C R Press: 7 books

By bringing us pear blossoms and knife blades, smells of salt and poison, Dominguez weaves an artful web out of the opposites that hold us together. History, both personal and communal, comes alive in the best way, here: through our bodies. As easily as we feel sprinkler water puddle under our toes,...

What happens when an interrogator turns the same unwavering attention to obtaining the truth to the wars we wage among countries, people, families and ourselves? Who and what defines what hold us Captive? Martin Ott, a former U.S. Army interrogator, puts the world and his personal life beneath an inquisitor’s...

Sybil Baker’s TALISMANS is a contemporary Heart of Darkness. In its linked stories, Baker’s compelling protagonist, Elise, travels throughout Asia in search of a way to come to terms with the deaths of her first love, her mother, and, especially, her father, a Vietnam vet who drowned in Thailand,...

Surefooted and emotionally deft, the stories in River Talk introduce an unforgettable array of characters. A woman reconsiders her decision to enter a polygamous marriage; a taxidermist plies his trade to woo the woman he loves; a Somali refugee takes a job at the local mill to support her family....

All we hear about are lawlessness and violence, without social history or political context to fill out the picture. THE FIFTH LASH AND OTHER STORIES gives us a portrait of Pakistan, and Muslims in general, struggling to reason their way into a better future. Paranoia, self-hatred, delusion, insecurity,...

Maybe everything that's beautiful starts ugly. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a small city of the new American South, we find an unexpected world of haves and have nots, families and outsiders, old hatreds and first loves that unfold in eight imaginatively rendered stories. As these characters...

Still haunted by the past and his most recent failures, Kent lives in a capsule hotel, penniless, jobless, forgotten by a fickle public, abandoned by his wife, and at the mercy of a nasty methamphetamine habit. Kent has vanished from the spotlight. But Denis Ozman, shock comic and husband of Kent's former...