Books published by Coffeetown Press

The Widow (La Viuda) is ninety-two years old. She lives in a house filled with photos and coins, jewels and a sable coat. Aware that her memory is failing but burning with desire to record the story of her life on paper, she hires Gabriela, a nineteen-year-old Mixteca from Mexico. Gabriela is one of the few survivors of a massacre and treacherous journey to El Norte. Gabriela and the Widow is a story of chaos, revenge, and change: death and love, love and sex, and sex and death. Gabriela seeks revenge for the destruction of her village. The Widow craves balance for the betrayals in her life. In the end, the Widow gives Gabriela the secret of immortality.

Eating Owen is a tale of mystery. What really happened to Owen Coffin, the cabin boy on the Nantucket whaling ship Essex? In the autumn of 1819, the unthinkable happened. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a whale rammed into the Essex, sinking it within minutes (the event that helped inspire Melville's Moby-Dick). The crew had no refuge except to jump into the three small and very flimsy wooden boats they carried on board to help them chase the whales. During the next three months, bobbing around aimlessly on the open ocean, the men suffered terribly. They ran out of food to eat, and some of them died. And some of them ate each other. Including Owen. The few survivors returned to Nantucket with the story that Owen had been fairly elected to be executed--before he was eaten. But no one knows for sure what happened. Or do we? Eating Owen is the story of Owen Coffin and his family before the Essex tragedy. It is a story about a family, a story about surviving and not surviving. A story about a whale's revenge.

Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he'd rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long-time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns-which drives Teresa, Ricky's hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher's daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark. Valley Boy is Book Two of Remick's California Quartet series.

A hundred years ago, the small country of Armenia within the Ottoman Empire became the site of continuous border conflict, political intrigue and sporadic wars between the Turks, the Persians and the Tsarist Russians. Early in the twentieth century, these regional conflicts erupted into bitter political and ethnic "cleansing" that decimated the country and nearly destroyed the population living there. The causes and magnitude of the ethnic killing that took place during and after World War I are still debated and disputed in Turkey and Armenia today. In times of calamity or economic distress, there is a small percentage of people (about two percent) who are willing to leave family, home, and their country of origin to set up businesses in exotic or foreign lands. The two-percenters and undocumented immigrants whose stories appear in The Gathering Place made the arduous trek across Asia to gather in the exotic city of Old Shanghai, where they joined a social club in the city''s Old International Settlement. Their travels coincide with war, economic depression, revolution, banditry and military occupation during the most turbulent period in modern history-a period that covers what some call the ''Modern Dark Age''-the first half of the twentieth century. The personal histories in The Gathering Place offer a fresh take on the immigrant experience during a time of momentous change in Asia-from the end of World War I to the exodus of Europeans from China.