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Conch Pearl weaves a cross-cultural narrative that reveals the damages wrought by colonialism and explores the healing power of art. Dede, a lonely twelve-year-old English expat, seeks friendship from various island residents. An American grifter provides Dede with companionship but demands something far more costly in return. When Dede impetuously flees Grand Bahama Island on a sailboat during a summer storm and washes up on a tiny cay, she is forced to confront realities she's tried to forget, and to make decisions that will change the course of several lives. In Conch Pearl innocence battles traumatic shame, and truth finally finds expression in the tongue of the ocean.

"History Is a funny thing," Michael Wayte says in The End of Good Intentions. "We don't always know what's significant. We hardly ever know what's significant. What was important then might not be so now; what's important now might not be later." Beginning with a fire and a gruesome incident of self-sacrifice, the novel presents a Christian college in transition, from its midcentury Presbyterian origins to a more strident and politicized Evangelicalism. Set between the mid-1970s and today, the novel moves back and forth through the turbulence of recent American history, charting the course of characters such as Michael Wayte, the pre-ministerial student who becomes the owner of a foothill bar; Leah Green, the Jewish student who finds herself a stranger in a strange Christian environment; Walter Book, the gay English professor, who doesn't know he's gay; and Eivar Mortenson, whose actions at the beginning of the novel become the catalyst for all that is to come. In The End of Good Intentions, David Borofka examines the gap between desire and emptiness, conviction and extremism, those who believe absolutely in the certitude of their perspective and those who live on the outer margins of doubt and uncertainty.

TOKENS was originally produced by the Blake Street Hawkeyes, Mixed Bag Productions & Whoopi Goldberg in association with Theater Artaud.TOKENS ran for six weeks from May 16th, 1985 to June 30th, 1985 at Theater Artaud in San Francisco. This was at a time when a mysterious and fatal disease was reeking havoc in San Francisco; known then as "Gay Cancer," it was soon to be called AIDS (Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome ) and now, HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). Only later, after TOKENS was produced, was the transmission vector of the disease identified. The similarities of the HIV pandemic to the Great Plague of London; the mystery of transmission, the pursuit of fatuous and real treatments, the heroism and charlatanism it brought out in the population and governing institutions, was prescient, as it is again in the time of Covid. At that time of panic (1985) the Bay Area's performing arts community, reeling from the crisis, came together to make TOKENS a devastating act of catharsis in the theater.

"Yahia Lababidi's work is characterized by a contemplative tone in line with Rumi, whom he often quotes. Lababidi is a Muslim voice for peace, celebrating the wisdom in ancient traditions and pointing out the ridiculous in the rush and cynicism of contemporary life. Drawn to the mystic tradition, he often refers to the virtues and fruits of silence, and writes that his aphorisms 'respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, briefly.' Perhaps an age as thoughtless and noisy as our own requires a whole book full of them."-Plough magazine

Music abides as an elemental force in the lives and situations chronicled in each of these seventeen stories and a concluding novella. The opening five stories groove to a noirish, mid-century jazz idiom, and the twelve middle stories develop as movements in an interconnected symphony of frustrations and felicities, while the novella charts in detail the pre-and-post Covid inner life of a boomer poet struggling obsessively with her bulimia and professional career aspirations. What all the characters share is a desire to follow Emerson's advice to "make much of your own place."

Miniature Cities is panoramic view of Alessio Brandolini's poetry, made of vast landscapes and haunting imagery, where the stark Roman countryside becomes the objective correlative for the mystery of human existence and interaction. In this dual language edition, Brandolini's poems are presented on facing pages with English translations by Giorgio Mobili

Written from street barricades and train rides under Andean stars, this is a book that celebrates a world where many worlds fit. Journalist Benjamin Dangl has reported on revolutions and social justice movements around the globe. This collection of vivid photography and lucid writing depicts street scenes, cityscapes, and night jungles from the margins of his reporting. These are dispatches from beyond the homogenizing forces of global capitalism, from decolonized mountain markets, scattered autonomous territories, and peoples' orchestras of the road. The Havana street parties, Ganges River bonfires, and jungle buses in these pages are journeys in themselves, evoking the vastness of our world of many worlds.

In the Place Where We Thought We Stood tells the story of a French-American translator travelling by train from Paris to Barcelona, then on to Madrid to comfort his mother-in-law who recently suffered a stroke. Haunted by his wife's recent suicide and by his inability to complete his translation of the correspondence of the writer Ingeborg Bachmann and her lover Paul Celan, he struggles numbly to make sense of the moment, the day. Set entirely in the course of this journey, the novel-at heart a reckoning with things past-explores the fleeting little triumphs of love.

At nine years old, on her first visit to a museum, Emily fell in love with Breakfast, a painting by Henri Matisse. Now a single mother, she lives in the world of art and can barely find time for her two daughters, much less for Mark, the man she loves. Her days are a jumble-she's lost the thread of her life-but a contest at the museum where she's the registrar gives her hope-the chance to see Breakfast again. Matisse's words and paintings permeate her days and nights, and glancing at a note card of the painting she loves, she sees something she's never seen before. The Art of Her Life shows the power of art to transform an ordinary life.

The capricious world of relationships is something everyone has navigated, often wishing for a magic spell to release them from its hold. In The Spellbook of Fruit and Flowers, Christine Butterworth-McDermott delves into these dark partnerings, using the symbolism of the natural world, particularly plants and their taxonomy, as metaphor. With references to myth and legend, science and history, these poems trace the dangers that arise from seduction, betrayal, and the need to find "pulp over pit." Here, snakes slither, pomegranates are bitten, and forests burn. Yet, there is also a determination to embrace the "resilience of flesh and spirit." Tethered birds are freed, dahlias mean "to survive," and restorative limes are offered. While never shying away from trauma, and its effects, Butterworth-McDermott always encourages the reader to "blink at the new leaf, the green wood /visible beneath the bark of the vine." While the world may be full of poison, the poems here are a salve.

SELF STORAGE is an absurd, four-character comedy in one 90-minute act. JERRY and PETRA are both renters in a public storage facility. Strangers to each other when they meet, their lives become entangled and increasingly complicated when a mysterious figure, THE LODGER, arrives and begins to occupy a vacant storage unit near theirs. Soon, inexplicable, surreal events occur, threatening JERRY's and PETRA's composure and their senses of reality. Hoping to solve the mystery of THE LODGER, they turn for help to the ineffectual caretaker, MARCUS, who is no help at all - who, in fact, is even more mysterious in his way than THE LODGER! In this four-character, one-act play, JAMES has lost his employment as an adjunct professor of English after austerity measures have forced education cutbacks, leading to the loss of his house to foreclosure and subsequent auction. In a desperate, quixotic attempt to spare his beloved former home from imminent demolition, he defies the new owner - real estate developer GINA - and stages a sit-in protest by occupying the living room and refusing to leave. Who will prevail in this battle of wills and ideology? And, THE OCCUPANT asks, what will be won - and lost - in the end?

Allen Ginsberg, while in the New York State Psychiatric Institute, met Carl Solomon. Their first exchange: Solomon: "Who are you?" Ginsberg: "I'm Myshkin." Solomon: "I'm Kirilov." From that moment their friendship started. Myshkin is the idiot in Dostoyevsky's 'The Idiot" (he ends his life in a Swiss asylum) while Kirilov is one of the possessed characters in Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed". Sometimes diverse cultures meet. The heroic samurai Benkei, according to Japanese legend, killed a giant carp which had swallowed his mother when she fell into a waterfall. It is not recorded if Benkei lost his taste for gefilte fish or sushi. The Japanese legendary monster, the Nu, was slain by a samurai no less brave than Benkei. Benkei, disappointedly, is apparently not Japanese affectionate for Benjamin. A Yiddish version would have substituted "mother-in-law" for "mother" and worked in the Yiddish for "Adam was fortunate - he didn't have a mother-in-law."The ultimate "Nu?": Gertrude Stein, dying, asked "What is the question?"

The Repetition of Exceptional Weeks is a speculation about relationships, and how an inability to say things well can dislocate places, languages, and centers. Poetry, screenplay, novel? A wayward path through the meeting places, unmolding from a place with loving attunement.

Two girls grow up in the same rural college town where class and family expectations guide them onto predictable paths: marriage for one and college for the other. However, Wanda and Callie defy the expectations and make other choices, ones with serious consequences. What does it cost a young woman to determine her path in life?

The Israeli Palestinian conflict came to a head in 1989 with the first Intifada. Stephen Langfur-an American-Israeli Ph. D.-refused to serve in the West Bank, joining the 90-odd conscientious objectors in Israel. The army sent him to a cell for wayward soldiers in Jericho. A few feet from him were cells holding Palestinians. Langfur jotted down his observations and thoughts on the entanglement of Arabs and Jews. After release, he developed the notes into Confession from a Jericho Jail, first published by Grove Weidenfeld in 1992.Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen wrote from retirement: "The author's brilliant exposition of ... the Israeli-Arab conflict may well prove a valuable contribution to present-day peace efforts." Instead, the Occupation has continued for 30 more years.If Langfur's confession is relevant today, it is because (as a reviewer put it) "the book is much more intimate-and much more intriguing and satisfying-than a mere political tract. It's a glimpse into the heart and soul of a man in middle age who is struggling with his ideals, his identity, his passions and his destiny.... At times, his prose is so deeply lyrical, so full of imagery and allusion, that it becomes a kind of poetry" (Jonathan Kirsch, reviewing the first edition in the Los Angeles Times).

What makes poetry effective? How does a poem work? What are its goals and aims?Taking his cue from the musical form of mashup, in POEM M. D. Usher has composed what is known as a cento, stitching together snippets from famous poems in such a way that the words of the text illustrate the aspect of poetry being described. A lively introduction and short, irreverent biographies of the featured poets add to the fun.In T. Motley's artwork, Word literally becomes Flesh, as letters emerge like epiphanies from the drawings.POEM is a unique achievement that stands in relation to canonical poetry as Disney's film, Fantasia, stands to classical music-first of its kind, something for all ages, and well worth experiencing again and again.

Sinners, saints and saviors collide in Bobby Johnston's stories, which chronicle the savagery and poetry of oppressive Catholic upbringing in 1970s Rust-Belt America.