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Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Ricardo Villa has published his first work of literature in the form a brief novella and while this initial entry into the realm of writing is short, it demonstrates the potential of a writer with a gift for communicating big ideas in a succinct and poignant way.

Along Heber Road feels like a first chapter for a longer novel - and perhaps that is what Villa has in mind, so well realized are his characterizations and his ability to capture the way young teenagers think and talk, both about and around adult topics.

Miguel is fifteen, the middle son of a Mexican family who have immigrated from Mexicali to Heber, a tiny town near El Centro in the Imperial Valley of California. Villa introduces Miguel in a Prologue so well stated that its significance doesn’t hit the reader with full impact until story’s end - the sign of a writer who understands the arc of storytelling.

Miguel’s family is dysfunctional: his father is a field laborer and a drunk who regularly beats his wife and Miguel, sparing Miguel’s ‘model’ older brother Mario and his delicate younger brother Santiago. Miguel loathes his family life and depends on his close friend Mauricio and Mauricio’s mother Aracely for understanding and affection. Continue reading »

This interview is with Susan Kaye Behm, author of The Journey, and conducted by the Ephesians Christian Ministries.

Brena: You yourself are a survivor. This book and the one that preceded it, Civilized Savages, are based on your life experiences. This is an incredibly personal story. Why did you write it?

Susan: I wrote it because this kind of abuse is going on right now – right in our own back yard and must be stopped. Victims often don’t have a voice. I want to be a voice for those who cannot yet speak.

Brena: Why did you write it as a novel?

Susan: I had tried to get my first book published as non-fiction, but people didn’t want to believe it was true. So I tried publishing it as fiction and was successful. This book is a sequel, so I kept it fictionalized. Also, I found that it was easier on me to write it as fiction. Writing the details about what happened was very difficult. When it got too intense, I could distance myself by focusing on the character in the story. But about 95% of both books is factual.

Brena: I saw Civilized Savages listed on Amazon.com on someone’s list of favorite science fiction. What do you say to the people who tell you that your story is not believable? Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Timothy Sykes steps into the forum of books on Hedge Funds with one terrific advantage: Sykes shares his initial interest, his development, his experience, and his successful creation of a Hedge Fund that made him a millionaire and an acknowledged expert in the field of Finance by age 26! In his book, An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund , Sykes proves that in addition to his extraordinary gift as an entrepreneur he is also a very fine writer, able to communicate his dream and his reality with a forceful, compelling style that will find an audience among those who wish to understand the seeming conundrum of the Stock Market.

Sykes relates this resource book on understanding finance in a personal, autobiographical manner. His tone, while always serious, manages to be light and wholly understandable, no small feat for a subject as daunting as Hedge Funds. Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

It’s more humane to face a firing squad than a classroom, humiliated because of illiteracy.’ This opening sentence of Timekeeper by new author (to this reader) John Atkinson begins a journey so deeply moving and profound, yet so utterly simply told that the book suggests Atkinson may enter the echelon of writers known for important Coming of Age novels. Such writers whose message and transference is tangential include James Joyce’s `Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Betty Smith’s `A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’, JD Salinger’s `Catcher in the Rye’, Robert McCammon’s `Boy’s Life’, Cormac McCarthy’s `All the Pretty Horses’, Sue Monk Kidd’s `The Secret Life of Bees’, Jamie O’Neill’s `At Swim, Two Boys’ - a rather disparate group of books in style but related in topic - and I’m sure every reader has others of equal impact.

Time, of course, will determine his longevity of importance, but at the moment John Atkinson appears to be a new voice whose book should find a very wide audience.

Johnnyboy is a 14-year-old sensitive, handsome, sadly illiterate half-breed Indian who flees his severely dysfunctional Virginia family - his helpless but loving Cherokee Mama and his physically abusive father Bugdaddy - to find his place in the universe. Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

There are many stories that continue to come out of the WW II experience, stories of courage, love and survival in the face of near hopeless situations inflicted upon the globe by Nazi Germany, and, thankfully, biographies of heroes whose moral convictions were stronger than the destructive forces of Hitler’s cadre.

The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story is yet another unknown story, a true tale of survival of the human spirit pitted against what seemed to be the end of the world in Poland. Yet this book is not ‘just another war story’.

As presented by the astute investigator and gifted writer Diane Ackerman, whose many books include ‘A Natural History of the Senses’, ‘An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain’, ‘The Moon by Whale Light - and Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins’, Crocodilians and Whales’, ‘A Natural History of Love’, ‘Deep Play’, ‘Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden’, ‘The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds’, and anthologies of poems such as ‘I Praise My Destroyer: Poems’ and ‘Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems’, this is a magical tale about a couple in Warsaw whose roles as zookeepers allowed their shared appreciation for animal life and ways of adapting to devise ingenious ways to protect many of the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto from mass execution. Continue reading »

Paragraph Line Books editor Jon Konrath announced the release of Air in the Paragraph Line, A Literary Journal of outsider and absurdist fiction, issue #12 - themed “weird, paranoid, insane.”

The theme for the new issue of the journal of absurdist and outsider fiction is “weird, paranoid, insane”, and includes 23 stories by 15 writers, including Grant Bailie, Keith Buckley, Tony Byrer, Joshua Citrak, Kurt Eisenlohr, Rebel Star Hobson, Stephen Huffman, Jon Konrath, R. Lee, Erin O’Brien, John Sheppard, Joseph Suglia, Todd Taylor, and Richard K. Weems, plus art from Matthew Pazzol.

“I created Air in the Paragraph Line to offer an excellent collection of out-of-the-ordinary writing that fit my tastes and didn’t have a market,” says Konrath. “Most literary journals are associated with universities, writing programs, contests, or major publishers. I wanted something without those agendas and their required filler, that would be enjoyable to read from cover to cover.” Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

A Concerto for Orchestra is the term for symphonic works in which each section of the orchestra is given space and spotlight to shine as soloist. In L.M. Ross’ novel, Manhood: The Longest Moan, the orchestra is reduced to a quartet of friends and while Ross weaves the individual stories of each man’s life of choices, moments of triumph and slides of misfortune, each character is so well defined that the spotlight must move with each chapter for that solo moment.

Ross is one amazing writer, a poet who can move with ease into the area of storytelling and yet maintain the allure of brush stroke images too often found only in the terse poem form. He writes about the African American experience in New York City as well as any writer today, and brings all the juices and aromas and flavors of the idiosyncratic language of black conversation without missing a beat, and more importantly, without alienating his reader with a foreign language, so well molded is his conversational technique.

Manhood brings to life four men over a twenty year period, beginning with the high school years when the four artistic lads formed a group ‘Da Elixir’ (”Once there was this gorgeous, gorgeous time when we were all living our dreams..”) only to have the group splinter as each pursued his own dream. Continue reading »

Jackie Kessler, author of “Hell’s Belles,” the first book in the Hell on Earth Series, has announced a Hell of a contest to help promote her second novel, The Road to Hell.

“The Road to Hell” hits the shelves on Tuesday, November 6, 2007. To celebrate, Jackie Kessler will be giving away an Apple iPod Nano. “The sexy red one,” says Kessler. There is no purchase necessary to win.

The official rules are:
Prizes and entry deadlines:
For the sweepstakes running between November 6 and November 10, 2007:
Grand Prize: one Apple iPod Nano, Product Red, 2G ($199.00)
Three placing prizes: Apple iPod Shuffles, silver, 1G ($79.00 each)
For the sweepstakes running NOW through midnight, October 31, 2007:
One 14k gold, 7-inch, hollow Byzantine bracelet, from Overstock.com ($90.99)

How to enter:
For the sweepstakes running between November 6 and November 10, 2007:
There are two ways to enter. You can buy a copy of “The Road to Hell” between November 6 and November 10 and either scan your receipt and email it (visit: http://www.jackiekessler.com for the email address) to Jackie Kessler (along with a valid return email address) with “ROAD CONTEST” in the subject line, or fax a copy of your receipt (again, along with a valid return email address) to 1-518-320-7177. Continue reading »

Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

The Artist’s Body (Themes & Movements) is one of the finer compilations of an art form that drew attention from the press, museum curators, the public, the critics and fellow artists, probably more intensely focused than any other ‘art movement’ of the 20th Century.

In this well documented and copiously illustrated volume the multiple authors contribute historical data, psychological responses and etiologies, and the works are all edited with skill and sensitivity by Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones. First published in 2000 in an expensive hardbound edition, the current release is now in affordable paperback form and belongs in the libraries of all who are interested in the trends and spectrum of contemporary art. Continue reading »

Excerpted from Sarah Britten’s The Art of the South African Insult

Choking on broccoli
Chris Chameleon once said that singing in Afrikaans was like choking on broccoli. Nobody seemed to mind as much, though, as they did when the Bible of global cool, Wallpaper magazine, described Afrikaans as “one of the world’s ugliest languages” in its September 2005 edition.

Johan Rupert, who is also the CEO of Richemont, responded by withdrawing millions of pounds of advertising for some of the world’s most desirable brands, effectively telling this nauseatingly self-regarding bunch of ponces to stick their Philippe Starck up their Rem Koolhaas. In our globalised society, Rupert showed us that the best way to get your own back is to use your status as a captain of industry at the helm of a huge marketing budget to further your own personal agenda. It makes more sense than writing letters to the Sunday Times.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before Steve Hofmeyr, having fathered half the Afrikaner nation (Wie’s jou papa? as the jokes go), crowned himself defender of the volk. Thus Afrikaners now have a choice, if one can call it that, between Steve and the Don of Dainfern, Dan Roodt. At least Dan wouldn’t be caught dead in a brown patchwork leather jacket. Continue reading »