The Contest
The 2010 Literary and Screenplay Awards Programs have ended. Finalists will be posted in our forums. Get early details on the 2011 Programs right here!
The Books
Our first title, released in 2006, is Canadian sensation Ray Robertson’s Moody Food, the critically acclaimed rock’n'roll-suffused modern tragedy. Moody Food is a fictionalized saga of music, love and the power of revolution inspired by the life of the legendary singer-songwriter Gram Parsons. In 2007, we released The Fires, by Alan Cheuse. In 2008, we released The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex & Other True Stories, a creative nonfiction collection from Pagan Kennedy. In 2009, our release of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Richard Currey’s international bestseller, Fatal Light, marks the culmination of nearly a decade of work. More info.
The Latest From the Journal
Santorini
The ferry pulled into the harbor at dawn, and they watched the sun rise behind the cliffs. The craggy bluffs of Santorini towered over them, exposing layers of black, white, and gray earth, all streaked with dark red, as if sprinkled with powdered blood.
She outlined the harbor with her eyes. When he told her he would bring her here, she bought a book about the island. So she knew, as she looked out at the sea, that the island used to be round, that she was not overlooking a body of water but a submerged volcanic crater, flooded centuries ago by a catastrophic eruption.
Take Me to Your Heart
“Elvis died on my birthday. My fourteenth. We lived in Delavan then. My mom worked at the club on the lake.”
Stirring wretched coffee with a fork while a tinny radio played something that must have been relevant to the assertion, fifty-seven year old Alonzo Johnson wondered how it had been decided, at that moment, in a packed Greyhound diner, that the stranger sharing his two-person table would disclose that particular piece of information. Or, more properly, those pieces, as it wasn’t only the Elvis-death-birthday declaration, but there was also Delavan, the mom, and the club. That must have been Hugh Hefner’s old place on Lake Geneva. He wondered which was most pertinent.
The House No One Lived In
They considered themselves midnight adventurers, coming off the hill they so lovingly called Henshit Mountain, to cross the pond in the dead of winter with sleds to “borrow” lumber from Artie Donolan who had ”borrowed” it from Breakheart Reservation, a state park. The park, at its deepest end, bordered on land that the Donolans had worked for years, including timber they ripped out of the state park as long as a few eyes stayed closed. To the boys from Henshit Mountain, the Donolan rape was not unknown, not to these teenagers, who were only enacting their own form of justice, borrowing enough lumber to build themselves a clubhouse at the thickly-treed section of the mountain. With various spurts of energy, even in summer when they floated rafts of lumber across the same pond from the same lumberyard, rooms were added to the clubhouse. The building rose majestically, they all agreed, they who had to a man become proficient carpenters and finish men.