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| ANNA BEGINS [Jennifer Davenport] 'Anna Begins' is a pair of Young Adult novellas, each about a girl and a boy around seventeen years old. In the title story, Melissa has an eating disorder, an absent best friend, a disconnected mother, her first sexual experience, and a story to write about all of it. Finding peer support in telling her own story, she decides to try to live the plot she is trying to write. 'A Million Miles Up', the second story, is an upside-down tale of teenage love. Scott and Elly try to navigate their junior year in high school. Scott wants to be famous and takes up celebrity-scale drinking. Elly just wants to be happy, but must deal with an abusive father. As both of them fall through the cracks at their school, they approach an ending neither of them can return from: Elly decides to kill her father. The two stories in 'Anna Begins' explore the humour, frustration and depth of pain the come with the most awkward years of life: the teens. { 150pp, 140x215mm, January 2008; HB, £13.50, 0930773837:9780930773830 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| BATHHOUSE [Farnoosh Moshiri] During the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, a 17-year-old girl is arrested by the Revolutionary Guards. She is not political, but her brother and sister-n-law are, so she is suspect too. She is confined in a former bathhouse with several other women ranging in age from adolescence to elderly, whose mental states vary from the stoic and care-giving to the insane. Based on interviews with several Iranian women who had been imprisoned in such a bathhouse, this novel documents the torment they endured and honours their humanity and courage. Winner of the 2001 Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction. { 183pp, 140x215mm, August 2001; HB, £13.50, 0930773624:9780930773625 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| CHARLIE : A Novel of War [Joanna Catherine Scott] This is a novel about an American soldier who goes to war, fathers a son, and abandons him. He is taken captive by the Viet Cong and held in a cave in a tunnel underground. Sick, starving, and alone, he gradually loses his grip on reality and becomes convinced that one of his captors is his lost son. In clear, lyrical prose, Joanna C. Scott has written a book that is at the same time mythic and believable. Although a number of fine Vietnam war novels have been published, Charlie and the Children is unique in its concern and its surpassing quality. { 235pp, 140x215mm, October 2007; PB, £9.50, 093077373X:9780930773731 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| CLEVELAND INDIAN : The Legend of King Saturday [Luke Salisbury] It's the end of the 19th century and the basepaths are alive with legendary players such as John McGraw and Honus Wagner. Cy Young is on the mound and King Saturday (the Cleveland Indian) is at bat. The 'kranks,' or fans, are rooting for action. 'The Cleveland Indian' brings to life the bawdy, often sinister, final days of the Gay Nineties. Against this panorama, the author fields an authentic 1897 Cleveland Spiders line-up, a team as colourful as its era. King Saturday, modelled on real-life baseball legend Sockalexis, the Indian outfielder who gave the Cleveland ball club its name, is a con man, a drunk, a brawler, a hero, a schemer, a murderer, and possessor of 'the most talent any baseball man ever saw.' { 326pp, 140x215mm, July 2007; PB, £9.50, 0930773829:9780930773823 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| CRAZY DERVISH & THE POMEGRANATE TREE [Farnoosh Moshiri] Awarded the Black Heron Press Prize for Social Fiction. In the dozen stories in "The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree", Farnoosh Moshiri combines social and political insight with the mythology of her native Iran. Her earlier books, The Bathhouse (which also won the Black Heron Press Prize for Social Fiction) and At the Wall of the Almighty, were set in Iran. The present book is set both in Iran and the United States. Several of the stories are concerned with the loss of status, the poverty, the loss of identity that immigrants often suffer. Unlike most immigrant stories, The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree deals equally with the violence and political repression visited upon those who would emigrate during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran. { 176pp, 140x215mm, April 2004; HB, £13.50, 0930773705:9780930773700 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| FRUIT 'N FOOD : A Novel [Leonard Chang] When Thomas Pak is hired as a clerk at a Korean grocery, he isn't prepared for the searing racial tensions that threaten to destroy the neighborhood in which he lives and works. His tenuous relationship with the store owners and their young daughter is jepordised by his own conflicting affiliations of race and class, and these turbulent forces soon converge violently around him. { 226pp, 140x215mm, July 2006; PB, £8.50, 0930773799:9780930773793 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| GREY MOON OVER CHINA [Thomas A Day] This first novel is the story of a disillusioned company of Army engineers, languishing in the Pacific during the energy wars between the United States on the one hand, and Japan and California on the other. They steal the plans for an energy device that could end the wars and the world's slide into environmental disaster, but use it to extort the price of their own freedom from the world: the resurrection of an abandoned space colonisation effort. They are driven by Eduardo Torres, a seeming shell of a man who destroys everything in his way, and everyone who loves him, in his drive to escape his own past. With him is the exotic and dangerous Tuyet Pham, a young woman who arrives from nowhere but knows Torres better than he knows himself, and Sergeant Polaski, the soulless warrior on whom the tormented Torres relies. Together they flee blindly and with terrible losses, for the drones sent to scout the way have never returned, and they can delay no longer. { 465pp, 155x230mm, October 2006; HB, £15.99, 0930773780:9780930773786 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| HOW I LEARNED THAT I COULD PUSH THE BUTTON [Jerome Gold] These essays compose a compact history of the effects of the war in Vietnam on American life. Coloured by the impact of the war, they portray some of the ways in which we looked at later events. Certain themes arise again and again-the perceived threat presented by the Other, the permeability of borders that separate like from other, the tension between loyalty to one's fellows and obligation to nation or country or society, the distrust of abstraction and those who use abstraction to manipulate us. These essays, drawing on the author's direct experience of one war and his peripheral experience of another, may be considered a companion volume to his acclaimed novel, Sergeant Dickinson. { 157pp, 140x215mm, September 2003; HB, £13.50, 0930773675:9780930773670 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| INFINITE KINDNESS [Laurie Blauner] In 1867 London, England, Ann Russell, a nurse and a veteran of the Crimean War, deals with issues of euthanasia, medicine, war, sexual identity, and spirituality. In the Crimea, Ann worked with Florence Nightingale; back in England, she still consults her for advice and support. Ann struggles with the transition to civilian life while working at a charity hospital. She also commits acts of euthanasia, a practice she adopted when desperately wounded English soldiers begged her to kill them. Lyrical and questioning, this historical novel explores the timeless concerns of life, death, compassion, and personal growth as viewed through the prism of Victorian England. { 234pp, 140x215mm, March 2007; HB, £13.99, 0930773802:9780930773809 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| LIGHTBEARER : A True Story of Love, Death, & Lessons Learned on the Other Side [Bonnie Cox] After a failed marriage, Bonnie Cox fell in love with Michael Jenkins, a sport parachutist -- a skydiver -- and photographer who earned his living photographing other skydivers. On assignment for a TV show, he was killed on a jump. This is the story of Bonnie's and Michael's love. Bonnie had had psychic ability since childhood. After Michael's death, she found that she was able to talk with him, even to visit him, on the Other Side. She discovered, among other things, that she and Michael had been husband and wife in a previous life. The lessons she learned on the Other Side endowed her with a profound spirituality and finally enabled her to accept her loss. This is an intelligently written book that will appeal to both the spiritual and the sceptic. { 222pp, 155x230mm, October 2002; HB, £13.99, 0930773659:9780930773656 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| MANTIDS EBOOK [Ron Dakron] Mantids is an update on the world's oldest novel -- Petronius's Satyricon - with a twist. In Satyricon, the hero can't get an erection; in Mantids, the narrator can't get rid of one. Combine his Viagra overdose with an invasion by mutant female praying mantises and a speed-tweaker Astoria, Oregon locale; add biting comedy and a warrior heroine and stir into a B-movie plot stew and you have a classic Dakron novel, chock full of sardonic prose and more fun than a barrel of junkies. { 134pp, 185x235mm, July 2008; EB, £6.99, 0930773896:9780930773892 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| MEKHTI [Amy Bassan] This is a coming-of-age story and a novel of obsession. Reminiscent of Kathryn Harrison's 'The Kiss', "Mekhti" is a story of a girl trying to fill an emptiness in her life, and of how that experience changes her. A teenage girl is seduced by a man 20 years older than she. What does he mean to her? She to him? The force of this novel is carried by the girl's emotions. It begins, in fact, with loss-of family, of identity. And while the girl is the one seduced, Mekhti, her lover, has meaning for her beyond his sexuality. Their relationship, the author writes, 'was like a cancer that grew and grew, invading every part of our lives and squeezing until nothing else was left. Simple relationships, like friend or boyfriend, are easy, you can replace them. But who could we ever find to reach into as many places in each other's lives?' { 229pp, 140x215mm, March 2005; HB, £13.99, 0930773713:9780930773717 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| MOSES IN THE SINAI [Simone Zelitch] Moses in the Sinai rewrites the books of Exodus and Numbers by way of The Arabian Nights, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Cecil B. DeMille. It makes generous use of myth and history, ancient and contemporary. The Hebrews of the novel are a varied mob of outlaws, magicians, sorcerers, aristocrats, and idolators, all content with being slaves. Moses must lead them into the Sinai against their will in the hope of serving a God whose very identity he doubts. The Hebrews of this historical and imaginative novel inhabit a world where children are born in cooking pots, meat rains from the sky, fish talk, and prophecies come true. It is a world where human emotion can take miraculous forms. This book is full of such miracles. { 140x215mm, October 2001; HB, £14.99, 0930773594:9780930773595 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| NEW LIGHT [Annette Gilson] Beth Martin wakes up one day feeling she has wasted years of her life. She goes to St. Louis to visit her college roommate and take some time to get her bearings. But at a party she experiences a vision, which she finds disconcerting, but also compelling. Also compelling is her seemingly chance meeting with neuroscientist who is researching the vision phenomenon. Beth accompanies him to "New Light", a visionary commune in the mountains where she meets its charismatic leader, a woman known as The Mother, and is befriended by some of the members. Their conception of America is challenging, most notably in their openness to sexual and emotional experimentation. Beth is intrigued by the sense of possibility she finds at "New Light", but is also disturbed by the enormous power The Mother wields over the members' lives. In the end Beth must address questions of faith and personal responsibility, jealousy and desire, loyalty and tolerance. { 315pp, 155x230mm, May 2006; HB, £14.99, 0930773772:9780930773779 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| ODD PUPPET ODYSSEY : An Adult Epic on a Small Stage [Richard Gold] The "Odd Puppet Odyssey" is an illustrated series of narrative poems. Reading as parables, they are poems for adults about the voyage of two puppet characters, Pongo and Rico. In the course of their journey, they explore identity, sexuality, adulthood, relationships and some of the social forces that affect them and their world. Recalling Homer's Odyssey as well as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Collodi's The Adventures of Pinoccio, and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Pongo and Rico travel down a rabbit hole to meet Death in Wonderland, are chased by the Hairy Monster of Manhood, and climb through the interior of a giant model of themselves. Leavened with humour and irony, this book is a picaresque story of self-acceptance and growth. Celeste Ericsson, the illustrator, worked in tandem with the author, so that poems and illustrations evolved together. The artist has been influenced by Renaissance and Baroque art, the commedia dell'arte and the satirical etchings of James Gillray. { 82pp, 205x250mm, October 2003; HB, £12.50, 0930773683:9780930773687 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| PRISONER OF THE WORD : A Memoir of the Vietnamese Reeducation Camps [Le Huu Tri] This is a recounting of Le Hu'u Tri's years in Vietnamese re-education camps. A young officer in the South Vietnamese army in 1975, he turned himself in to the new authorities following the fall of Saigon. He believed he would be freed within a few weeks. Instead, he spent almost six years in forced-labour camps -- euphemistically called 're-education camps' -- where prisoners were routinely starved and deprived of medical care, where some were shot, and they were worked beyond exhaustion. The title alludes to the author's observations on the techniques of manipulation and control the authorities used against their prisoners. This memoir is an important contribution to the literature on the methods and techniques of totalitarianism, particularly Communism, and it is the only book that deals so extensively with the Vietnamese camps. Readers of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda will recognise "Prisoner of the Word" as illustrating Ellul's concept of internal propaganda. { 272pp, 155x230mm, August 2000; HB, £15.99, 0930773608:9780930773601 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| TEMPING [Kirby Olson] "Temping" is about a no-longer-so-young man who is a temporary secretary, then returns to graduate school, and gets a job teaching the theory of humour -- in Finland, where he also manages a circus. The book opens in Seattle and encompasses Hong Kong, France and Finland. It has a love story, rivalries between the hero and other academics, religious ecstasy and several attempted murders. Its characters include Finland's saddest poet, an evil dwarf who is both circus performer and a senior Professor of the Comic, and a beautiful, young, blonde acrobat. "Temping" is a madcap take on the seriousness of life. And it has a happy ending! { 217pp, 155x230mm, October 2005; HB, £13.99, 0930773764:9780930773762 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |
| WISDOM OF THE BODY [Judith Roche] This is a meditation in poetry on the 'bodiness' -- the physicality -- of all things: our bodies and how they change, the salmon and their life cycle, trees, flowers, the earth, everything caught in the mystery of time. The book contains a series of poems on the life cycle of Pacific Northwest salmon that was a City of Seattle public arts project, and poems from the libretto of a musical piece by noted composer Janice Gitech, 'Navigating the Light'. { 94pp, 140x215mm, April 2007; PB, £9.50, 0930773810:9780930773816 , Midpoint Trade Books (Black Heron Press) } |