Books in the WORLD PROSE series

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

John Young writes with the humor of David Sedaris and the insight and humanity of John Updike.--Aileen Grever This often-comic novel is not 'Christian' or 'religious, ' although the narrator is a 7-foot-tall minister ... who becomes obsessed with growing the world's largest pumpkin. John Crackstone is cracking under the pressure of working with the wrong people in the wrong place. And he's aching for success.What begins as backyard lark swells into a hilarious and absurd idea to build a pumpkin empire by making everything from snacks to toilet paper. It becomes his chance to flip the tables on his affluent and perpetually disappointed deacons.Getting Huge resonates deeply with readers, showing how the pursuit of other people's goals and ideas of success can cloud judgment. Follow John Crackstone's humorous--and touching--pursuit of success and sense of belonging, which culminates on an unforgettable Christmas evening.

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.

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.

A young Croatian woman travels to Medugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary, where she meets an angel and witnesses a miracle. Twenty years later, after living in a cloistered convent, she travels to Rome where her habit of prayer transforms the lives of seven strangers. Their stories intertwine and connect in this portrayal of several Roman churches, the art of Bernini, Caravaggio, and Borromini, and Rome's rich architectural history.