World Prose

A widower meets a man who can change the weather. A middle-aged woman attempts to freeze to death; A young man attempts to starve to death. A young woman navigates in a foreign city, constructing a new identity. A dancer is forced to accept a ride home from a bar comedian. A divorcee meets an elderly Japanese woman… From the sombre offices of Tokyo to the ESL classrooms of Toronto, see how they find their own therapeutic ways to reconcile with their loss, agony, and despair

On civil rights and America's 1960s New Left movement. Set during America’s 1960s New Left movement, The Opposition tells the story of twenty-something young men and women linked by a fierce desire to change the world who become involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, when under the pressure of Vietnam, and America, unraveling, their web of passion and pain reaches a breaking point. Four women and four men meet in a Midwestern college town in 1963. As racist violence surges in the Deep South, they are seized by the civil rights movement. They all take part in demonstrations; Melissa, who is black, leaves to help voter registration in Mississippi, and several decide to organize in a poor white community in Cleveland. One of the women, Sally, has an illegal abortion. As the Vietnam war accelerates and things go awry with community organizing, some of the group get involved in antiwar projects, and another of the women, Valerie, goes to Mexico to study art. Matt, the son of a pro-war minister, is summoned by his draft board, and has a powerful drug experience on his way into draft resistance. The group rendezvous in Chicago during the Democratic Convention of August 1968 and the police do not take kindly to them. Passions flair and arguments erupt amid street fights. One of the activists, Kurt, reconsiders confrontations and decides to work with a liberal Congressman to lobby for legislation to end the war. Ronnie, a radical filmmaker, and his lover, Marcia, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, get close to the just-founded Weathermen. The novel moves through these eight lives to a tragic conclusion.

Celebrating life in America's fiftieth State A father in Hawaii takes his troubled son fishing, unable to tell him the sad news he must share. A woman is lost at sea during a reef walk and sends her family into turmoil. An unlikely relationship develops between a Realtor and an Ultimate Fighting Champion. These are just some of the sad, funny and memorable characters found in the Made in Hawaii short story collection.

Lake City has a lot of heavy weather, and it’s not just in the air. Eduardo “Vince” Negron has a regular table at a bar-restaurant in Pigsville called El Perro Negro, from where he runs El Manojo, a motley assortment of hoodlums. Negron is minor league, but across town former gangster gone legit Lloyd Frend is thinking big: perhaps he will run for office one day; he will certainly make a heap more dough. Men will be caught in the crossfire between Negron and Frend as they battle for territory, not least Walt Hargrove, an appliance store salesman drawn to El Manojo by curiosity and the desire to make an extra buck or two. Told with a tongue in various cheeks, Pigsville is a gripping tale full of sex, drugs, and violence and not a little black humour.

As a tsunami in South-East Asia kills three hundred thousand and Pope John Paul II lies dying, the lives of eight people in Rome are transformed by a Croatian housekeeper named Dubravka, who was betrayed in love and later witness to a miracle at the site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The stories of the North Americans and Italians she encounters interconnect and alternate with key episodes from Dubravka's life, as she struggles to resolve her personal concerns as well as the contradictions in her Catholic faith while working at a pensione in Rome's Campo de’ Fiori, in the shadow of the statue of the martyred visionary Giordano Bruno.

The Starlight Hotel-Casino is the story of a troubled family business doomed to fail and the stressful dynamics among its members and key employees during the collapse. It describes the inner workings of the casino business and the demise of Reno as a major player in the industry; unable, as it was, to meet the triple threat of Las Vegas, Indian gaming, and the legalization of gambling throughout the United States and abroad. The novel is both a roman à clef and bildungsroman.

Coal Boy, is a human fiction that builds on the premise: love is universal; so is racism—the same mold as Colson Whitehead, James Hannaham, and Robert Dugoni. Geocultural attributes set my story apart from their works. The United States of America stages their stories, where Black Americans and slavery have long been one of the major human rights issues intensely debated in sociopolitical arenas. My story focuses on people of mixed racial heritage: namely, Black-Japanese—the children of Black Americans and Japanese women born in Japan during the post-World War II Occupation.

Al is in his early sixties, retired from business, happily married. He meets a much younger woman, Courtney, whom he befriends. His immediate difficulty is to define the friendship: His wife, Kimberly, regards the friendship with Courtney as inimical to their marriage. Kimberly insists that Al chooses between her and Courtney. He must confront the issue of what constitutes love; and whether and how much he loves the two women, and in what different ways. Al ends his friendship with Courtney but feels badly about it – he thinks that he has behaved poorly, and that he has let her down. Kimberly is deeply angry, but he slowly recovers her trust, and they resume their erstwhile happy marriage.

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.

In 2005, after four months in hospitals, Dick Rayburn returns home with a limp, a disfigured face, and pain. Around tense conversations between him and his wife, Valerie, concerning their absent son, Jamie, the narrative weaves memories triggered by objects in the house. An old self-portrait draws him back to his childhood and the studio of his father, who trained Dick to be an artist, while an article critical of the Iraq War, by the journalist to whom he was engaged when they were graduate students, resurrects the person he was and the woman he loved. Dick relives his evolution from a young artist and left-wing university student to the war profiteer Valerie blames for Jamie being in Iraq, and cannot stop reliving the horror that he witnessed the day he flew into Fallujah and was shot down as his helicopter left the city. To cope with the memories that haunt him, Dick returns to his passion for painting. He paints what he saw in Fallujah, the person he feels he has become, and the loved ones he has lost. The images emerge from a deep, dark background, the principal ingredient of which is ivory black.

When Samson Johnson feels pushed over the edge from news reports of another U.S. mass shooting, he comes up with the bi-partisan 'Save Lives, Save Guns' plan. If shootings could be made non-lethal, killings would be stopped, the insurance companies would still profit and nobody would have their guns taken away. From town hall meetings in Oklahoma, to a Pride Centre in Vermont, from sunny California, to the prairies of South Dakota, Samson's sleepless effort to end mass shootings forever covers the breadth of the country. Yet as the campaign goes viral on social media and funds begin to pour in by the millions, Samson is confronted with the realities of his plan. Voices across the country begin to riddle him with doubt: that his policy may be misguided and stand to do more harm than good. Can Samson put a stop to his misguided plan in time? Or is the 'Believe America' movement a Frankenstein's monster 'too big to fail'? A biting satire on American exceptionalism, gun ownership and violence, #BelieveAmerica gets to the core of how hard it will be to change these attitudes and to bring sanity back into the debate.

A highly readable, intimate story about loss, aging, female friendship, family, and renewal…told with grit and humor. Lexi is a sixty-year-old widow whose solitary life is thrown into turmoil when a desperate young woman moves in with her, soon followed by the unexpected arrival of her best friend, who has separated from her husband of forty years. The mix of these three very different personalities – a powerful omnivore seeking to live life to the fullest; a sweet, self-denying vegan; and Lexi, a thoughtful, still grieving widow – leads to some surprising (sometimes humorous) situations that force Lexi to re-examine her life. In the physics of relationships, Lexi observes that nature abhors a vacuum. She begins to wonder if she herself has somehow manipulated her circumstances to fill that vacuum…simply to imitate the life she had before the death of her husband.  “[The Physics of Relationships] was a joy to read. I loved the flow of the writing, the profundity of the observations, and the humor. You have truly sketched a very accurate, forgiving, and endearing picture of a woman at this stage of life. Thank you for writing this book.” -Kaiya Cade Smith Blackburn “You did an amazing job writing so truly in the voice of an older woman…. I found Lexi’s character appealing from the first page, and her consistent voice made her a very sympathetic, fully realized character. I particularly enjoyed her reflections on all she observed about human nature and the realities and absurdities of aging. She is kind, funny, curious, thoughtful, eager to puzzle out relationships. …. I enjoyed the twists and turns and tensions of the plot, three women living together, and the extra complication of Tasha [her daughter], and romantic partners, and the suspense of whether a myriad of small/large issues will get resolved.”  - Rosalyn Art

Diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome as a teenager, Adam, now a 26-year-old freelance designer, attends his first meeting at a social support group. Here he meets Anna, a charity worker with a face hemangioma, Marta a TV anchor with alopecia, and Eva a make up artist with vitiligo. The following week he moves in with them. Shaped after the writer’s own experience of living with Tourette’s syndrome, Adam tries to move from self-inflicted invisibility to being visible—in his family, career, and personal life. Invisible is a book about what it means to be different. A book that encourages acceptance and tolerance. A book about fear and escape, about the necessity of being loved and accepted. It’s about the permanent struggle with your complexes and attempts to start loving yourself. It’s about hard stories. But also about big hearts.

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.

The year is 1950. A brutal racist attack drives Alfie Bagliato’s family from their small town to New York City, where, at sixteen, Alfie dreams of escaping his Italian American enclave through a career in music and a romance with his distant cousin, Adeline. Soon enough, disappointment and frustration lead Alfie to join the military, to follow Adeline to San Francisco, and then to become a New York City cop, whose clash with protestors during the 1968 Columbia University student uprising nearly kills him, forcing him to confront his inherited bigotry and fear, as he wrestles with his lingering love for Adeline and need to find a new life.

In 1967, the Summer of Love, 17-year old 'Buckles' Sinclair runs from her privileged home in Scarsdale to hitchhike to San Francisco, but instead of Flower Power, Peace, and Love she finds herself plunged into the darkest heart of the American nightmare. Her abandoned mother, KJ, rebuilds her identity and life in the company of a “family” of homosexual men—she is Wendy to The Lost Boys of Manhattan.

Blow Up the Ashes, Vol 2 of American Mayhem, reveals the story of Pierre Doucet, a gambler and then a killer for the New Orleans mob during World War 2 who at one time admires from afar a yellow-haired girl. When decades later he travels to New York, he meets KJ again. They discover she was his “yellow-haired girl. “ KJ learns Pierre is a killer, but instead of drawing back in horror joins him. KJ and Buckles come together at the novels’ end when Buckles wreaks revenge on Big Bill.

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.