VENGEANCE OF GRIMBALD By Richard Hacker For Sale at Amazon VENGEANCE OF GRIMBALD is Richard's second novel in the fantasy thriller ALCHIMEIA series published by Del Sol Press. The first in the series, DIE BACK, was published in 2018. Richard's work has been recognized by the Writer's League of Texas and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and as a judge in literary contests such as PNWA and ChicLit. As a freelance development editor for Algonkian and Del Sol Press, he enjoys the opportunity to give writers honest critique and evolve their craft. In addition, he is the science fiction and fantasy editor for the Del Sol Review. Novels in his Nick Sibelius crime series include KILL'T DEAD OR WORSE and ALL HAT AND NO CATTLE. Richard is currently writing a tongue-in-cheek sci-fi novel, THE BIFURCATION OF DUNGSTEN CREASE, as well as a third book in the Alchimeia series.

MINGLEMENTS By Renée Ashley Purchase at Amazon For Renée Ashley, everything's connected, and so Minglements comes forth in rays of entanglements, some hilarious, some not so hilarious at all. This collection is a kind of guided tour through the way a mind works. Now, when people ask Ashley, What planet do you live on? she can hold up this book in response. Peter Murphy, author of Atlantic City Leaves, best sums it up when he notes, "Renée Ashley accomplishes something extraordinary in Minglements, a hybrid book of literary criticism and memoir. She states all the reasons she shouldn't write a memoir, defends them, and writes it anyway, and I don't want her to stop... Ashley has ignored the New Critics' focus on "the work itself" and offers us a more transactional appraisal of contemporary poetry. She gives us such an idiosyncratic take on "the work" and on herself, we may never be able to read another traditional review without longing."

PIPER ROBBIN AND THE AMERICAN OZ MAKER By Warwick Gleeson Purchase at Amazon Upon this 80th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz, Piper Robbin and the American Oz Maker will officially join the "heretical apocrypha of Oz." In other words, a work of imaginative fiction borrowing heavily from Oz, but not subject to the confines and strictures of Oz canon. This dark and epic science-fantasy by Warwick Gleeson features three of the most protean and uniquely flawed heroes ever forged in 21st century speculative fiction... [more about this novel]

SECOND SHIFT - ESSAYS By Susan Tekulve Purchase at Amazon In this collection of twelve essays, Susan Tekulve explores the tasks we perform that earn us more than a paycheck. Tekulve's topics include the gathering of secret family stories; surviving a night of haggis and Scottish whisky; mothering a musician son; facing down two teenage gunmen, and caring for a dying mother. The key word in this collection is memory. Whether investigating common occurrences, or making narrative sense out of events for which there are very few words, these essays remind us that memories, and the shaping of them into stories, are the best kind of work. Susan's stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, New Letters, Best New Writing 2007, The Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Webdelsol, Black Warrior Review, and The Kansas City Star. An Associate Professor of English, she teaches in the BFA and MFA in creative writing programs at Converse College.

KARMA CITY - AN SF ACTION THRILLER By Gardner Browning Purchase at Amazon An unexpected parasite has crippled humanity; but when a geneticist turns to darker science to create a cure, an enhanced predator is engineered that acquires an intelligence of its own. It falls to an urban drifter and his female, mercenary partner, to stop this killer elite before it supplants mankind. New Hampshire author, Gardner Michael Browning, has been writing fiction since elementary school. As an older brother to two, spinning tales of magic, fantasy and adventure was an important job throughout childhood. Storytelling is but one passion, as Browning draws inspiration from the many facets of his life.

KNOWING WRITERS - ESSAYS AND REVIEWS By Walt Cummins Purchase at Amazon Walter Cummins learned very early on that the writer he knew as a person, no matter how well, is not the writer whose words he read. Even when the material is autobiographical, even based on incidents he has heard about in great detail, the written version is another reality and the voice or character experiencing the situations a much more complex being than the person who told him about them. So, what does it actually mean to know a writer?

DIE BACK - A LITERARY SCIENCE FANTASY By Richard Hacker Purchase at Amazon Six hundred years after a fifteenth century scryer gains the alchemical knowledge to create a dark future in his own image, Addison Shaw inherits a destiny: to fight this ancient war that threatens all he loves with extinction. Using an alchemical pen, he writes himself into past lives, leaving his body in the present. Upon completion of his mission, he must die in order to break the link and return home. While his enemy, Kairos, plays a three-dimensional chess game across the centuries, with each "Inking," Addison's world shifts further into chaos. From ancient Alexandria to modern Tokyo, Addison and his fellow Inker, Jules, fight a time war against Kairos. After Jules is murdered in the present and her consciousness trapped in an Inca princess five hundred years in the past, Addison, alone and close to defeat, realizes that the only way to save his world is to destroy it. To save the future he must die in the past, and as often as possible.

THE SINGING SHIP - DSP PRIZE WINNER By Rebecca Winterer Purchase at Amazon.com Two teenage sisters--Bernadette, the explorer and skeptic; and Jane, the Christian optimist--engage in an unorthodox battle for the truth of their attack in the Australian bush. As they grow up, each seeks refuge in their own world: Bernadette in the maps and writings of the 19th century explorer Charles Stuart, Jane in her faith and teaching. Their parents, Audrey and Robert, unaware of what's happened, deal with their own break in the security of their marriage. Audrey copes by creating a button quilt, its patterns an intricate topography hinting at the family's secrets and betrayals. As the quilt grows and the years pass with the growing burden of what's unsaid and denied, each character bends the boundaries of time and memory to negotiate with the trauma that has separated them from themselves and each other... [ more on Amazon ]

A NEW TIME WAR NOVEL - WAR OF THE WORLD MAKERS By Reilly Michaels Purchase at Amazon.com From 1743 Prussia to 2238 Dubai, the Pan Buddhist Democratic Union (PBDU) wages war to save humanity from being annihilated and replaced in the 21st century by a mad vision of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. PBDU member, Czarina Catherine II, joins forces with spellcrafter Zolo Bold as well as her younger self, the Princess Freddie von Anhalt, and together with World Maker Niccolo Paganini they face an implacable foe, the most brilliant mind to ever invent the future: Leonardo da Vinci--recast to the 21st century as Master Edison Godfellow, inventor and magician supreme. "War of the World Makers" by Michaels is a dark science-fantasy with no delusions of grandeur. It is truly grand. [ more about this novel ]

HOW CAN WE MAKE YOUR POWER MORE COMFORTABLE? By Norman Ball Purchase at Amazon.com In a style by turns bitingly satiric and deadly serious, Norman Ball exposes the Red-Blue divide for the sham it is. The much-trumpeted Democrat to Republican transfers of power, then back again, are all hollow gestures full of sound-bite and fury signifying nothing but divide-and-conquer.

NOTHING BETWEEN US By Wendy Barker Purchase at Amazon.com Nothing Between Us is a collection of stunning poems about Berkeley in the 60s that examines the politics of race, nuances of the feminist movement, as well as the complexities of infidelity.

A WORLD WITHOUT WAR By Don Thompson Purchase at Amazon.com A World Without War is a compilation of essays written since 2000 by activist producer and playwright Don Thompson (Tibet in Song, Democracy: A Work in Progress, L.A. Book of the Dead). Written for popular webzines such as The Potomac Journal (ed. Michael Neff) and SolPix, the essays chronicle important political and cultural issues and trends post 9/11 -- all with Thompson's unique and independent perspective that often puts a completely new spin on familiar topics.

GEOGRAPHIES OF LIGHT By Lisa Suhair Majaj Purchase at Amazon.com Geographies of Light is a voice of the Palestinian people, bearing witness to brutal loss, as well as the joy.

Detour By Michael Brodsky ISBN: 978-0615122465 Purchase at Amazon.com Detour charts the struggle of a movie-obsessed would-be medical student to avoid at all cost the straitjacket of a fixed identity. His transient, too intense sexual relationship with a rootless former heroin addict becomes one of the many "detours" that seem to frustrate but ultimately define his quest for connectedness and the fulfillment of a true calling. Detour received the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Citation of the PEN American Center in 1979.

Mad Anatomy By Kimberly Nichols ISBN: 0972509593 Purchase at Amazon.com Mad Anatomy is a collection of literary shorts that explores the prism-like psychology of intimacy and human relationship. DSP assures you this collection cannot be surpassed in terms of originality and voice. Kimberly is a brilliant fiction writer.

The 2008 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories ISBN: 978-1-934832-06-6 Purchase at Amazon.com The nine short stories collected here, selected by our judge and panel of readers from a pool of over five hundred stories, admirably showcase the range, vitality, and distinction of the contemporary literary short story. Kimberly Willardson's winning story, "Winter Memories of the Summer Bear" was chosen from the 2008 contest's nine finalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler. Finalists include Jacob M. Appel, Miriam Gershow, Nick Healy, Brodie Smith, Erin Soros, Naomi Williams, Mark Wisniewski, and Christina Yu.

The 2007 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories ISBN: 978-0-979150-16-6 Purchase at Amazon.com These ten short stories -- Valerie Hurley's winning story, "Jasmine, Washing the Hair of Pearsa," and nine finalists--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story. From a pool of over five hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals and magazines, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these finalists. Valerie Hurley's winning story was chosen by our judge, Pulitzer winner Robert Olen Butler. Here you'll find stories by: Jacob M. Appel, Stephenie Brown, Lauren Cobb, LaTanya McQueen, Benjamin Pearlberg, Matthew Pitt, Scott Winokur, and Mark Wisniewski.

The 2005 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories ISBN: 0-9748229-8-1 Purchase at Amazon.com These twelve short stories--Matthew J. Sullivan's winning story, "Unfound," and eleven finalists--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the most compelling writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over five hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals and magazines, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these ?nalists, the best of the best, for the 2005 Robert Olen Butler Prize for a Short Story. Matthew J. Sullivan's winning story, "Unfound," was chosen from these finalists by our judge, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler. Here you'll find stories by: Cheryl Alu, Jacob M. Appel, Kerry Dolan, Alicia Gifford, Alison Lee Kinney, Phil Lamarche, Cris Mazza, Jeff Parker, Bill Pettitt, Peter Paul Smith, Matthew J. Sullivan, and Alia Yunis.

The 2004 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories ISBN: 0-9748229-5-7 Purchase at Amazon.com These eleven stories--E. R. Catalano's winning story, "News from My Father," and ten finalist--show the range possible in the contemporary literary short story and offer a snapshot of some of the best writing by established and emerging literary talents. From a pool of over six hundred stories, some published in very well-known journals, and many unpublished, our panel of readers selected these ten finalists, the best of the best, in 2004. E.R. Catalano's winning story, "News from My Father," was chosen from these finalists by our 2004 judge, Robert Olen Butler.

All I Can Truly Deliver: Stories By Matt Vadnais ISBN: 0-9748229-4-9 Purchase at Amazon.com "What I love most about each of these enigmatic, glistery, beautiful, and intricately inventive stories is their valuable celebration of and commitment to the Difficult Imagination. Comprised of skewed appropriations and manipulations of 'canonical' work by the likes of Melville, Kafka, and Joyce, this collection reminds us again and again of two profound points: that 'originality' and 'truth' are, at best, states of mind, and that loss and death remain the only two things we'll never really be able to deconstruct. All I Can Truly Deliver marks the arrival of an important new talent to the festival called exploratory fiction." - Lance Olsen

TELLING STORIES - OLD AND NEW By Walter Cummins Purchase at Amazon.com Walter Cummins has published six previous short story collections: Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism. More than 100 of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Laurel Review, Other Voices, Georgetown Review, Contrary, Sonora Review, Abiko Quarterly, Weber Studies, Midwest Quarterly, West Branch, South Carolina Review, Crosscurrents, Crescent Review, The MacGuffin, in book collections, and on the web.

HABITAT STORIES OF BENT REALISM By Walter Cummins Purchase at Amazon.com Walter Cummins is a master of revealing quiet truths. His stories stay with one's consciousness. It is an intellectual, emotional pleasure to turn the pages of his story collections. They engorge one with questions that there are few answers for. He's a secret poet to any perspicacious reader. Cummins bends reality achieving dark epiphanies as enduring as his quondam revelations. It all begins with his arresting sentences.

Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane: Poems By Nin Andrews ISBN: 0-9748229-7-3 Purchase at Amazon.com "Nin Andrews explodes the iconography of our childhoods as she creates a new series of Dick and Jane readers, this time earmarked for adults who desperately need a vocabulary for a different time. With edgy humor and deep understanding of the shadows we all cast, she gives us a Dick and Jane we can't resist. The bizarre nature of the world she creates is what initially draws us in, but what keeps us there is our growing knowledge that it's our world too." - Joyce Dyer

Ascension Days Poems by David Blair Winner of the 2006 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize ISBN: 978-0-979150-15-9 Purchase at Amazon.com "What a strange and intense book this is! David Blair has a wild, restless imagination and he uses language like saw, a hammer, a velvet whip. He can write incredibly tender (and original) love poems and enfilading satirical poems, as well as many of the many other 'kinds' of poems between those poles, and they all seem entirely at home, indeed, need to be in this book together. His music, his diction, his refusal to use (ever!) clichés, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward. That is where his poems go: forward. He will be in the company of the best poets of his generation." —Thomas Lux

A Little Night Comes Poems by Julianne Buschsbaum Winner of the 2004 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize ISBN: 978-0-974822-96-9 Purchase at Amazon.com In a fierce landscape, these poems--violent and lovely, transcendental and desperate--jar us into new senses ... And further, in Julianne Buchsbaum's dense, laconic poems, poise solicits passion and urgency courts elegance. Her rich, lucid, alliterative lexicon, full of apt surprise and happily astray amid the glitter of evidence, makes a dictionary of the small parts of world and the larger parts those parts make. And love is never far from the parted lips, in all its errors and ecstasies€ —Reginald Shepherd

Poppy Poems by Austin Hummell ISBN: 0974822922 Purchase at Amazon.com "Taut with the voice of many close-held wisdoms, Austin Hummell's POPPY is laced with a brilliant restraint and an odd humility. He traps the feral, injured thing and tames it just enough to examine the damage, then sets it back again, free. These poems deliver their partial deaths with a startling clarity, and do not flinch from the unbeautiful. Hummell is a master of extremity, and of beauty too. He is one of the most exacting and exciting, most wounding and unflinching new poets I've read in a good long while." - Lucie Brock-Broido

Torch Lake & Other Poems By Brian Johnson ISBN: 978-1-934832-07-3 Purchase at Amazon.com Purchase at Barnes&Noble.com "The most lyrical poems (mostly in prose) that I have read in years. A silver-tongued 'I' with little concern for itself, so wakeful and watchful is it embodied, and so attuned to its bounty of fabulous perceptions. A first collection brought to a nearly translucent state of shine. —C.D. Wright "Torch Lake & Other Poems is the most original and exciting collection given American poetry since Larry Levis’ Elegy. There’s more juice, scope, imagination and sheer vitality in this work than in twenty run-of-the-mill collections." —Gray Jacobik

Vitreous Poems by David Ray Vance Winner of the 2005 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize ISBN: 978-0-9791501-0-4 Purchase at Amazon.com Winner of the Del Sol Press 2005 Poetry Prize, David Ray Vance's poetry collection combines science and art gloriously. Mary Jo Bang, the Prize Judge, has this to say about Vitreous: "Part rewritten 1934 medical text, part Keatsian reflection, this is the logical offspring of the long-awaited meeting of science and art; a marriage of equals where each half maintains its primary allegiance: the poetic to the common lyrical language of emotion and memory, the medical to its narrowly appropriated lexicon of intraocular, cornea, and Placido's disc. Mr. Vance has woven these two competing word streams into a meditation on sight and risk. Think of it as an item in the cupboard of the scientifically sublime. Think of Ronald Johnson's Ark. Vitreous is utterly fascinating in its reach, and exquisitely tender. And important, because it answers again today's recurrent question, Can form be further broken and still be a poem? The answer (of course) is yes."

A Pure Bead Poems by Allegra Wong ISBN: 978-0-979150-17-3 Purchase at Amazon.com In language at once candid and layered, calm and devastating, terrifying and gorgeous, the poems in Allegra Wong's first collection, A Pure Bead, cut deep to the heart, reveal small and piercing dramas of human joy and suffering as if through a diorama's eye-hole. These vivid poem-worlds expand emotionally and intellectually; give off shocks; attract, disturb, unsettle, and finally allow a tender and profound beauty to emerge. Here is nothing less than the complex, psychologically accurate world of humankind. Put your eye to these dioramas: you won't be able to stop looking.

The Literary Traveler By Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy ISBN: 0-9748229-3-0 Purchase at Amazon.com Literary travelers Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins set off for an afternoon with J. P. Donleavy in his Irish mansion, to visit the Paris of Hemingway, the Lisbon of Bernardo Soares, Joyce's Dublin and his gravesite in Zurich, the Ionian home of Lafcadio Hearne where Sappho plunged to her death (or did she?), the Victorian pubs of London where Phileas Fogg made his famous wager, Synge's Aran Islands, Voltaire's Ferney, the luxurious abode of Baroness Varvara in Copenhagen, the "secret" erotic shrine of Emanuel Vigeland in Oslo, Robert Graves's Mallorca, and the digs and haunts of scores of New York writers, Helsinki, Chicago, Florence, Venice, Slovenia, the Rhine of Goethe and Byron, the Alps, Stonehenge, Oxfordshire, the mysteries of the Yorkshire Dales, and the poets and pubs of Edinburgh's Auld Reekie. Journey with them, off the beaten path, down the narrow allies, up the mountains and into the pubs in search of literary history.

Your Life Is a Movie Edited by Don Thompson and Nicholas Rombes ISBN: 978-0-974822-99-0 Purchase at Amazon.com Your Life Is a Movie contains some of the most provocative thinking about media, film and culture you're likely to encounter. Drawn from scholars, political pundits, film makers and film critics--ranging from the famous to the relatively obscure--this anthology of interviews and essays is a must-read for anyone concerned about the direction of film and media in modern culture. Contributors include Eric Alterman, Ray Carney, Patricia Ducey, Timothy Dugdale, Todd Gitlin, T. B. Meek, Michael Neff, Rob Nilsson, Nicholas Rombes, and Don Thompson.

DIAGRAM.2 Edited by Ander Monson ISBN: 0-9762092-1-7 Purchase at Amazon.com DIAGRAM.2, the second print anthology from the popular online magazine of text, art, and schematic, DIAGRAM, includes selections from its third and fourth years of publication. Includes a wide array of strange, never-before-seen schematics from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, chosen for their strangeness and beauty. Like the first print anthology, (Some from) DIAGRAM: Selections from the Magazine and More, this is an often bizarre, sometimes funny, often profound, and always intense collection. Edited by Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities and Vacationland.

DIAGRAM.1 Edited by Ander Monson ISBN: 0972509585 Purchase at Amazon.com DIAGRAM, the online periodical of esoteric oddness and schematic, presents selections from the first two years, available in print for the first time. It includes a wealth of strange diagrams from the 19th Century as well as sonnets, stories, essays, outlines, singing appliances, good science, in-between-genre weirdness, and much loveliness.