Tag: books

The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories

by Henry Stanton

Announcing the publication of:

The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories

by Ethan Goffman

We tell ourselves stories to live.
Joan Didion


We use the gift of storytelling to make sense of this strange, horrible, wonderful, slippery thing called life. From literary fiction to a sprinkling of fantasy, these stories and a novella provide a surrealistic roadmap to our strangest of times, encompassing political anger in the workplace, climate disaster in cherished spaces, virtual reality in daily life, artificial intelligence and the human psyche, sexual fluidity and ambiguity, and the paradoxes of new age evangelicalism. The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories will leave you pondering just who we are in the twenty-first century, how we got here, and what might come next.

“A good story is more important than complete fidelity to the truth,” Ethan Goffman writes. Indeed, throughout this collection of short stories, truth proves chimeric, as borderlines between fact and fantasy perpetually shift. Dreams and visions infiltrate the lives of Goffman’s characters, who themselves often seem rather hapless. Despite the elements of magical realism that infuse Goffman’s stories, there are no storybook heroes or villains here, only ordinary people caught in a dystopian world, who nevertheless manage to muddle through. At first glance, these stories might strike the reader as being rather sad, even forlorn. But look again — there is a dark comedy at work here, a cosmic joke, which Goffman strives to illuminate. These are stories of dogged endurance by those who rebel against an often hostile universe. The outcomes may be bittersweet, even tragic, but the human spirit carries on, unconquered.

W. Luther Jett, renowned Washington, DC area poetry advocate and organizer and the author of Flying to America (Broadstone Press, 2024)

“Salvador Dali must be laughing or crying in his grave—probably both—at this dripping, oozing world,” notes one character in The Church of the Oversoul and Other Stories. Reading this book is like taking a vacation into other realms. Ethan Goffman offers stories ranging from the brief to the connected or interconnected pieces of the seven-part “Pifflemeyer.”
You know the rollercoaster has started when Goffman gives readers “a day as lovely as a Hallmark card.” Then, there is the Vonnegut-like tone of “Bertha.” “The Book of Joe” has its own unique connection to the biblical Book of Job while “A Real Man” seems an extension of Anthony Burgess’s novel The Wanting Seed. “The Cruelest Month” asks, “Why doesn’t more go wrong with people?” Goffman shows us how that’s possible within these pages.


Bill Cushing, author of The Commies Come to Waterton, Heroic Brothers of the Civil War, and other books

THE CHURCH OF THE OVERSOUL by Ethan Goffman

$18.95 Book + $1.14 Md Tax + $7.00 Shipping

$27.09

Announcing The Publication of “MAIDEN ROCK” by Peter Mladinic.

by Henry Stanton

Peter Mladinic is my patron saint of strays — stray dogs, stray people, stray memories which gain profound meaning in combination with things which would not be obvious to another, but allow Mladinic quiet epiphanies which stop inches before false resolution might be added. While there is happiness here, a profound melancholy also washes through many of these poems. There are old dogs finally out of options, nuns with their tender humanity masked by their habits, lovers finally lost to one another, but who might pick up the pieces with unconsidered possibilities of the past. There is also the guilt of the hero who can’t, finally, save anyone, not even himself, but who still persists. Read these poems with an open heart and allow yourself the wonders Mladinic offers. He understands that any war is every war, and invites the reader to the uneasy peace that sometimes comes as we stumble our way through the broken minefields of our own long walk into night.

—Jeff Weddle, author of Driving the Lost Highway and winner of the Eudora Welty Prize.

IMG_2239 me

MAIDEN ROCK by Peter Mladinic

$18.95 BOOK + $1.14 MD SALES TAX + $7.00 SHIP

$27.09

Announcing The Publication of “If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem” by award-winning Poet Sophia Falco.

by Henry Stanton

“Sophia Falco is a born learner and seeker, as her very name suggests, questing after the wisdom of a psychic-spiritual order that will transform herself lastingly. The title of her award-winning new book, If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem, suggests this utter yearning for flight, for release into becoming little birds lost, doves or falcons in flight across heaven and earth. This long quasi-narrative poem holds these felt tensions of embodiment as well as a Buddhist-like release from the prison-house (or bird cage) of flesh-meat into some airy creature of metamorphosis via sustained expression and a tender openness to change and future love. Poetry grounds and sustains these tensions, storms, and inner flux of mind and affect into achieved diary-like form, an ethos of creative activism and compassion, all elegantly and brilliantly collated daily as original poetry as in a state of renewed innocence, healing, and rebirth: for “my life was on the line” once again in these life-saving lines of poetry or like “a basketball in flight” as one last perfect shot.”

—Rob Wilson is a poet-scholar who teaches in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz & author of When the Nikita Moon Rose as well as Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.

Sophia Falco wields her poetry as lamp and lance against the darkness that surrounds us all — claiming her place proudly within the ranks of poets past whose private lifelong struggles with mental illness, sexuality, and silence she both echoes and embodies (from Emily Dickinson to Allen Ginsberg to Mary Oliver). In doing so she achieves brief flights and flashes of an almost zen-like insight: graceful as the arc of a basketball at the buzzer; gentle as the rustle of hands over paper. Reaching “outwards instead of inwards” for “a way out of this / mind maze.” And finding it here within these pages.

—Dr. Scott Lankford, Professor of English (emeritus), Foothill College Stanford GEN Global Educators Networkand honors–memory as a landscape where endless discovery beckons, where sanctuary may be found.

IF MY HANDS WERE BIRDS: A POEM by Sophia Falco

BOOK $18.95 + MD TAX $1.14 + $7 SHIP

$27.09

Announcing The Publication of “GONE THE SUN” by Joel Peckham

by Henry Stanton

If a book can be a song, the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of this memoir-in-fragments, Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou, the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham’s past—his father, his lost wife, his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love, urging us all home.

Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Voice Lessons and I Could Name God in Twelve Ways

In Gone the Sun, Peckham writes about his loving, sometimes fraught history with Manitou, a summer camp he and his father worked at for many years. As his father declines into dementia the middle-aged Peckham—still working summers at the camp between semesters as a college professor—muses upon time, upon loss, and the various selves we inhabit as we age. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, but heartbreaking in the most resonant, emotionally intelligent, and illuminating way possible.

Sue William Silverman, author, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul

GONE THE SUN by Joel Peckham

$18.99 Book + $1.14 MD Tax + $7 Shipping

$27.23

Announcing The Publication of “The Endless Undoing” by Eleanor Lewis

by Henry Stanton

“Eleanor Lewis is a conjurer, gleaning from lifetimes of memory, emotion, and perception. The dead are active in her poems. Animals and humans switch places. The stars are incarnate. A soul might transmigrate to the stuffing of an abandoned car seat. Magical and mystical, these are poems to live with and return to with gratitude, like the seasons.”
—Anne Watts, musician, and radio host

ELEANOR LEWIS HEADSHOT

THE ENDLESS UNDOING by Eleanor Lewis

$10.99 Book + $.66 MD State Tax + $7 Shipping

$18.65