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Authors: Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire
Poe Ballantine
Fiction / 356pp / $15.95 / 0-9766311-1-3
 
Edgar Donahoe is back for another misadventure, this time in the Caribbean. When he becomes involved with his best friend's girl and is stalked by murderous island native Chollie Legion, even Cinnamon Jim, the medicine man, is no help—it takes a hurricane to blow Edgar out of the mess.
“This second novel … initially conjures images of
Lord of the Flies
, but then you would have to add about ten years to the protagonists' ages and make them sex-crazed, gold-seeking alcoholics.”
Library Journal
God Clobbers Us All
Poe Ballantine
Fiction / 192pp / $15.95 / 0-9716915-4-1
 
Set against a decaying San Diego rest home in the 1970s,
God Clobbers Us All
is the shimmering, hysterical, melancholy account of eighteen-year -old surfer -boy/orderly Edgar Donahoe, who struggles with romance, death, friendship, and an ill-advised affair with the wife of a maladjusted war veteran.
“Calmer than Bukowski, less portentous than Kerouac, more hopeful than West, Poe Ballantine may not be sitting at the table of his mentors, but perhaps he deserves his own after all.”
San Diego Union-Tribune
Things I Like About America
Poe Ballantine
Essays / 224pp / $12.95 / 0-9716915-1-7
 
These risky personal essays are populated with odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer. Written with piercing intimacy and self-effacing humor, they take us on a Greyhound journey through small-town America and explore what it means to be human.
“ Part social commentary, part collective biography, this guided tour may not be comfortable, but one thing 's for sure: You will be at home.”
Willamette Week
 
WINNER, 2005 LAN GUM PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION
Madison House
Peter Donahue
Fiction / 412pp / $16.95 / 0-9766311-0-5
 
This novel chronicles Victorian Seattle's explosive transformation from frontier outpost to metropolis. Maddie Ingram, owner of Madison House, and her quirky and endearing boarders find their lives linked when the city decides to regrade Denny
Hill and the fate of their home hangs in the balance.
“ Peter Donahue seems to have a map of old Seattle in his head… And all future attempts in its historical vein will be made in light of this book. ”
David Guterson
Author of
Snow Falling on Cedars
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 / 218pp / $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
September 11: West Coast Writers
Approach Ground Zero
Edited by Jeff Meyers
Essays / 366pp / $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 / 310pp / $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
The Cantor's Daughter
Scott Nadelson
Fiction / 258pp / $14.95 / 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.”

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