Poor Russell Dean, golden boy of American advertising. His meticulously crafted career has brought him wealth, fame, an idyllic lifestyle and a beautiful wife. But now his wife is divorcing him, he's surrounded by fools and Russell is in a tailspin. A golf vacation to a remote Ontario resort town is exactly what he needs to skate through a rare rough patch. Or not. Mysterious natural forces far beyond his control and the eclectic characters he meets -- including three skilled, powerful women and a mirthful Ojibwe fishing guide -- have decidedly different plans. Welcome to the Canadian wilderness, Mr. Dean. Welcome to Kamini: Danger, Suspense, Mysticism, Romance and Live Bait.

Two men, no longer young, and friends from childhood, fly to NYC-each with a secret purpose unknown to the other. They arrive just as COVID-19 explodes across the city's 5 boroughs. One of the men (white) has come to Manhattan to confront a theater producer who has made a coercive offer to his wife. The other man (black, former All-American football star) plans to confront and take revenge on his white girlfriend from college days-who left him for a white man. As they pursue their goals they are caught up in the hunt for America's most famous criminal. The black man, seeking revenge, makes a surprising turn. The white man, who has taken his confrontation with the theater producer to criminal length, may never leave Manhattan to return to his family. Manhattan Meltdown introduces a series of inter-connected characters who, ever as their lives are impacted by lethal disease, must continue to struggle with more conventional personal crises: uterine cancer, imperiled romantic relationships, and the deteriorations of advancing old age.

In our era of #MeToo and fresh attempts to break the gender biased holds on our culture, a portrait of gender bias in the art world offers a microcosm of the pervasive challenges to achieving equality. Living Dolls and Other Women provides a fictionalized account of that world set against the pervasive sexual harassment in every corner of urban daily life. Set in the late 1980s, with New York City in the middle of a real estate crash, Living Dolls and Other Women chronicles the lives of five urban women as well as an activist organization comprised of women in the art world, the Living Dolls. Living Dolls and Other Women is an urban drama, chock full of action: crime, mystery, culture, and romance. The book takes on the contemporary issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, artistic merit, feminism, family values, and sexual preference. It delves into the main characters' lives and traces dramatic and personal transformations of each. The comical yet dead serious antics of the Living Dolls thread through the novel as the backbone of the book.

Two men, no longer young, and friends from childhood, fly to NYC-each with a secret purpose unknown to the other. They arrive just as COVID-19 explodes across the city's 5 boroughs. One of the men (white) has come to Manhattan to confront a theater producer who has made a coercive offer to his wife. The other man (black, former All-American football star) plans to confront and take revenge on his white girlfriend from college days-who left him for a white man. As they pursue their goals they are caught up in the hunt for America's most famous criminal. The black man, seeking revenge, makes a surprising turn. The white man, who has taken his confrontation with the theater producer to criminal length, may never leave Manhattan to return to his family. Manhattan Meltdown introduces a series of inter-connected characters who, ever as their lives are impacted by lethal disease, must continue to struggle with more conventional personal crises: uterine cancer, imperiled romantic relationships, and the deteriorations of advancing old age.

Jamison Everett, a shy and lonely man with few friends, is a retired high school English teacher. When his artist sister, Monna, who is suffering from Parkinson's Disease, calls and asks for his help, he reluctantly agrees to leave his apartment in Minneapolis and temporarily relocate to her remote Montana town. Perhaps, in caring for his sister, he will find the friendship he longs for. But Monna's fiercely independent husband, Ben, has a different game plan. Parkinson's has robbed Monna of her ability to paint, and if the doctors won't cure her, then by god he'll do it - by sheer force of will. Jamison, summoning his courage, offers to help, and an alliance is born. Yet neither man can know how much their nascent friendship will ask of them. Only Monna senses what is coming.