Faraway Places (15 page)

Clown Girl
Introduction by Chuck Palahniuk

Monica Drake

Fiction / 298pp / $15.95 / 0-9766311-5-6

Clown Girl lives in Baloneytown, a neighborhood so run-down that drugs, balloon animals, and even rubber chickens contribute to the local currency. Using clown life to illuminate a struggle between integrity and economic reality, this novel examines issues of class, gender, economics, and prejudice.

“The pace of [this] narrative is methamphetamine-frantic, as Drake drills down past the face paint and into Nita's core … There is a lot more going on here than just clowning around.”

Publishers Weekly

So Late, So Soon

D'Arcy Fallon

Memoir / 224pp / $15.95 / 0-9716915-3-3

An irreverent, fly-on-the-wall view of the Lighthouse Ranch, a Christian commune the eighteen-year-old hitchhiker D'Arcy Fallon called home for three years in the mid-1970s, when life's questions overwhelmed her and reconciling her family past with her future seemed impossible.

“What would draw an otherwise independent woman to a life of menial labor and subservience? Fallon's answer is both an inside look at '70s commune life and a funny, poignant coming of age.”

Judy Blunt
Author of
Breaking Clean

The Tsar's Dwarf

Peter H. Fogtdal
Translated by Tiina Nunnally

Fiction / $15.95 / 0-9790188-0-3

Due out September 2008
Soerine, a female dwarf from Denmark, is given as a gift to the Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, during his visit to Copenhagen. Soerine travels to St. Petersburg where she becomes a jester at the Tsar's functions. She enjoys her new life and falls in love with the Tsar's favorite dwarf, but disaster strikes in the shape of a priest who wants to “save” her.

September 11: West Coast Writers

Approach Ground Zero
Edited by Jeff Meyers

Essays / 266pp / $16.95 / 0-9716915-0-9

The events of September 11, 2001, their repercussions, and our varied responses to them inspired this collection. By history and geographic distance, the West Coast has developed a community different from the East; ultimately shared interests bridge the distinctions in provocative and heartening ways.

“September 11: West Coast Writers Approach Ground Zero
deserves attention. This book has some highly thoughtful contributions that should be read with care on both coasts, and even in between.”

San Francisco Chronicle

Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip

Mark Mordue

Travel Memoir / 316pp / $15.95 / 0-9716915-6-8

A world trip that ranges from a Rolling Stones concert in Istanbul to meetings with mullahs and junkies in Teheran, from a cricket match in Calcutta to an S&M bar in New York, as Mark Mordue explores countries most Americans never see, as well as issues of world citizenship in the twenty-first century.

“Mordue has elevated
Dastgah
beyond the realms of the traditional travelogue by sharing not only what he learned about cultures he visited but also his brutally honest self-discoveries.”

Elle

FINALIST
, 2006 OREGON BOOK AWARD
WINNER
, SAMUEL GOLDBERG & SONS FICTION PRIZE FOR EMERGING JEWISH WRITERS

The Cantor's Daughter

Scott Nadelson

Fiction / 280pp / $15.95 / 0-9766311-2-1

Sympathetic, heartbreaking, and funny, these stories – capturing people in critical moments of transition – reveal our fragile emotional bonds and the fears that often cause those bonds to falter or fail.

“These beautifully crafted stories are populated by Jewish suburbanites living in New Jersey, but ethnicity doesn't play too large a role here. Rather, it is the humanity of the characters and our empathy for them that bind us to their plights.”

Austin Chronicle

WINNER:
2004 OREGON BOOK AWARD; 2005 GLCA NEW WRITERS AWARD

Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories

Scott Nadelson

Ficion / 230pp / $15.95 / 0-9716915-2-5

These interrelated short stories are graceful, vivid narratives that bring into sudden focus the spirit and the stubborn resilience of the Brickmans, a Jewish family of four living in suburban New Jersey. This fierce collection provides an unblinking examination of family life and the human instinct for attachment.

“Focusing on small decisions and subtle shifts,
Saving Stanley
closely examines the frayed ties that bind. With a fly-on-the-wall sensibility and a keen sense for dramatic restraint, Nadelson is … both a promising writer and an apt documentarian.”