Guernica World Editions Series

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 the coming apocalypse. 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 and on to the present. Beginning in the Midwest 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. After a stint on the East Coast, they settle in the West. The music, art, science, and politics of the era are palpable throughout the book.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Archeology of a Good Ragù 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 Ragù turns the city into a prism that throws its colors across both urban and spiritual experience, everywhere.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This collection includes fourteen stories, roughly evenly divided between those that occur in Israel and those that occur in the U.S., with a couple occurring in vague, exotic places, one of them even in an imagined Greenland. The lead—and by a considerable margin, longest—story, "Help Me, Rhonda," is about two American immigrants in Israel, a man and a woman, the former divorced and the latter single, who meet by chance and try to navigate the difficult maze of fear, doubt, and need that their encounter prompts in both of them. Most of the stories in the collection are also about encounters between men and women and their joint (or not so joint) quest, sometimes quixotic, for harmony and understanding. A common theme is geographical or cultural distance, or some other sort of obstacle. Some other stories are about a quest for a different kind of harmony, dealing with mystical aspiration and the yearning for transcendence.

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.

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.

When Rosemary grows tired of her father's overstatements and boasting with respect to her supernatural powers, which includes the ability to create flowers just by looking at their images, she decides to flee to a sanctuary far from Pandemville, her hometown. Together with a friend, and pursued by an angry father, Rosemary is sent on a series of journeys in order to escape an unknown danger. During those journeys, Rosemary encounters a series of very different societies, each of which offers to share its ideals: Courage, Loyalty, Awareness, Wisdom and Strength. Little does Rosemary know the wealth of knowledge this journey would bring her -- and how that knowledge would eventually serve to help save the life of her father.

"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.

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.