Books published by Harvard Square Editions

Next Generation Indie Book Award finalistThe Landmark Prize for Fiction finalist (under the working title, Intensia)Goethe Award shortlistedA timely novel on how the young musician overcame prejudice to become an international phenomenon as the entire world celebrates the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth:The year was 1770, the place, Bonn, Germany. A drunken father took his first look at his baby's dark complexion and lost his temper. The mother insisted the child was his. This was the beginning of a youth filled with anxiety, prejudice, and uncertainty for young Luis. We know him as Beethoven.Descriptions by neighbors and friends often begin, "He was black," meaning darker than others, and therefore subject to discrimination in the German north. Was Beethoven black in contemporary terms? There is little doubt that the child, perhaps with Moorish roots, who grew up under the thumb of a domineering, alcoholic father, did not look like other members of his family, nor even his community. We may never know why.

Enter this tetrad of tangled love tales at the turn of the last millennium when what were then the latest technologies-personal computers, fax machines, and mobile phones-started to short-circuit pacemakers. This tour de four of realistic love stories operates operatically, like a piece of music in four movements, sometimes zany and tragic, at times surreal and sublime.Help Phone Thirteen' (scherzando con misterioso): A young father moves his family across the country to escape his oppressive in-laws and, when his job and marriage implode, gets guidance from a mystical voice on a "help phone" at the local mall and a professional clown masquerading as social savior.'Meer, Tarn, Water, Fell' (marcia moderato con fuoco): A poetry-loathing Dutch tour bus driver on a stopover in The Lake District plots revenge on his German ex-wife, unaware that the daughter he never knew he had has followed him half way around the world for the love she was denied.'Impressions' (appassionato): An ex-military pilot turned tech CEO finds his unconventional marriage and newfound faith at odds when he discovers the joys and dangers that come with waiting for answers from heaven and the heart.'The Seal' (eroico non troppo): A young family, caught between the baby blues and the deep blue sea, battles professional and personal pressures, but thanks to a homeless benefactor and captive harbor seal, learns that loving the environment and loving each other are a matter of instinct.T. S. Eliot had his Four Quartets of poetry, now comes a foursome of fiction. For beach readers, literature connoisseurs, and book club junkies alike, these tales will quadruple the pleasure in reflecting on how we live and love. Wherever you take them, they will find you once again, in love with trouble and troubled by love.

The Heir of the Thunderbirdby May-Britt and Martin BraendstrupThe Heir of the Thunderbird is the first of three books in The Glass People seriesAt the age of 16, Victoria discovers that maybe the strange condition that causes her bones to break like twigs is not osteoporosis, but a legacy from her late father's ancestors. However, by then she is already tangled up in an intricate web of old legends and secret organizations.In order to find out who she really is, she must seek out her father's family in Canada, and face her Indian ancestry.

Open this book, and you will enter a world refracted in a prism with thirty-two polished surfaces. A gem, cut in the Eurocrat diamond district, emitting multifarious literature through its many faces. Some reflect the wistful melancholy of the Brussels drizzle, some tear open the sky with a bolt of genius that will have you groping for your sunglasses. A brain drain of anglophone and anglophile writers, itinerant and settled, share and sharpen their largely expat outpourings of human love and beastly bombings, reassuring community and bewildering exile. The private explodes in public, the petty corrupts the grand, the funny elbows the dire-in the heart of the old world, lives and stories converge and drift apart. This collection portrays our troubled and exciting times through short story, poem, script and novel excerpt of both seasoned pros and promising hacks. Whether brutally marooned on the damp flatlands, or cosily embedded in red-brick ale houses, their dreams and nightmares shine from this beloved, accursed, ramshackle Europe of ours. Come inside.

When Ben Ava, a struggling medical student facing insurmountable financial worries, receives a scholarship offer for a Medical Center in Memphis, he thinks that his tenuous future is finally secure. But Ben's past will not leave him alone. His fellow scholarship winner is his old friend Brenda-a young medical student with extraordinary talent whose troubled past has made her self-destructive and dangerous. In Memphis, their lives become increasingly tangled as Ben is pulled into Brenda's orbit. Soon, he finds himself risking his medical education, his new romance, and his entire future in the hopes of steering himself and Brenda through the tumult of their shared loneliness and trauma.Tears Before Exaltation is a literary drama about coping with the past, surviving the present, and the blurred lines between courage and insanity, hate and love.