Authors Books

Where do I begin in describing this ink of Audrey Michelle?
It is sensual and poignant, salient and clever, inspirational and surreal. You can feel her joy and desperation with every breath; you reminisce and contemplate in every thought. Her words are confronting in their honesty because the lady is so real.

Well done...

Audrey's words, whether written or spoken, speak miles to my heart. Her imagery and unique use of styles keeps you at the edge of each write. I feel that I have gained a great knowledge of who Audrey Michelle is and wants to be: A phenomenal person and Author.

Audrey's poetry goes right to the heart, and from there rushes through your body to set you on fire, or to freeze you. Some pieces about death, that invite to meditate about life and death. And many juicy pieces, the most uninhibited erotic poetry I ever read!

3D Stereoscopic Portraits - Photography by Rolf Bertram - Posing by Audrey Michelle: Color and Infrared

Flexible: Posing by Audrey Michelle

This book gives a great insight into the mind of the author. She shares the deepest of emotions and makes herself open and accessible for her readers. Readers of any background will be able to relate to the universal themes and deep emotional commentary.

This book, with its juicy poetry and provocative photography really were a treat for my husband and me. It takes you to the lowest of lows, but brings you back up to the highest of highs. I'd recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a well-rounded portrayal of a real woman.

To help you understand what kind of a person i am and to find if you can relate to me... I was recently called obscure. I prefer to call myself unique.
I absolutely loved this book. I would have to say it is one of my top 5 favorites. I've read it over and over again, I have 2 copies... one is always in my purse (just in case I need something to read!) and I have lended the other to many friends and they have loved it as well.
I love it because it has a story to fit every mood. Hope you love it too!

I can't heap enough praise on 80 percent of the stories in this collection. They were variously beautiful, touching, haunting, riveting, warming...it makes me run out of adjectives. They covered me in short story love.

The next 15 percent were excellently written but didn't enchant.

Only 5 percent made me raise my eyebrows and mutter.

Read this book. You'll feel wiser to the human condition, when you throw a party beautiful people will start conversations with you when they see it on your bookshelf, and most importantly, you'll feel wiser to the human condition.

This is one of the best collections of contemporary American fiction. Every story is top-notch, and Wolff included a few authors I'd never heard of before (such as Braverman and Dybek, two writers whose short stories I've since sought out). I was also surprised at how this collection didn't sag at all--it was strong right to the end.

The bottom line: Wolff knows how to choose a great story. This book is a keeper.

Also recommended: The Gospel of Arnie

"The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories" speaks with the intensity of liquor and fists. It lets loose on the gut of America.

Tobias Wolff, one of America's hardest hitting fiction writers, ("The Night in Question: Stories" and "In the Garden of North American Martyrs") has hammered together one of the best collections of modern fiction--far better than any individual "Best of..." collection.

If you are drawn, like me, to the intensity and disillusionment present in American literature at the turn of the century (i.e. Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald) this book may be what you have been looking for in contemporary writers. Including such staples of the contemporary cannon as Raymond Carver, Andre Dubuse, Amy Tan, Joyce Carol Oates this book packs in the best of modern short fiction and restores the genre to its former revered status.

Tobias Wollf, himself an excellent practitioner of the short story, does not include a work of his own in this wonderful collection (save a very thoughtful introduction). This is one of the most well edited collections of contemporary short stories on the market. It may be a few years old by now, but most of the "must read" writers, as well as surprisingly good lesser-knowns are included. Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus, sadly no longer contemporary in the strict sense, live on within these pages alongside excellent new voices. Two stories that really stand out for me are John L'Heureux's "Departures," a very deep and moving narrative, and Ralph Lombreglia's "Men Under Water," a beautiful alchemy of the dreams and realities of contemporary life. The selections written by Jamaica Kincaid, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, and Denis Johnson are so well picked, they seem to capture a bit of the authors themselves, as well as a portion of their writing. Because of these atttributes, I think the Vintage Book of Contempory Short Stories is both valuable for personal collections and for use in the classroom. It does the job that all compilations are supposed to, but seldom do, accomplish. It exemplifies the current breadth and depth of this contemporary artform.

As a person who has a relative dealing with Alzheimer's, I
think this is a great book. The movie was great also.
We all need our family and friends to help us during hard
times but we need God the most.

A Vow to Cherish touched me deeply--for many reasons. To me, this story is about having no regrets and allowing God to work things out in our lives with His perfect timing. I remember seeing the movie when it first came out and holding my breath as I watched John fall in love with Julia. I recall the same conflicting feelings when I read this book. Part of me wanted John to be happy with Julia. I truly felt for the guy. Part of me also cared deeply about his commitment to his wife.

The author did a fabulous job taking a difficult situation and covering it with flesh. The emotion and the loneliness were real as was the temptation both John and Julia experienced. Many people would justify John and Julia's relationship outside of marriage--especially for John. I hurt for the man. My mother was bedridden with MS for twenty years and my father cared for her until the very end. He cherished her and remained faithful when so many men in the same situations dumped their spouses when they could no longer perform their wifely duties.

John Brighton honored his vow to cherish his wife until they parted at her death. I'm convinced it made all the difference for his enduring happiness. John could then marry Julia free from guilt and knowing he gave his wife his undivided love and attention to the very end--once he overcame the temptation to vault his flesh into a forbidden zone that he would end up regretting later.

I've never read a book that more vividly portrays the deep pain of loneliness and all of the issues that go with it. My heart swelled and my throat tightened more than once through this beautiful story. I loved it!

Not often does an author have the chance to go back and rewrite her first book, but Deborah Raney had that opportunity. I read the original edition, saw the movie inspired by her book, and now I've read the new one. She has updated numerous things and added more depth, making an already good novel hauntingly beautiful.

John Brighton's wife has Alzheimer's, a cruel disease that afflicts entire families. I know. My mother died of Alzheimer's. I found Raney's book to be healing for me. With deep understanding and compassion, she exposes layer after layer of emotion a husband feels when his wife leaves him a bit at a time.

More cruel than sudden death or divorce, Alzheimer's robs the patient of their dignity as it robs the family of their loved one. After my mother died, daddy said he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. That hurt and I couldn't understand how he could say it. Until I read A Vow to Cherish. As Raney reveals John's deep love for his wife, she also discloses how the disease wore him down. No one suffers Alzheimer's alone.

Beautifully written and filled with credible characters, Raney once again demonstrates why she's an award winning author. A Vow to Cherish stands on my all-time-favorites book shelf.

John and Ellen Brighton attend the high school graduation of their youngest child. The nest would soon be empty and they were looking forward to having time for each other. They plan to travel and just enjoy themselves. Then something started to go horribly wrong. Ellen began having periods of confusiion, saying things that didn't make sense. She gets lost and can't find her way home. A doctor gives them the shattering news. Ellen is in the early stages of Alzheimers. Nothing can be done to help her and the situation will gradually get worse.

In Chicago, Julia Sinclair has lost her husband and after years of sending her sons to St. Mark's private school, which she can no longer afford, she is desperate to get out of Chicago. She applies for a job at the Parkside Manor, a nursing home in the same town where John and Ellen live. When Ellen moves to the Manor, Julia meets John and they are attracted to each other. She can provide the companionship he misses so much. Someone to talk to, someone who understands. But John still loves Ellen, and he made a vow to cherish her in sickness and health on their wedding day. How can he go back on that vow just because she no longer knows him? A Vow to Cherish is a touching story of love and commitment and is an honest portrayal of the destroying disease of Alzheimers. The characters are so real you'll feel you know them. This book will touch your heart

Loved the first one, but with Raney's matured writing the edited reissue is even more poignant and relevant.

Walden Pond is a classic which everyone should be required to read. I read this years ago and wanted to add this one to my library. What a wonderful surprise it was. The pictures enhance this classic. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Thoreaus' works, Nature and getting back to the basics in life. In this busy life we live, it is relaxing to spend time reading this book.

Bought this as a gift for my husband and he really loved the photo illustrations. They are beautiful. Makes a nice "coffee table book".

* "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion . . . I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long . . . A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil."
~ Henry David Thoreau; "Walden"

* "Walden has become as much a state of mind as it is a place."
~ Scot Miller; "Walden - 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition"

For my birthday in 1984, my dear friend, Marty ("rhymes with party"), gave me the 1981 Avenel books hardcover edition of WORKS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. This compilation contained all of the famous transcendentalist's most significant writings and the thirty intriguing Herbert Wendall Gleason, black and white photographs that graced the 1906 publication of Thoreau's complete works.

My dear friend died in an auto accident five years later, but part of his legacy is the passion for Thoreau's philosophy that his gift awakened in me, and that book which occupies a prestigious place in one of my bookcases right between my Holy Bible and my 1st edition copy of Mark Twain's 1872, Roughing It. And my book, though yellowed now, looks pretty good for a volume 23 years without a dust jacket (I nearly always trash the things immediately), and for having been completely read twice, and thumbed through hundreds of times!

A couple of years ago, GFM (Good Friend Melanie) gave me a softcover copy of WALDEN AND OTHER WRITINGS, and I was glad to have it as it contained a couple of essays and excerpts I'd not previously read, and it provided me with a copy of Thoreau's best that I could loan out to others.

Therefore, when my friend, Pooh, and I flew into Philadelphia in late August 2005, to visit the birthplace of our nation, and then to drive north to visit Walden Pond and environs, I did not consider purchasing a copy of this 150th ANNIVERSARY ILLUSTRATED EDITION of WALDEN for myself while in Thoreau's hometown. I already had two copies of this true classic and couldn't see buying a third despite the stunning pictures included in this publication. I did, however, bring home a copy as a gift for GFM. (The woman in the bookstore in downtown Concord, Massachusetts, pointed out to me that the original publishing price - printed on the inside flap of the dust jacket - was $28.12, half a cent less than Thoreau tells us it cost him to build his little house at Walden's shore in 1845. (He officially moved into his homemade home on the appropriate date of July 4th, and an American classic was born!)

One day, shortly after returning from my memorable trip, I borrowed from GFM the copy I had given her, so I could gaze upon the nearly 100 SCOT MILLER photographs once again. And I was so awed by the indescribably gorgeous and practically breathtaking pictures of the Walden area and its flora and fauna, that I realized I needed to own this book like Thoreau needed solitude. And that's how I came by Thoreau's WALDEN for a THIRD time! While Marty's gift reigns for sentimental reasons, the 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition is tops in exquisite beauty - a lovelier and more profound coffee table book is simply unimaginable; a richer gift for a valued friend couldn't be purchased at ANY price! This edition is simply a divine marriage of Thoreau's insight into the nature of Man and his place in nature, and Scot Miller's illustrations of the natural world wherein Thoreau made those treasured observations over a century and a half ago. Hey, I even left the dust jacket on this book despite the fact that the jacket's photograph is also reprinted on page 2, and it barely even hints at the wonders inside.

In Thoreau's WALDEN, the naturalist makes the following observation in the chapter titled, "Sounds": "I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end." And Scot Miller has brilliantly captured with his camera the splendor of that "drama of many scenes" at Thoreau's old stamping ground.

I'm not knowledgeable in the techniques of photography, so I can't explain to you HOW Miller was able to make photographs like these (it seems obvious to me, however, that he must employ an array of various filters and such). All that I CAN tell you is that words can't describe the virtual explosion of colors (like nature vibrantly celebrating that 1845 4th of July within Herself) and the uncommon degree of visible detail (staring at those rocks and leaves in "Still Life Under Ice", I can almost feel the bone-numbing cold that any one of those stones would penetrate my hand with). "Magical Fairyland Pond" is the perfect caption for that dreamlike picture of Walden's sister pond. I can almost hear a lonely dog barking from across the glittering snow while hidden deep in the distant, wooded shore, when I'm lost in the "Sunrise On Frozen Walden Pond." I'm not even going to attempt to describe the "Nature's Palette, Heywood's Meadow" photograph on page 32. Suffice to say that God is "The" Master Painter. Incredible! (And Scot Miller, you're a wonder, too!)

This five-star beauty of a book represents the pinnacle of the publisher's art, and it includes a shot of the exact site of Thoreau's 1845 cabin (previously obscured by a cairn), and Henry's simple tombstone, which I visited at the Author's Ridge section of the Concord cemetary where our hero's physical body gradually became a part of the nature that his spirit loved so much.

On a family vacation many years ago, I visited Walden Pond and walked all around it. In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Thoreau's Walden, the Walden Woods Project published, in 2004, this illustrated edition of the work with stunning color photographs by Scott Miller of Walden Pond and its environs. The Walden Woods Project is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of Walden Pond and to the legacy of Thoreau. I found this book a fitting memorial of my walk around Walden Pond and of my earlier readings of Walden. The lovely edition, photographs, and memories inspired me to turn again to Thoreau's book.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 -- 1862) lived at Walden Pond, Masachusetts from July, 1845 -- September, 1847, in a cabin he built himself on a tract of land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was two miles from Concord, Massachusetts and one mile from his nearest neighbor. A railroad passed near the pond, and it was frequented regularly by farmers, hunters, picnickers, and others. During the two years, Thoreau left Walden Pond at times to visit friends in Concord, to lecture, and to visit other ponds and sites in the area. He made no pretense of being entirely isolated. In his book, Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau described the first year of his life at Walden Pond (he tells us that the second year was much the same) and his reasons for living there. Much of the book was written at Walden Pond, and Throreau also wrote other works there.

The book is short but it is written in a dense, difficult and condensed style with many long, complex sentences. It is also highly allusive and shows Thoreau's learning in classical literature and his interest in Eastern thought and religion. It is filled with many short, pithy, and provocative comments which have become proverbial in American literature.

In the opening and closing chapters of the book, Thoreau describes his motivations for living at Walden Pond and abandoning the life of commerce. For Thoreau, most people are owned by their possessions. He saw a need to live with little encubrance in order to understand himself and find inner peace. "Simplify, simplify, simplify" was his goal. In one of my favorite sentences of the book, he states (p. 67) "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Then, towards the end of the book, Thoreau recounts some of the lessons he had learned in the following passage:

"We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it, and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring."(p/253)

In the middle sections of the book, Throreau describes his life in the woods, again with recognition of his substantial interactions with other people during the time. (He was not a hermit.) He describes the books he read, his activites at his cabin, Walden Pond and woods, the changes of the seasons, and the plants and animals. The pond and its creatures are described with great detail, but Thoreau gives even more attention to internalizing his experiences and explaining their significance to his readers.

Scott Miller's beatiful photographs of Walden Pond add a great deal to this edition. They are well-placed to correspond with the discussion in the text, and they illuminate Thoreau's descriptive passages. The photographs, and the book itself, brought back reading and visiting memories and made me want to see Walden Pond again.

But much as Walden is revered for its descriptions of nature, the book remains for me primarily internalized and intropsective. Thoreau has many polemical things to say which will not, and should not, appeal to all readers. But the book documents the effort of an individual to try to understand his life, to reflect, and to understand change. As I have suggested, it is not an anti-social book as Thoreau was never far removed from friends and company. But it is a book about understanding one's life and learning not to be afraid of solitude or of being with oneself.

Robin Friedman

I'll not dwell on the author's content but on the publisher's choice of binding. Thoreau calls for a complete abandonment of possessions and to always choose the simpler, less expensive if something is needful. This beautiful coffee table book uses expensive glossy enamel paper with gorgeous photographs going way beyond necessity. Every time I picked it up to read, it's irony struck me first and weighed upon me until I set it down. It's a shame really, because with other content it would be luxurious.

Cris Mazza has for many years now been on the radar of readers who admire technical skill and innovation. Her latest, Waterbaby, demonstrates the same technical mastery of her earlier writings, but adds an imaginative dimension to result in her most satisfying effort to date. She begins, not unusually, with a character flawed in body as well as spirit. Tam suffers from epilepsy and has been tormented since childhood by the memory and consequences of a seizure during a swim-meet. She would have drowned had her athletic brother Gary not saved her--or possibly he selfishly used her to appear the hero, in the process dahsing Tam's own girlhood dreams of athletic excellence. Tam has been haunted by this early memory and its consequences for the long forty-something years before the novel begins. Through another series of mishaps (also perhaps resulting from personal failings) she ends up in the rich setting of a Maine lighthouse, haunted by her memories, by a hard-luck single mom and kid she chooses to harbor, by a distant ancestor she researches, and, finally, by an actual ghost. Mazza pieces the various stories together in a pastiche of different verbal media (including letters, emails, websites, and traditional past tense narrative). So much for the technical mastery, which is accomplished and assured as usual. The great achievement of Waterbaby is the investment the reader comes to feel in Tam, in wanting her to accept/transcend her past and become a more whole person. The magnetism of this main character keeps the many different quirky minor characters, asides, episodes, from eroding reader interest.

"Waterbaby" is somewhat of a departure for Cris Mazza. While she generally sets her stories in Southern California, or at least populates them with people from that region, this novel takes place in a Maine coastal town. The other side of the country though has some similarities to the hardscrabble desert; the landscape becomes a character as much as any person in this novel. The continuity of the rocky shore and lobster industry across generations makes up a large part of the main character Tam's dilemma. As she tries to find her place in her own family, the various family dynamics of past generations intrudes on her psyche as well. The story then incorporates several lost baby stories as Tam investigates her ancestors and her relationships with her family, especially her brother. As in several of Mazza's works, the theme of regret and the conflict that arises from trying to negotiate being a woman play a large role in the novel. Additionally, like other American writers (i.e. Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Faulkner), Mazza merges style and place in a masterful way. Family relationships, sex, and self-reliance might be as dangerous as the rocky shore of Maine. Mazza does a wonderful job of portraying these dangers with honesty and engaging storytelling.

What a deliciously conceived novel about personal redemption! The protagonist, Tam, suffers her first epileptic seizure at 12. Her condition will steal her swimming career and estrange her from her brother, Gary. But it will not impede her journey into her troubled family's complicated past, a journey that takes her to the Maine coastline, going back to the early nineteeth century. Here tales of thwarted love and shipwrecked babies haunt the landscape. Tam will unlock more than one story, connecting newspaper acounts, oral history and her own search for understanding until she unfolds a broad historical panorama, a fascinating past. Particularly terrific is Mazza's interweaving of contemporary tools of communication, from websites, to blogs, to email mixed with archival accounts. Reading Waterbaby is a thrilling intertextual adventure that feels immediately ours, but simultaneously layered with a fresh understanding of nineteenth century economic and legal conditions for women and their children. As always, Mazza, is a wise voice, deeply concerned. This novel is a thrilling non stop read.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog has written, "There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

Cris Mazza takes this one step further with her seductive book Waterbaby, giving us a protagonist who seeks to create a present by recreating her past -and the possible pasts of her ancestors as well. Tam not only attempts to piece together her ancestor's lives through research and genealogy, she delves into lore so thoroughly she finds herself literally recreating the sea-legends that are intertwined with her own familial history. Mazza is able to juggle the various stories and mix them with imagined pasts and historical pasts, even using the occasional cutaway page of a blog or an electronic archive. Links between legend and historical fact--as well as Tam's personal past and her family's history--begin to accumulate pretty quickly, leaving the reader dazzled by Mazza's ability to keep all the plates spinning without wobble.

All this plus Waterbaby is a funny and compelling page-turner to boot.

The greatest pleasure of "Waterbaby" is the sense of being in the hands of a master storyteller. The voice alone, deceptively simple and straightforward, intrigued this reader to relax and let it take me. This is a rare quality, quite independent of compelling character or driving plot. Yet "Waterbaby" provides characters and plot aplenty. It has been called a ghost story, which it is, even an erotic ghost story; but of a surprising post-9/11 kind. (One character, a search-and-rescue professional, is more than haunted by what he and his search-dog find in the still-burning ruins of the World Trade Center.) In Shakespeare, ghosts are the past penetrating the present. In Mazza the present invades, recreates the past, in every sense. One ghost, Tam, the main character herself, a relatively young (late 40's) retired stockbroker, takes imaginative and spiritual possession of an unremembered, long-dead ancestor who once helped keep a light-house on the dark and stormy coast of Maine. Family is the mysterious presence disturbing Tam - not only the hostile "hero" brother who disappears to pursue her, but all the alien great-great aunts and uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers who never knew her but now will not leave her in peace. Central to her exploration of who they were and how they persist in her are a shipwrecked baby, a newborn found in a toilet, and a drowned woman whom the locals continue to see walking at twilight the light-house rocks. Not the least ghostly of the people leading Tam into her terra incognita is the graveyard lover who insists she play the drowned woman - for prospective renters of the modernized light-house. No one writes with more comic poignance about the guerilla warfare of intimacy between women and men than the author of "Your Name Here_____" and "Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?" But I have long hoped she would enlarge her canvas and here she does: reaching out to the loves and wars of siblings, children, and parents - Maine to California - and 21st century back to 20th and 19th, with assurance, depth, compassion, and inexhaustible, penetrating wonder.

I just recently started reading this book and must say I am "blown away" by the simple truth is states. I have been on a spiritual journey for some time, fueled by the need to find out what is really real. I've come to the conclusion that the journey never ends, there are always levels to accend too. The higher you go - the easier it gets. There are a lot of great spiritual works out there. A Course In Miracles, Conversations With God, and many others I have read and have helped me on this journey. They all teach the same truth in the end, for the truth is the same. This little book does it in such a direct way that it has made an enormous impact on me. I do feel you have to be ready to accept it though, and depending on where you are on that acceptance continuum will affect the impact this book has on your life. For me, its just what I needed at this stage, and I highly recommend it.

Shame on all the booksellers selling this ten dollar book for $75 and up!
Devorss is re-publishing this book in August!
I took note of the sellers AND WILL NEVER BUY FROM THEM!

The message of this book is very profound.The author speaks about many topics .I want to mention one of the concepts .I was really impressed by the words " Whatever you hold in consciousness , will manifest into your body and affairs" . This reminds me of Paramahansa Yogananda( His Autobiography of a Yogi is a classic ) 's words " If you hold onto an idea with dynamic will power ; it finally assumes a tangible outward form" .

Most people have stacked up negative beliefs about life and themselves which take an outward form due to holding onto those beliefs. Many smokers hold onto the idea that they cannot quit and they prove themselves right over and over. Or people who are poor hold onto the idea that they can never get over their conditions and prove themselves correct . Or men losing hair hold onto the idea of baldness with such fear that they help in manifesting the very condition they dont want.

Now I want to mention one specific way to hold an idea in your consciousness. Many people have read about Scott Adams ( creator of Dilbert ) and his experiences with affirmations. He says that one can achieve a lot in life by using affirmations.An example affirmations is " I John Doe will get rich by investing in stocks " to get rich via stocks. One has to write it fifteen times in a row daily till the goal is fulfilled. You will experience coincidences of such nature that your desire manifests itself.
He picked two stocks that were the best stocks of that year.Who told him what stocks to pick ? The answer lies in a small book that has been in print over 75 years. It is IT WORKS by R.H.Jarrett. In this book ( It works - RHJ ) the author says that a mighty power in man which he calls God in man can guide you to accomplish any goal that you wish to be fulfilled.But you must be really earnest about it.

Try these concepts for yourself and prove whether these concepts are true or not.Good Luck.

Awesome. If you have heard that "still small voice", this may be helpful. Highly recommended.

Awesome book. If you want to "change"...here you go.

"We were ugly" is a box of chocolates, each story a different flavor and often an entirely different food group. David Barringer is a musician of a writer, changing topics and tone with each turn of the page in this volume. Perhaps most importantly, Barringer's work is inventive and original and does not stoop to box-of-chocolate or musician analogies. Further, although the stories would be enjoyable at any length, Barringer's brevity makes this a fine volume for the attention-span deprived, allowing for enriching literary pauses during commercial interruptions or the satisfaction of taking in a number of stories during a leisurely bathroom break. Highly recommended.

David Barringer has a way with simplistic worlds, exploding the very minute of a life's experience to present his readers with telescopic view of his character's and their life. Albeit using a mattress as a trope to navigate a relationship and its possible decline in his short story, "The Mattress" or a methodical mental catalog of one's entire life that may not have been so lived in Barringer's "The Catalog". Barringer focuses on the not-so-pretty, the ugliness of life to bring forth tidy biographies, rich characters and he has a wonderful gift on capturing the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.

An amazing triumph for an amazing writer. Barringer's book proves that fiction can transcend the mundane and shows that the beautiful can come from practically anything. These stories will wiggle their way into your heart and not let up until you're pacing around the room wondering what beautiful things you can make. You can't. Give up. Barringer has already done it. Read this book. Now.

"Absolutely outstanding" gush fans of this "wonderful collection" from a Detroit writer; "bittersweet" stories about "bittersweet" "adolescence"; it's "a" "rich little book" that's "always an experience"; and the cover is "simply exquisite."

Frightening and necessary. Maybe frighteningly necessary. My favorite piece is "Out of Pounds", which made me laugh and then cringe because I, too, am a fat girl on a bike.

Read it. Read it now.

I first read this book when I was 11 or 12, circa 1962.

It was so appealing that I adapted it into a play for a 7th grade book report. My teacher, the doughty Mrs. Kerrigan, took me to task for not reading a REAL play. I held my ground, however, and insisted that the dialogue and imagery made it as actable as any "play" could be.

Here I am, lifetimes later, still chuckling over this little masterpiece.

If you like Jean Shepherd's "Christmas Story", you will love this book!

Many times reading this book I related it to my own childhood in the 1980's. It's amazing to think that this was written in the 1950's, about the author's childhood in the 1930's. It's also hard to believe that such normalcy could have taken place in an era when we never hear about anything but misery. Unbelievable as well, is that happiness and life carried on without the direct interference of the New Deal. This book is truly a gem that will bring you back to the forts and treehouses we used to play in.

I'm sure that mothers and daughters will enjoy the book as well, but fathers and sons will get the most from it. I first read a borrowed copy of this book at age 10 back in the 1970s, and I loved it. Its praise of living leisurely, making your own fun, spending time with friends rather than parents, even doing nothing at all, seemed to validate my own boyhood lifestyle. I never forgot the book and finally bought it for myself from Amazon 30 years later.

The book is now more than 50 years old, yet it seems strikingly contemporary because the trends that Smith spotted in the 1950s (structuring children's playtime, always trying to teach and "improve" our kids, being a "pal" to our kids) have only accelerated since. Smith treats everything with nostalgia and humor, making every page a joy, if a tiny bit sad.

I now have a baby boy of my own, and I'm going to save my copy for him to read, years from now. I strongly recommend this book to young fathers, and fathers-to-be.

This book should never be out of print. A glorious, accurate dipiction of childhood from a boy's perspective. We can all relate. Sweet and innocent: when he talks about smoking "weed," it was real weeds from a back lot! When duct tape was the most valuable thing on the planet and an abandoned lot was a wonderland, it will all come back to you.

What a wonderful little book! Very short, only 124 pages, and I think the best word to describe it is - bemusing. I was charmed by the writer's account of his childhood in the Roaring Twenties. Written in 1957, so many of his observations on parenting (and he had two of his own) are certainly true today. We micro-and macro-manage our children. Are they ever left to their own devices any more? I do remember one of the things he did, running a needle under the skin of my finger. I have a note in my copy that says this book should be given to whichever of my children's children reaches 6 first.

Geling Yan's White Snake and Other Stories depicts life during the Cultural Revolution in China, mainly through the experiences of Chinese women. Yan herself was born in Shanghai and inducted into the People's Liberation Army at age twelve, where she served in both ballet and folk dance troupes. Yan is well known in China where she has won a number of literary awards. She was a news correspondent in the 1970's covering the Sino-Vietnamese war, and when her tour of duty ended, she began writing creative works. She has published five novels, three short story collections and several screenplays including Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl. White Snake was the first of her works to be translated into English. She now lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Yan is a gifted writer. Her descriptions of scenes and emotions are so well developed, the reader is genuinely transported to scenes in China. Her stories build a tension that remains high until the ending. Her character development and grasp of the intricacies of relationships are so realistic that the ending truly affects the reader. Her stories are rich with deeper meaning and almost mystical in presentation, perhaps influenced by her being raised on Chinese folklore. The title novella "White Snake" describes the transformation of a celebrated ballet dancer imprisoned for spying following a love affair with a Russian dancer. The story of Sun Likun's fall from grace ironically mimics the Chinese folktale of the White Snake, her signature role. The mythical White Snake struggled against her own fate when she left the heavens because of her love for a mortal.

The book's other short stories each explore different aspects of Chinese life and relationships. "Celestial Bath" is a tragic tale of a teenage girl sent to the countryside to perform her required government service and then trapped by local government bureacrats into prostitution to buy her ticket home. "Nothing More Than Male and Female" explores the feelings of a woman who moves into the family home of her fiance months before the wedding, and then discovers she has fallen in love with his brother - a sensitive, semi-invalid not expected to live long. "Siao Yu" is about a young Chinese woman who is forced to marry an elderly man so she can stay in Australia long enough to achieve permanent status and then marry her young Chinese lover. The only story with a male protagonist, "The Death of the Lieutenant," conveys the hopeless case of a man from an impoverished village, who joins the army in hopes of bettering himself and then kills an officer accidentally. A female news reporter is disturbed by his calm acceptance of a sentence of execution.

The common theme in this book of stories is the mortal person, flawed, hoping for something better, but struggling along to survive with whatever is dealt to them. The women in particular in her stories are oppressed by hundreds of years of Chinese culture and even under the Revolutionary regime must still fend off men who want to use them for sex and the societal expectation that they will marry. Her female characters are strong and independent despite their circumstances.

To review these short stories demands the shortest of comments. Geling Yan thankfully has been translated so that for those of us who can only read 'English' have not been denied stories, which once read cannot be forgotten. I truly cannot praise the quality,emotional content, technical structuring,linguistic texture, etc. etc., sufficiently highly. I can only suggest that you read these short storiesand discover their wonder.

I was a bit surprised when my husband first handed me my copy of 'White Snake and Other Stories'. I had never read any Chinese literature in my life and was quite unfamiliar with Lawrence Walker and Geling Yan as a translator author team.
What a wonderful surprise my husband's gift turned out to be! The writing style was so sensitive, thoughtful, creative that I felt I was literally being transported into another time and another culture. I feel that what I learned about China in the short time it took me to read this book is priceless, not to mention the true enjoyment of reading good, creative original literature like 'White Snake'. My congratulations to both Geling Yan for writing this marvelous book, and to Lawrence Walker for doing such an incredibly brilliant job at translating what must have been an unbelievably difficult work. He made it so easy to read that one would have thought it was written originally in English. And Geling brought to me her China in her own wonderful way!

Geling Yan's WHITE SNAKE AND OTHER STORIES is an excellent collection of the author's 6 short stories. "White Snake" is pyschologically and emotionally most subtle. The story derives the theme allegorically from an ancient fable of love for its plot, and it transforms that faithful love into a very subtle and complex human experience that deserves various interpretations. As in her other stories, "White Snake" leaves room for the reader's imgaination to explore and appreciate its meaning. It is poetic! "White Snake," "Celestial Bath" and "Siao Yu" are also political. The author is skillful to portray an individual's life in the context of a large and powerful world of political entity. "Celestial Bath" and "Siao Yu" actually depict a tragedy of the Chinese nation. Hemingway-like detachment is the author's approach, even in "The Death of the Liutenant" in which the woman writer is apparently the author's alter ego. Lawrence Walker's translation is fluent, faithful to the original and very readable. Yan's style, however, is so sophisticate that no translation can do justice. (This is the problem for all translations). This collection of Yan's stories is a suitable text for a contemporary Chinese literature course.

Viewed from San Francisco, China, its people and culture have been an integral part of this city and its history since the Gold Rush. Like most San Franciscans and I daresay most Americans, while I am curious about the country, for the most part my knowledge is superficial and limited to glimpses of what really makes China tick. Chinese American cuisine and frequent trips to Chinatown have given me only a suggestion of the culture and life view of the Chinese.

White Snake and the characters depicted gave me an insight to the Chinese mind in the way that few other books have. Celestial Bath in particular, is one of the most poignant stories of unrequited love I have ever read. My wife and I have re-read it several times and always are moved by it, particularly the closing scene.

A gifted author who draws on her own experience in China, Geling Yang has helped me to bridge the cultural divide between America and China. I look forward to reading more of her works to continue to deepen my knowledge of China and her people.

Larry Walker's translation of the collection - always a challenge - is a tour de force.

This collection of "fiction" is infused with strong memoir quality. As memoir, it's gripping: an interior view of current relationships layered on family background that provides a shimmering sense of depth, like viewing life through clear but moving water. As a group, the stories pack a punch of love and loss that grip the reader as a partner. I could not put it down, though sometimes I wished for release from the intensity of involvement that the author demands from her reader.

The life and love of the Chekhovian short story live with this writer's work. Each sentence is a delight--some of her sentences are puzzling and demand rereading. Compact, nearly perfect stories full of loss, betrayal, and humor. What a joy it is to read something really real and really wonderful.

One evening recently at Politics and Prose, the best bookstore in DC, I was looking for short stories. I was in the mood for something new, different, possibly a local talent that I had not discovered. I came across Mary Tabor's The Woman Who Could Never Cooked. What a rare and stimulating talent this author is right here in our midst. This book is a scintillating and finely nuanced collection of stories each and every one more deftly constructed than the other. She is like a master carpenter in her attention to detail and technical precision. Words are laid down in intricate sentences that evolve into paragraphs describing and evoking characters and scenes with depth and meaning. These paragraphs, each a carefully designed frame of thought, culminate in stories that resonate with sexuality, pain, loss, and the conflicted inner workings of both the female and, remarkably, the male mind. In the carnival of rubbish and mediocrity that characterizes so much of today's writing, Mary Tabor's work stands out as a very sleek edifice of thought and emotion that makes you happy, once again, to be a reader.

Mary L. Tabor's new collection is a must-read for anyone who enjoys crisply written, thematically rich short stories. Tabor's work reminds me of both Alice Munro and Raymond Carver in that she presents ordinary people (her setting is usually the Washington, DC area where she lives) in situations which simultaneously assay character and explore large themes such as fidelity and truth to oneself. She artfully braids such strands as romantic involvement, chance acquaintance, tension and suspense, selfishness and altruism, loss and gain, typically emerging at the story's end into enhanced self-awareness and fresh affirmation of life. A major new talent; I anticipate her next work of fiction with great anticipation. -- J. Loucks

Mary Tabor's writing is powerful, evocative, and tender in "The Woman Who Never Cooked." All the stories are incredible, but both the title story and "Sine Die" left me in tears. I am haunted by these stories and I find that lines and passages keep coming back to me during the day. I feel for all her characters; devastation, loss, anger, and betrayal keep swelling up inside me as I go through the routine of my day at the office. When reading the collection, I would have to sit for a moment after finishing each story to allow its depth to settle before I could continue reading. Tabor creates worlds that are impossible to leave and characters that are impossible to forget. I read the stories again knowing how they would end, knowing what was inevitable, but wondering and hoping that maybe it might be different this time. I could speak endlessly about the fluid prose or the expertly crafted imagery, but for me the real testament to Tabor's talent is that I find myself focusing on how the stories made me feel. Tabor makes it impossible to consider yourself separate from the tales she masterfully spins. I highly recommend this collection to those who want to get lost in beautiful storytelling, in worlds filled with love, hurt, mortality, and ultimately forgiveness in spite of it all. You will not be disappointed.