The leaves that fell in January |
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Mahasweta Devi once said ... |
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Writing became my real world for me, in which I lived and survived. Forward. Backward.
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We've started a fundraising campaign. Can you help spread the word? |
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We need your help to keep diversity alive in literature. Your support goes beyond sustaining our press; it is a testament to your belief in the power of literature to bridge cultures and foster understanding. Together, we can continue to bring stories from around the world to readers everywhere. Thank you for being a crucial part of the Vine Leaves Press community. With your help, we can ensure that the pages keep turning and that diverse voices resonate for generations to come.
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Douglas Adams once said ... |
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Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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Joseph Lezza |
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AWP Events
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Joseph Lezza will be a part of two events/panels at the upcoming AWP:
A Very Gay Literary Happy Hour at Uptown Lounge on 2/8 from 5-7 pm CT.
Fragments, Figments & Flash: Unconventional Memoir and the Myth of Memory on 2/9 at the Kansas City Convention Center, Room 3501CD from 3:20-4:35 pm CT.
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Kathleen Collins |
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Upcoming Book Events |
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Kathleen Collins will be at Book Culture in Pittsford, NY on 2/22 at 6 pm ET and at Buffalo St. Books in Ithaca on 2/23 at 4 pm to promote her forthcoming Study in Hysteria.
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Ursula K. Le Guin once said ... |
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It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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Isaac Asimov once said ... |
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If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
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Born in Michigan, Soorya Townley moved to Los Angeles and became a massage therapist to A-list clients, including going on the European tour with the singer Sting. After her daughter’s murder, then make-shift mothering to her granddaughter, she spent three years in Benin, Africa and as an editor for the American Embassy’s newsletter. Soorya is now working on her third book, featuring charming stories of her former celebrity clients. Her memoir, Ripples In The River, was featured on Dateline, 48 Hours, and the Discovery Channel. Dick Wolf’s production interviewed her and featured it recently called, “Blood and Money.”
Her memoir, Ripples In The River, will be published in July 2025.
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Kathleen Collins
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"...her daughter's also very mysterious to her and vice versa. They don't have a good relationship. They don't talk to each other openly, and they really don't understand each other." Kathleen Collins was recently a guest on the New Books Network podcast, where she discussed her forthcoming novel Study in Hysteria, its chararacters, and more.
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Mike Maggio
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"I guess I could write a book on this but what you say fiction does is not far off from poetry: creative expression, profound thoughts, metaphors and line breaks. But poetry is very different from fiction. Line breaks, for example, can have a huge impact on the meaning and movement in a poem." Roz Morris recently interviewed Mike Maggio as part of her Nail Your Novel series.
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Sara Hosey
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"I love novels for the vast landscapes they traverse, the many shades of human experience they evoke. Although short fiction elicits pleasure on a different scale, every so often I encounter a story collection that offers both closely observed situations and a wide-ranging emotional exploration. Sara Hosey’s recently released Dirty Suburbia: Stories is one such book." Read Laura Dennis's recent review of Dirty Suburbia from Mom Egg Review.
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Steve Zettler
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"An encounter with a Philly mobster followed by a trip to Panama City on the trail of a large amount of cash hidden in Panama Bay kicks off a roller coaster journey that could cost Sam and his friends their lives. Throw in some local criminals and a rogue CIA agent to mix things up and you've got a cracker of a story that is very difficult to put down." Kevin Cannon recently reviewed Steve Zettler's Two for the Money. Read it here.
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Marc Parent once said ... |
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If January is the month of change, February is the month of lasting change. January is for dreamers… February is for doers.
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Check out our top-rated all-time bestsellers & other recommendations: |
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Study in Hysteria |
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by Kathleen Collins
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In the middle of 1974, Flora is privileged and middle-aged in a liberation-hued America, and feels both compelled by and left out of the women’s movement. She finds it difficult to activate her limited supply of empathy as she contends with a clandestine and unlikely friendship, a worrisome health scare, a domineering and philandering psychiatrist husband or her own distant daughter.
Flora's secret foray into psychotherapy does nothing to halt the sense that there is a better life for her somewhere else, in some parallel existence. T hrough the continuum of psychological diagnoses, she is lost in the murky place between contentment and discontentment, normal and abnormal.
Is her state of mind a clinical, diagnosable condition, or common malaise? Perhaps she'll find out if she stops resisting to share herself with those who love her.
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When the Ocean Flies |
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by Heather G. Marshall
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An email from a stranger tells Alison Earley that her natural father, whom she has known for only six years, has died suddenly. What begins as a short trip back to Scotland for a funeral soon becomes a journey that puts adoption, sexuality, and identity on a collision course as Alison finds herself caught between the life and family she has so carefully constructed on one continent and the family from which she was taken on another.
Shunned by her father’s family, reunited with her natural mother, and reconnected with a long-lost love, Alison finds herself trying to shepherd her youngest child towards college while questioning everything she thought she knew about herself.
When her natural mother uncovers a series of letters written to Alison from the grandmother she never knew, resurrecting the stories of generations of women—stories long buried by patriarchal rule—Alison realizes that she must find the courage to face and reveal the secrets of her own past. At what cost, though? And who and what will be left in the aftermath?
When the Ocean Flies explores the pain of separation and abuse, and the power of love to heal even over huge gaps in time and geographical distance.
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Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories |
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by Elizabeth Bruce
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In Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories, Elizabeth Bruce gives readers 33 ways of looking at a dollar. Her empathetic, humorous, and disarming embrace of plain-spoken people searching for a way out, charms and provokes. These are bittersweet stories of resilience and defiance.
In “Universally Adored,” a color-obsessed artist draws a facsimile of a dollar—a masterpiece universally adored—to win her girlfriend back. While checking for spare change in the laundry, in “Bald Tires” a Tennessee housewife with a malcontent husband finds an unused condom in his Sunday trousers. In “The Forgiveness Man,” a runaway teen with a newborn follows a vagabond healer absolving the bedraggled godless through hugs of forgiveness. And in “Magic Fingers, a ladies’ room attendant tracked down by her abusive ex finds refuge in a cheap motel with a 1970s era bed massager.
Riffing on the intimate object of a dollar, Bruce’s humane short fictions—from a great mashed potato war to the grass Jesus walked on—ring with the exquisite voices of characters in analog worlds
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Dirty Suburbia |
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by Sara Hosey
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The stories in Sara Hosey’s stunning collection, Dirty Suburbia, trace the lives of girls and women struggling to live with dignity in a world that often hates them.
Dirty suburbias are working-class neighborhoods in which girls who are left to fend for themselves sometimes become predators, as well as affluent communities in which women discover that money is no protection against sexism, both their own and others’.
One young woman sets up her abusive, cheating boyfriend, hoping he’ll get arrested so that she can rescue him and win him back. A teenager arranges to meet up with an older man she’s met online playing video games; she brings a knife with her, just in case. A middle-aged divorcee attempts to rekindle a romantic relationship with her high school English teacher, who happens to be a former nun. A struggling academic falls in love with a Henry David Thoreau impersonator, and a well-adjusted grad student goes home for Christmas only to be repulsed by her family’s casual cruelty.
Despite the ugliness and injustice, they face, as well as the failures of their families and communities, these characters often find relief in friendship and connection, and sometimes, even discover meaning and cause for hope.
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And congratulations to Rachel Stolzman Gullo for the re-release of her novel, The Sign of Drowning, out by 7.13 Books.
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The Sign for Drowning |
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by Rachel Stolzman Gullo
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When she is seven years old, Anna witnesses the tragic drowning of her younger sister, Megan. The tragedy haunts her and her parents, and in the aftermath, Anna becomes convinced she can communicate with her sister through sign language. Thirty years later, Anna, now a teacher of deaf children, adopts Adrea, a young deaf girl who forces her to face the trauma she’s carried inside her since she lost her sister so long ago. The result is a transformation of heart and soul that Anna never dared to hope for.
With this debut novel, originally published by Trumpeter in 2008, Rachel Stolzman Gullo has crafted a moving and poetic testament to love’s power to transcend grief, pain and the limits of human language.
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