Books published by Alternative Book Press

Daughter’s Exchange opens a conversation wherein we can reevaluate a figure like Zora Neale Hurston, whose marginal engagement with the intellectual marketplace during her lifetime is rarely discussed outside of a specialized audience.  Daughter’s Exchange seeks to address those who teach the next generation—a generation who seem more fractured than ever due to their access to the technological advancements of our times—in order to challenge them to consider the role of assigning value within the intellectual marketplace.  Daughter’s Exchange finds a place in classrooms interested in women’s studies, African and African American culture, and pedagogical practice.  Traditional academic discourse favors the semblance of objective, universal truth by masking the agent behind the language, but Daughter’s Exchange resists this move by drawing upon oriki as an African and woman centered oral practice.  In Yoruba West Africa, women find relative expressive freedom in the private, public space of their ile.  On these homegrounds, where people recognize bonds of kinship, women are able to call for help from the living and the dead, draw power from their God, give voice to fear, offer praise to great men, memorialize the past, name the present, predict the future, and readily add their voices to a dynamic art.  The hope here is to continually remind the reader of the agents behind the text rather than to obscure those collectively engaged in defining the discursive community.  Nevertheless, the liberatory nature of word play has its limits.  That is why Daughter’s Exchange privileges experience over the word.  The incontrovertible evidence of African American history is recorded in their lives, consequently the lived experiences of African American women is inherently valuable.  Of course, the marketplace does not agree.  The woman-centered Nigerian market, which might be read as liberatory, is circumscribed by the slave market and the more immediate pressures of the academic market.  The effort here is to subvert the established order that exiled African American ancestors and subjected them to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.  And to speak from the chasm in patriarchal discourse, be it Eurocentric or Afrocentric, into which the African American woman’s experience has been discarded.  Daughter’s Exchange defines the dimensions of a homeground of sorts that affords others access, if not to the broader marketplace, then to a more private audience where bonds of kinship permit them to speak.

A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. is a fictional biography of Meinhardt Raabe, a midget hired to play a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. Meinhardt wants the dignity and respect given normal people, yet his disability makes him mistrust even those who can see past it. He devotes his life to succeeding in work, but wonders if it has been at the cost of friendship and love. The narrative follows Meinhardt from 1935 pre-war Berlin, where he is the victim of Nazi social hygiene policies, to his star turn in the movie, through decades of social change in the United States, and ends in 1980 with his pilgrimage to the small town in Germany where the grandmother (Oma) who raised him was born. There he confronts the choice to maintain the safety of his isolation or, at the age of 65, to at last take the risk of opening his heart. Secondary characters, based on imagined and historical figures, include Rodge Smythe, an aphorism-spouting legless Great War veteran; Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz; Charles Becker, another Munchkin, who marries a fellow cast member and is the father of one normal child and one midget; and Celia Posy, a beautiful fashion model, half-again Meinhardt’s height, with whom he falls in love but who has a hidden disability of her own. Settings in Europe and the United States during bygone eras, together with characters who range from seamstresses to salesmen and bartenders to buskers, bring alive the struggles of a memorable character, with a memorable name, as he learns his true measure. The book is entertaining, appealing to generations of readers who share the author’s fascination with the magic of Oz. While she is not a midget, she is a very short person who can thus identify with the protagonists’s logistical challenges and struggle for full-size respect. However, A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. is much more than an inside look at a classic movie or the trials of a little person. The book matters because justice is the pursuit and right of everyone who is discriminated against due to disability, race, ethnicity, religion, country of origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, appearance, and/or other aspect of identity. Though set in the past, A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. is with us today, wherever bigotry lives. In its pages, readers will find the intelligence, love, and courage to follow the yellow brick road to the safe home we all deserve.

What's a girl to do when her brand loses its juice and her product stops moving? Where does she go after the sinister agents visit and her friends start to disappear? How does she respond to the tweeting President and his repertoire of vaguely threatening reality shows? How does she get her own show back up and running? Faced with such puzzling questions, Britt and her friend Jimmy decide the time has come to take off through the nighttime streets of the depopulated and collapsing city to find some real answers - at the pits, where everything goes to die. On their quest, they encounter a sheaf of characters - the limbless gurney boy who speaks in riddles and sings to the dark and empty streets; the one-legged former Tumorthon emcee, who had the whole world in his hand and lost it all to the boy with the tumor in his brain; the enigmatic shopkeeper who stocks his shelves with the cast-offs from a long-gone world. Through these encounters, pursued by agents operating a vast surveillance network, Britt and Jimmy finally reach the pits and find answers to questions they hadn't even thought to ask.

Bernadette "Bernie" Sheridan, has the Carlos Lunas case in the bag. She's smart, confident, and fueled by personal tragedy. She knows all too well what's at stake for the six-year-old, Mexican-American boy, who lost his parents to a drunk driver. After all, her own mother and father-her adopted parents-died tragically when she was only thirteen, and she's been struggling with the emotional loss ever since. Now, nearing forty and jaded as ever, she's adamant about saving Carlos from a fate similar to her own, even if only by winning him a healthy monetary settlement. Even if it means she must harken back to a painful childhood in order to do so. There are other obstacles waiting for Bernie: a hotshot, misogynist defense attorney will challenge her case; her beloved grandmother's deteriorating health will threaten her only semblance of family; and a handsome economist will begin to test her iron-clad vulnerability. Surely, she'll be able to forge past all this chaos. For Carlos's sake. But what will happen when her birth mother, Julie, tries to reenter the picture thirty-seven years after giving her away? Will Bernie decide to toss that aside too, on her martyrly mission for justice? Meeting Julie may be just the thing Bernie needs to win the Lunas case in the end. And learning her harrowing story may also provide the missing piece in the tragic puzzle of her haunted childhood. Told through the verging, alternating viewpoints of two broken women in two different eras, The Circle Game is at once a thoughtful commentary on female agency, racial bias, and domestic abuse, as well as a nuanced novel wrought with literary heft and profound psychological tension."Tanya Nichols' The Circle Game sets two memorable characters on a collision course: Bernadette, an idealistic attorney overwhelmed by courtroom challenges and more personal questions of identity and purpose; and Julie, her anonymous birth mother, whose story unfolds decades earlier in a dingy trailer parked behind a biker bar. Nichols' prose consistently grabs the reader with its lyrical clarity, and implicates us in the lives of complex and engaging characters. The novel moves us deeply in all the best ways..." --John Hales, author of Shooting Polaris: A Personal Survey in the American West"California's great Central Valley long has been fertile ground for novelists eager to write about immigrants, busted dreams and the moral questions facing real people in their everyday lives. With The Circle Game, where the ghosts of the past lurk in the corners of every chapter, Tanya Nichols zeroes in on good intentions that lead to fatal consequences. It's a tale of families, motorcycle outlaws, lovers, and redemption. You won't soon forget it."--Bill McEwen, GV Wire"The Circle Game has the power to show us that, even after years of great tragedy and loneliness, only forgiveness can open the circle of family and let in those we need most."-- Kristin FitzPatrick, author of My Pulse is and Earthquake

Ghetto Dogs is a biracial love story seen through the violent prism of dogfighting and drug dealing. While on his way to apply for a teaching job in Harlem, Vincent DeRosa saves a young boy from being mauled by a runaway pit bull. Looking on in horror, the boy's mother watches as the white man is in turn attacked and nearly killed. It is only later, under very different circumstances that Vincent and Desiree meet again and fall in love. But their love is challenged from a number of angles, not least of which is Desiree's ex­ boyfriend, Rosco, a notorious drug dealer and dogfighter who has decided to re-­enter the life of his young son.