Tag Archives: literary fiction

BOOK TOUR: Jack London and Murder on Nob Hill by Ray M. Schultze

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Publisher: Ray M. Schultze
Publication date: December 2, 2025
Genre(s): Mystery, murder mystery, historical fiction, historical mystery, literary fiction, biographical fiction

In 1898 San Francisco, Jack London and Murder on Nob Hill by Ray M. Schultze begins with Jack London witnessing a murder that disappears from official record. The unanswered moment propels him into an investigation that intersects with contested spaces, unseen influence, and longstanding tensions.

Jack’s attempt to report the crime results in complete dismissal, prompting him to follow discreet signs into places steeped in unspoken conflict. The narrow streets of Chinatown reveal a network of rival groups balancing shifting control while disappearances persist without public response. Jack’s encounters, including one with a woman whose past is intertwined with these forces, add complexity to the information he gathers. As he examines how disparate elements connect, he confronts individuals intent on maintaining silence where their authority is most effective. His effort to uncover what transpired reflects broader dynamics shaping interactions across the city’s hidden districts.

Amazon: https://bit.ly/48AI8UB
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244308185-jack-london-and-murder-on-nob-hill

Excerpt

San Francisco
Fall, 1898

Jack London was drunk.

Ingloriously, outrageously, irredeemably drunk.

It had been a long time since he had been so demolished. This was the day he committed himself to make up for lost time. It was a clear, moonlit evening, the city’s gaslights blazing, but his disorientation was so intense that for all he knew he could have been wrapped mummy-like in the fog.

At the age of twenty-two, he had been drunk innumerable times in innumerable places. One could fairly say he had earned an advanced degree in inebriation at the school of John Barleycorn. Truth be told, he had never cared for the taste of liquor, but that was hardly the point. He cradled the glass to grease the wheels of camaraderie or to establish his manly credentials among hard-drinking men. And if not that, to ameliorate the bouts of depression he was prone to or simply to escape the hardships of growing up poor and being forced to become a work beast from a very early age. This day, he was intent on doing a deep dive, swimming down into the current of forgetfulness, stealing a glimpse of oblivion, even while knowing that it was a transitory experience, that he must at some point rise back up and burst painfully onto the surface. With his head pounding and body wracked, he would once again have to face the reminders of failure: the stream of rejection letters, the dashed-off notes declaring his writing unfit for public consumption.

Had these editors embraced so much hackwork that they could no longer discern honest, robust writing? Did they really favor gross sentimentality over impassioned realism? Yes, he was of a raw age, but he knew he had experienced more of the world—and discovered more of its truth—than many men over a lifetime. He had slaved in the factories, processing jute, canning fish, shoveling coal. He had pirated oysters along the bay before switching sides to enforce the marine law. He had ridden the rails west to east, seen the fat Iowa farm country, marveled at Niagara Falls in the moonlight, endured the living hell of jail as a convicted vagrant and walked the slums of New York City. He had braved the Pacific on a seal hunter, stepping ashore in Japan. And he had met the ultimate physical and mental challenges prospecting for gold in the unforgiving wilderness of the Yukon.

Yet these smug literary gatekeepers kept themselves cloistered in their offices, stooping to consider the supplications of someone they surely regarded as a lesser mortal. Would they care to know how hard Jack had labored since returning from the goldfields in midsummer, how he had disciplined himself to sleep no more than five and a half hours a night and chained himself to the writing desk except for brief meals and the occasional odd job? How he had churned out short stories, essays, poems, even jokes, any kind of writing he could think of, desperate to make the handful of dollars that would allow him a decent living and help support the family? No, of course they wouldn’t care. He would have taken soulful satisfaction in reaching out, grabbing them by the lapels and shaking them until their brains rattled. Since that was not feasible, he had sought solace in the bottle.

Where the hell am I? That’s the existential question, isn’t it? There was nothing more existential than struggling to put one foot in front of the other, to keep from falling down and possibly being trampled by the carefree souls out for an evening of entertainment or being kicked or robbed by those malevolent ones looking for a sadistic thrill or profit. He took a tiny measure of relief in realizing he was staggering along the sidewalk and not in the street where a horse-and-carriage might thunder over him, pounding him into the cobblestones. So, where? Washington Street? Montgomery? Likely one or the other, since he had just tried to gain admission to the Bank Exchange Saloon, with its crystal chandeliers, marble embellishments and elegant oil paintings. It wasn’t really his sort of place—too refined, too welcoming to the lawyers and well-heeled capitalists that he disdained. But he fancied invading it just for amusement’s sake. Not surprisingly, the saloonkeeper ejected him. Just as well, he told himself, since the taste of the bar’s renowned Pisco Punch would have been lost on him.

He had begun his odyssey in late afternoon at his favorite watering-hole, Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, which teetered on pilings on the Oakland waterfront, not far from his home.

“What’s up with you, Jack?” asked Johnny Heinold, who was used to seeing him huddling with a dictionary at a side table rather than elbow-bent at the bar. “You got writer’s block?”

Writer’s block? Jack had to laugh. The spigot of his creativity was gushing. The problem was, the magazines and newspapers weren’t thirsty for it. “No, just need something to warm the blood in my veins after writing about all those freezing nights in the Klondike.”

About the Author

Ray M. Schultze is the author of six novels, five of them works of suspense—The Last Safe Place, Combustion, The Devil in Dreamland, Decatur’s Dig, and Beranek’s Stand. His most recent novel, Russian River, is historical fiction. His interest in writing began in childhood with a handmade, folded-paper “magazine” that his mother encouraged. After graduating from the University of California at Riverside, he pursued newspaper reporting as a practical way to support himself while writing fiction. Over a twenty-five-year career, he covered politics, the legal system, and education for newspapers in California, Florida, and Arizona. When he turned to fiction full-time, he drew inspiration from authors such as Alan Furst and Ken Follett. Ray now lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife, Judi. They enjoy tennis, hiking, exploring the region’s beaches and headlands, and international travel—experiences that often shape his novels’ settings. He is also an award-winning woodworking artist. Visit him at his website.

BOOK BLITZ: Hook & Jill by Andrea Jones

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Literary Fiction


In celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th – We
present Hook & Jill, Book One of the The Hook & Jill Saga

 

An ageless fable grows up…

Wendy Darling learns. What appears to be good may prove otherwise, and what
seems to be evil…is irresistible. In this startling new vision of a
cultural classic, Wendy intends to live happily ever after with Peter Pan. But
Time, like this tale, behaves in a most unsettling way.

As Wendy mothers the Lost Boys in Neverland, they thrive on adventure. She
struggles to keep her boys safe from the Island’s many hazards, but she
finds a more subtle threat encroaching from an unexpected quarter.…The
children are growing up, and only Peter knows the punishment.

Yet in the inky edges of the Island, the tales Wendy tells to the Lost Boys
come true. Captain Hook is real, and even the Wonderful Boy can’t defend
his Wendy against this menace. Hook is a master manipulator, devising
vengeance for his maiming. Insidious and seductive, Hook has his reasons for
tempting Wendy to grow up. Revenge is only the first.

Deepening the characters so artfully sketched by J.M. Barrie, Hook & Jill
reveals the dark side of innocence at which Barrie hinted in the figure of
Peter Pan. It brings alive a daring Wendy who asks questions and seeks truth;
it delves into the man, Hook, the iconic villain. Striding from fairy-tale and
thrusting into reality, Captain Hook becomes a frightening force indeed.

 

About the Author

Andrea Jones is the author of the Hook & Jill Saga, an award-winning
series of Neverland novels for adult readers.

Jones graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she
studied Oral Interpretation of Literature, with a Literature Minor. In her
career in television production, she worked for CBS and PBS affiliates, and
corporate studios, also performing as on-camera and voice-over talent.

Jones is an editor of the Reginetta Press Classics Restoration program, which
seeks to preserve the integrity of beloved old manuscripts before they are
lost to time. The first project in the program is Peter and Wendy: The
Restored Text. In tribute to J.M. Barrie, Jones corrected alterations made by
modern publishers, returning Barrie’s timeless tale to its exact 1911
first edition text. This book is the basis of the Hook & Jill Saga, and
Jones remains true to J.M. Barrie’s vision of his Neverland and its
inhabitants.

Andrea Jones is known around the world as Capitana Red-Hand of the web-based
pirate brotherhood, Under the Black Flag. She is also a member of the pirate
re-enaction troupe, the Brethren of the Great Lakes. Her home port is near
Chicago.

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BOOK BLITZ & GIVEAWAY: Stranger Still by George Ochoa

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Stranger Still
George Ochoa
Publication date: August 19th 2025
Genres: Adult, Literary Fiction, Thriller

Paul Inster, a brilliant, insane Columbia college student majoring in English with an undisclosed minor in knives, is in love with graduate student, Tracy Iridio. Seeing her in the library every day, he mistakenly believes she is in love with him and that she is a goddess, Teresa. In fact, the two have never met, and she does not know who he is. When, for the first time, he sees her with her boyfriend, classical history professor Larry Post, Paul sets out to destroy Larry via a campaign of terror. As the campaign mounts, Larry, mystified, tries to figure out who is attacking him and why. Through a series of surprises and confusions, the campaign escalates to murder.

Stranger Still is both a thriller and a literary novel, combining suspense and violence with rich language, webs of cultural allusions, and themes of love and madness.

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / iBooks / Kobo

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EXCERPT:

Teresa and I often made love, though never in the flesh. To this day the psychiatrists will scrutinize such a statement as if it meant something other than what it plainly says, as if it were the telltale boil of some rare mental pox that might explain the blood spills photographed by the police. But these doctors do not understand love, optics, metaphysics, error, or even good taste. As far as flesh went, I never touched or even talked to Teresa, not until our moral decline had already begun. Before then, seeing the chaste tables that divided us in the Columbia library less than a decade ago, in the middle years of the 1990s, you might have thought Teresa and I were strangers, that she didn’t know I was alive.

I first saw her early in my junior year, a new female sitting several tables away in the Burgess-Carpenter reading room on the fourth floor of Butler Library. She seemed at first like any other of the pretty women on campus whom I liked to ogle and who regarded me as if I were invisible. But the more I stared at her, the more she particularly interested me. A pile of books rested near her elbow on the blond pine table, her head bent with rapt attention over her open book. Hazy September sunlight from the tall windows bathed her small breasts in her magenta top, made the white skin of her forearms glow. Her dark-brown hair was long and luxuriant, her neck long, her face shaped like that of a Raphael Madonna. But what captured me most were her eyes—large, sad eyes, ringed with mauve circles as if she hadn’t slept well. Why was she sad? Was there something I could do to make her happier?

We sat like that for a long time, she near the east end of a table in the back, never noticing me, while I shot frequent glances at her from near the west end of the second table from the door. About twenty feet diagonally divided us, too far for me to discern her eye color, though I tried. Finally, she got up, gathering her books into a white canvas tote bag and walking toward the door. As her gangly frame passed me, I gave her eyes a good look and saw they were hazel, flickering elusively under their long lashes from green to brown to gold.

The thought of her big, sad, long-lashed hazel eyes kept me happy for the rest of my day at Columbia. Even when I boarded the downtown Number One train, the first of the three trains that every evening buried me back in Jamaica, Queens, I was still thinking of those eyes. But an hour and fifteen minutes in the subways will discourage anyone. By the time I left the second leg, the D train, for the final and longest leg, the F, my thoughts were turning dark. The train was crowded with smelly, loam-colored laborers imported from faraway continents, and me just one of the horde.

Most students at Columbia boarded, but because my family was poorer than that of the standard Ivy Leaguer, I was a commuter. Combined with my natural tendency toward solitude, this meant I had no friends either on campus or anywhere else. I longed to make contact with someone, anyone, but did not know how. Sometimes I just wanted to pet them—the young secretary sitting before me on the subway in vinyl jacket and glittery eyeliner—to touch her shoulder, her pulsing throat, and say, “I am here. I am lonely. Help me.” Sometimes I wanted to hit them—the goon in the Yankees cap. When I felt particularly desperate, I wanted to stab them. I had knives that would have fit that purpose, but I never took them out of the house.

Author Bio:

George Ochoa’s first novel is the thriller Stranger Still. In addition, he has written or cowritten thirty-five nonfiction books, including The Book of Answers, The Writer’s Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe, The American Film Institute Desk Reference, and Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films. His short fiction has been published in North American Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Eunoia Review, Bangalore Review, and elsewhere. He is also the author of published poems and essays.

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BOOK TOUR: Boy With Wings by Mark Mustian

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Book Title: Boy With Wings
Author: Mark Mustian
Publication Date: March 15th, 2025
Publisher: Koehler Books
Pages: 322
Genre: Literary Fiction / Historical Fiction

 “A brilliant fever dream of a novel, a haunting coming of age story reminiscent of both Franz Kafka and Charles Dickens.”

~ Chris Bohjalian, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The Jackal’s Mistress

*Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2025 First Place Winner*

What does it mean to be different?

When Johnny Cruel is born with strange appendages on his back in the 1930s South, the locals think he’s a devil. Determined to protect him, his mother fakes his death, and they flee. Thus begins Johnny’s yearslong struggle to find a place he belongs.

From a turpentine camp of former slaves to a freak show run by a dwarf who calls herself Tiny Tot and on to the Florida capitol building, Johnny finds himself working alongside other outcasts, struggling to answer the question of his existence. Is he a horror, a wonder, or an angel? Should he hide himself to live his life?

Following Johnny’s journey through love, betrayal, heartbreak, and several murders, Boy With Wings is a story of the sacrifices and freedom inherent in making one’s own special way-and of love and the miracles that give our lives meaning.

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/mdxEoR

Guest Post – Books and Music:

There’s something magical about words and music—it’s why popular songs burrow into our minds and ears. When I started the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music in Tallahassee, Florida in 2015, it’s what we sought to tap into. Poetry has rhythm. Musical tracts tell a story. It all blends together, often into something profound, sublime or strange.

Like maybe most authors, I listen to music when I write. Usually classical works, sometimes jazz—I find that pop or music with words tends to distract me, and I’m there to write. I go through phases that correspond loosely to the book: for The Gendarme I listened to a lot of dissonant 20th century stuff: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Weill. I was big into Messiaen. For Boy With Wings, it was more 19th century romantic pieces, Mahler and Brahms but also some jazz: Miles Davis, Mingus, Adderley, Coltrane.

It’s interesting how musical tastes change over time and also don’t, and tastes in literature do the same. I listened as a youth to what’s now called “classic rock,” and still do sometimes, but my interest has broadened as I’ve aged, and I appreciate the complexities now of classical music and jazz. I can listen to folk music pop, country—almost anything, and enjoy it. Being involved with Word of South has exposed me to a whole range of new artists that makes me feel young again.

With literature it’s much the same. I enjoyed sci-fi and fantasy as a youngster and still do. I was forced to read the classics, which I generally disliked, but later in life I went back and read many of them and found new interest there. I read widely now, biographies, non-fiction, literary fiction, even some horror and graphic works. If it’s well-written it’s wonderful, and I try to set aside time each day to read.

This may sound strange, but sometimes I can hear the words on the page as I write them, as they seem to belong to some structure beyond the page. Maybe I’m to be faulted for this—I can’t really say, and I don’t know quite where it comes from. I saw somewhere that the writer Richard Ford reads every word of his novels aloud to his wife before he completes the work. I don’t do that, but to an extent I guess I do, as I listen to them bang around in my head as I read and revise, revise and read. Occasionally I’ll utter a phrase aloud that seems awkward. Reworking it, I hear music, that gift that seems to arrive from beyond time and logic. Mixed with the beauty of language, it seems to create between them something else. Something different, and special, even ethereal. I can look back on it later and think, “Who wrote this crap?” but also think, “Hey, not bad. This isn’t bad at all.”

Author Bio:

Mark Mustian is the author of the novels “The Return” and “The Gendarme,” the latter a finalist for the Dayton International Literary Peace Prize and shortlisted for the Saroyan International Award for Writing. It won the Florida Gold Book Award for Fiction and has been published in ten languages.

The founder of the Word of South Festival of Literature and Music in Tallahassee, Florida, his new novel, “Boy With Wings,” is out in 2025.

Author Links:

Website:  https://markmustian.com/
Website:  https://markmustian.com/
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/@markmustian
Facebook: https://facebook.com/markmustianauthor
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mark-mustian
Bluesky: https://markmustian.bsky.social
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Mark-T.-Mustian/author/B0CSF8JY2Y 
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3463600.Mark_Mustian

BOOK BLITZ: Surviving Karma by Mark Nistor

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The Karma Series, Book 2

 

Literary Fiction, Mystery

Date Published: November 9, 2024


 

Officer Bella Streit’s abduction has yet to make headlines. Her captor once
again humiliates police by nabbing Captain Stark’s protective detail from
the precinct parking lot. Her predecessor, the third officer taken, adds to
the comedic nature of embarrassing the police. Taken from the scene of an
accident, Officer Tauron Sandoval’s handling reflects the lengths at which
Pin will go to feed his hunger. Now with Bella secured, Pin no longer
needing Tauron leaves her to a fast moving hourglass of life. Her minimal
sands flow as two other officers succumb.

Pin seeks revenge through torturing those he deems as old police.
Detectives Rix and Jain work the case. They find a roadmap offering clues to
the serial killer’s endgame. The roadmap given to them by informants.
However, unknown by the detectives is Pin also has informants feeding him
information. Double agent informants play their roles as if trained spies.
Both parties question the loyalties while traversing to the ultimate
showdown.

Surviving Karma will require finding the common ingredient to their
sandwiches of life.

 

The Karma Series

 Available on Amazon

 

Challenging Karma

The Karma Series, Book One

 

Surviving Karma

The Karma Series, Book 2 

 

About the Author

Well, Mark’s just a guy who made a life-changing promise.

Mark prides himself on being a family man, entrepreneur and now, author.
Trained to be a certified logistics professional, Mark got a certificate in
video and television production. Script writing class helped expand a love
for transforming ideas into stories. One of those first scripts would become
a first novel, Challenging Karma.

The published author experience has always placed high on a list of
dreams.

Mark’s late mother would be the one to give the push needed to make
the dream a reality. After reading a first draft; she offered encouragement
toward finishing a yet to be named story. The self-published Karma series is
how he is keeping a promise to her.

 

Contact Links

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Purchase Link

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BOOK BLITZ: My Only Friend, The End by Steven Owad

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My Only Friend, the End
Steven Owad
Publication date: December 2nd 2024
Genres: Adult, Literary Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic

Everyone in town has dropped dead. Maybe everyone everywhere has. Surviving the flash extinction was easy. The hard part—living alone—starts now.

Goodreads / Amazon

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EXCERPT:

I spent the next two days nursing a chill fever and watching the fires engulf pockets of the city—more slowly than you might expect, with prodigious walls of steam wherever fire met the Missouri floodwaters. Despite the vivid show, there was something anticlimactic about the way the town died so gradually after everyone in it had died so fast.

The amoxicillin and painkillers aided the convalescence, but they did nothing for my mental health. Whether awake or asleep, I obsessed over my wife and son. I also immersed myself in a sea of questions that had no answers, questions that begat other questions, borne of illness of the body and mind. Some of the more obvious ones:

What to do now? Go find survivors? Stay here and make sure I’m visible when the National Guard comes?

Some were darker: Did Ronnie and Evan suffer, or did everyone everywhere really drop dead at the same time?

The biggest question of all, which I asked myself every few minutes: What the hell happened?

And that question’s obvious cousin: Why didn’t it happen to me?

A fact that ruled out positive answers: No rescuers had come to the aid of the 60,000 souls of Great Falls, Montana. This, combined with the death of all radio signals from near and far, told me this plague or, I don’t know, supercharged virus or whatever had a potentially planet-wide scope. But since I was alive, other people were alive too, right? At the very least another skydiver. A deep-sea diver. Someone who was immune to this … to this what? Was it a virus? Bioterrorism? How could it kill the people on the ground and the people in my plane but spare me? Did my high-speed fall—115 miles per hour—was that what saved me? My unique movement within a certain pocket of air pressure shielded me from a blast from an otherwise apocalyptic pathogen or radiation pulse or microwave beam? If so, were other jumpers still breathing? Or climbers up on Everest? How about miners and spelunkers and sailors in submarines? I couldn’t be the only one left.

Author Bio:

Steven Owad is an award-winning writer and editor living in Calgary, Canada. His novels have been praised in publications such as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Kirkus Reviews, and his stage plays have been produced in theaters throughout North America. In his previous life as a newspaper editor, Steven lived in Thailand and Poland, where he begged journalists not to use “impact” as a verb. Before that, there was a degree in English, with a lot of thousand-page Victorian novels. These days shorter modern novels and plays are more his speed. Steven loves the outdoors when there’s no risk of frostbite. Connect with him on Facebook or at stevenowad.com.

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BOOK TOUR & GIVEAWAY: Calabritto by Tony Nesca

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Tony Nesca’s free-flow writing draws the reader into a tragi-comedy of epic proportions.

Calabritto

by Tony Nesca

Genre: Literary Fiction

Calabritto is a novel about a mountain village in central Italy taking place in the early seventies and the eccentric characters that weave their stories in and around each other.

Written in Tony Nesca’s classic free-flow, stream of consciousness, the prose itself mesmerizes and captivates, drawing the reader into a tragi-comedy that unfolds an intricate tapestry of human experience.

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About a Girl

by Tony Nesca

Genre: Literary Fiction

About a girl is a short novel that begins with two strangers, a man and a woman, who meet at a bus-stop and go on an impromptu bar-crawl on a cool, winter day. Taking place in twelve hours it recounts the oddball, hardcore, characters they meet and their increasing emotional connection as they fall for each other almost immediately. Infused with sexual energy, pop-culture references, intellectual debate and literary allusions this is an unapologetic, uncensored look at our society through the eyes of the outsider.

It is written in a free-flow, spontaneous style with long unhindered sentences that enable the reader’s eye to glide down the page as the story flows and moves to an urban beat of strippers, punk rockers and nightlife happenings.

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Searching for Rebellion: Two Indie Authors Form Edgy Publishing Company Tony Nesca and Nicole I. Nesca have one question – where have all the fearless artists gone? Unable to find a mainstream publishing outfit that suited their taste for grittier writing, the Nescas formed their own – Screamin’ Skull Press. For the Beat Generation, controversy was the norm, not the exception.  Creators like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Lucien Carr courted debate and made careers out of pushing the proverbial envelope with their poems, books, music and other creative expressions. Living on the fringes of society was considered to be more exciting and fulfilling than conforming to the mainstream. Authors and married couple Tony and Nicole Nesca feel connected to that Generation through their own work, and their innate understanding of what it means to be artists whose work cannot be deemed ‘conventional’ by anyone’s standards. Currently writing, editing and publishing their works through their self-publishing venture, Screamin’ Skull Press, Tony Nesca and Nicole Nesca have both cultivated individual styles but have the same mission. “To be frank, we see too much pushed out into the world today that is bland and formulaic,” says Tony Nesca, whose unique, humorous and lyrical sixth novel, ‘Hobo’ is out now. “Every other book is a rip-off of another rip-off. The bookstores are packed with these endless vampire stories and dystopian fairy tales. Where is our Anais Nin? Our Hunter S. Thompson?” Our Virginia Woolf? Screamin’ Skull Press exclusively publishes the worrk of the Nescas – raw, electric and with a free flowing mix of prose and poetry, their books are explorations of freedom, art, death, love, literary experimentation and living how one chooses. “We knew that mainstream publishers wouldn’t have the courage to publish the kind of work that we want to create,” says Nicole Nesca. “It’s interesting – sometimes we wonder, could Henry Miller or Hemingway find success in today’s market? It’s as if bravery is a dirty word in literature. Fearlessness, to me, is everything to a writer. Although we have our own styles, I think that’s one thing that Tony and I saw in each other when we met – that drive to find truth and peel back the layers in our own work.” “I think we first fell in love with each other’s writing,” says Tony. “Which was a fitting beginning to our story.” Tony Nesca and Nicole I. Nesca have published 19 distinct works through their Indie Press, and their journey toward a more rebellious future for literature continues.

Tony Nesca was born in Torino, Italy in 1965 and moved to Canada at the age of three. He was raised in Winnipeg but relocated back to Italy several times until finally settling in Winnipeg in 1980. He taught himself how to play guitar and formed an original rock band playing the local bars for several years. At the age of twenty-seven he traded his guitar for a Commodore 64 and started writing seriously. He has published six chapbooks of stories and poems (which he used to sell straight out of his knapsack at local dives and bookstores), seven novels, six books of poetry and stories, a spoken word album, a graphic novel co-written with Nicole Nesca, and has been an active contributor to the underground lit scene for 28 years, being published in innumerable magazines both online and in print.

Tony Nesca and his wife Nicole I. Nesca have one question – where have all the fearless artists gone? Unable to find a mainstream publishing outfit that suited their taste for grittier writing, the Nescas formed their own – Screamin’ Skull Press where they have published 19 distinct works through their Indie Press, and their journey toward a more rebellious future for literature continues.

Screamin’ Skull Press exclusively publishes the worrk of the Nescas – raw, electric and with a free flowing mix of prose and poetry, their books are explorations of freedom, art, death, love, literary experimentation and living how one chooses.

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BOOK TOUR: The Shade Under the Mango Tree by Evy Journey #LiteraryFiction #CulturalHeritage @pumpupyourbook

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“Gripping. One of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a long time.” 

— International Review of Books

Title: The Shade Under the Mango Tree

Author: Evy Journey

Publisher: Sojourner Books

Pages: 288

Genre: Women’s Literary Fiction / Cultural Heritage Fiction

After two heartbreaking losses, Luna wants adventure. Something and somewhere very different from the affluent, sheltered home in California and Hawaii where she grew up. An adventure in which she can also make some difference. She ends up in place steeped in an ancient culture and a deadly history.

Raised by her grandmother in a Honolulu suburb, she moves to her parents’ home in California at thirteen and meets her brothers for the first time. Grandma persuades her to write a journal whenever she’s lonely or overwhelmed as a substitute for someone to whom she could reveal her intimate thoughts.

Lucien, a worldly, well-traveled young architect, finds a stranger’s journal at a café. He has qualms and pangs of guilt about reading it. But they don’t stop him. His decision to go on reading changes his life.

Months later, they meet at a bookstore where Luna works and which Lucien frequents. Fascinated by his stories and his adventurous spirit, Luna volunteers for the Peace Corps. Assigned to Cambodia, she lives with a family whose parents are survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide forty years earlier. What she goes through in a rural rice-growing village defies anything she could have imagined. Will she leave this world unscathed?

Inspired by the healing effects of writing, this is an epistolary tale of love—between an idealistic young woman and her grandmother and between the young woman and a young architect. It’s a tale of courage, resilience of the human spirit, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.

Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFMR9SG

Also available as an audiobook: 

https://www.amazon.com/Shade-Under-Mango-Tree-Between/dp/B09X7CPYFD/

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https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-shade-under-the-mango-tree-evy-journey/1137986157?ean=2940166256980

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-shade-under-the-mango-tree-1

iBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-shade-under-the-mango-tree/id16069

Book Excerpt  


Prologue

Ov’s thin upper body is slumped over his crossed legs, his forehead resting on the platform. His brown, wiry arms lie limp, the right one extended forward, hand dangling over the edge of the platform. Dried blood is splattered on his head, and on the collar, right shoulder, and back of his old short-sleeved white shirt.

It seems fitting that he died where he used to spend most of his time when he wasn’t on the rice fields—sitting on a corner of the bamboo platform in the ceiling-high open space under the house. It’s where you get refreshing breezes most afternoons, after a long day of work.

The policeman looks down at Ov’s body as if he’s unsure what to do next. He lays down his camera and the gun in a plastic bag at one end of the platform untainted by splatters of gelled blood.

He steps closer to the body, anchors himself with one knee on top of the platform, and bends over the body. Hooking his arms underneath Ov’s shoulders and upper arms, he pulls the body up, and carefully lays it on its back. He straightens the legs.

He steps off the platform. Stands still for a few seconds to catch his breath. He turns to us and says, “It’s clear what has happened. I have all the pictures I need.”

He points to his camera, maybe to make sure we understand. We have watched him in silence, three zombies still in shock. Me, standing across the bamboo platform from him. Mae and Jorani sitting, tense and quiet, on the hammock to my left.

Is that it? Done already? I want to ask him: Will he have the body taken away for an autopsy? I suppose that’s what is routinely done everywhere in cases like this. But I don’t know enough Khmer.

As if he sensed my unspoken question, he glances at me. A quick glance that comes with a frown. He seems perplexed and chooses to ignore me.

He addresses the three of us, like a captain addressing his troop. “You can clean up.”

The lingering frown on his brow softens into sympathy. He’s gazing at Jorani, whose mournful eyes remain downcast. He looks away and turns toward Mae. Pressing his hands together, he bows to her. A deeper one than the first he gave her when she and Jorani arrived.

He utters Khmer words too many and too fast for me to understand. From the furrowed brow and the look in his eyes, I assume they are words of sympathy. He bows a third time, and turns to go back to where he placed the gun and camera. He picks them up and walks away.

For a moment or two, I stare at the figure of the policeman walking away.  Then I turn to Jorani. Call him back. Don’t we have questions? I can ask and you can translate, if you prefer. But seeing her and Mae sitting as still and silent as rocks, hands on their laps, and eyes glazed as if to block out what’s in front of them, the words get trapped in my brain. Their bodies, rigid just moments before, have gone slack, as if to say: What else can anyone do? What’s done cannot be undone. All that’s left is to clean up, as the policeman said. Get on with our lives.

My gaze wanders again toward the receding figure of the policeman on the dirt road, the plastic bag with the gun dangling in his right hand. Does it really matter how Cambodian police handles Ov’s suicide? I witnessed it. I know the facts. And didn’t I read a while back how Buddhism frowns upon violations on the human body? The family might object against cutting up Ov—the way I’ve seen on TV crime shows—just to declare with certainty what caused his death.

I take in a long breath. I have done all I can and must defer to Cambodian beliefs and customs.

But I can’t let it go yet. Ov chose to end his life in a violent way and I’m curious: Do the agonies of his last moments show on his face? I steal another look.

All I could gather, from where I stand, is life has definitely gone out of every part of him. His eyes are closed and immobile. The tic on his inanimate cheeks hasn’t left a trace. The tic that many times was the only way I could tell he had feelings. Feelings he tried to control or hide. Now, his face is just an expressionless brown mask. Maybe everyone really has a spirit, a soul that rises out of the body when one dies, leaving a man-size mass of clay.

I stare at Ov’s body, lying in a darkened, dried pool of his own blood, bits of his skull and brain scattered next to his feet where his head had been. At that moment, it hits me that this would be the image of Ov I will always remember. I shudder.

My legs begin to buckle underneath me and I turn around, regretting that last look. With outstretched hands, I take a step toward the hammock. Jorani rises to grab my hands, and she helps me sit down next to Mae.

Could I ever forget? Could Mae and Jorani? Would the image of Ov in a pool of blood linger in their memories like it would in mine?

I know I could never tell my parents what happened here this afternoon. But could I tell Lucien? The terrible shock of watching someone, in whose home I found a family, fire a gun to his head? And the almost as horrifying realization—looking back—that I knew what he was going to do, but I hesitated for a few seconds to stop him.

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About the Author

Evy Journey writes. Stories and blog posts. Novels that tend to cross genres. She’s also a wannabe artist, and a flâneuse.

Evy studied psychology (M.A., University of Hawaii; Ph.D. University of Illinois). So her fiction spins tales about nuanced characters dealing with contemporary life issues and problems. She believes in love and its many faces.

Her one ungranted wish: To live in Paris where art is everywhere and people have honed aimless roaming to an art form. She has visited and stayed a few months at a time.

Website or Blog: https://evyjourney.net

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ejourneywriter/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14845365.Evy_Jour

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RELEASE BLITZ: Matt Miller in the Colonies by Mark J. Roser #LiteraryFiction @RABTBookTours @Matt_in_1760s

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Book Four: Architect

 

General and Literary Fiction

Date Published: February 28, 2023

Publisher: The Skydenn Looking Glass

 

Twenty-first-century scientist Matt Miller has become a wealthy businessman
and politician with a beautiful wife and family. Yet, despite his every
effort, Matt’s world is crumbling around him. Grace has recovered from
her physical injuries, but her mental scars deepen as the threat to her
family remains and her brother’s trial looms on the horizon. The
Millers find themselves at the center of a maelstrom that threatens to
engulf the entire colony of Virginia and make it the epicenter for a
revolution. As the events around Matt unfold and his situation worsens, an
opportunity presents itself to right the wrongs he has caused, but only if
Matt can leave his life in the colonies behind.

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BOOK TOUR: Rocked in Time by Charles Degelman #LiteraryFiction #Politics @pumpupyourbook @CDegelman

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Rocked in Time is set in the rebellion, love, and chaos of the 1960s and ‘70s and explores a world of resistance and celebrates those who dared to buck the system in those turbulent times…

By Charles Degelman

Book Blurb

Rocked in Time (Volume Three in
the Resistance Trilogy) slips behind the scenes of a blasphemous
theater company hell-bent on toppling America’s Vietnam-era
establishment with punch lines, pratfalls, and comic rebellion. Along
the way, our protagonist pursues a love for the stage, a passion for
resistance, and the intimate politics of sexual revolution amid the
tear-gassed campuses and burning cities of a nation at war with itself.

Release Date: October 18, 2022

Publisher: Harvard Square Editions

Soft Cover: 978-1941861882; 408 pages; $22.95

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AhO7NW

Book Excerpt  

RATMAN MEETS THE 50-FOOT HINDU

The Emeryville flats used to stink of the tide. Dead fish, drying algae, bottles and cans, old tires lay scattered over a landscape of mud and sewage. Stick figures perched on the muddy edges of the East Bay, fanciful driftwood and tin creatures standing stork-legged in the mud, stick-flapping arms, wings, feathers, broken brooms, old flags, weathervanes, hubcaps, rusted saw blades, other detritus.

Celebrating America’s junk. Resistance. We drove together, my cousin Eric and I, in a VW bus weathered to a chalky blue. Across the flats, the Bay Bridge arched toward Angel Island and beyond, to the summer fog bank of San Francisco. We bounced into the Haight-Ashbury to check out a band my cousin had written to me about the previous winter. He called them the Jefferson Airplane and they were playing at a little club called The Matrix.

We were stoned on Mexican weed. I was reciting lines from Ratman Meets the 50-Foot Hindu, a play I had recently closed back in Harvard’s experimental, black box theater. I played a 50-foot Hindu who had journeyed to America to avenge the murder of the sacred cow. This zealot took his revenge by stomping his burger-munching victims to death with a set of hooves.

I’d picked up the fake Indian accent from the cultural ether without offense. White people had begun to stir, waking to the notion that civil rights were human rights and that racism was alive and well in America. When Ratman and the 50-foot Hindu walked the earth, India still seemed like a distant, overpopulated nation, shaped by British colonialism, its independence two decades old but still imbued with the nonviolence of Gandhi and the meditative power of the spinning wheel. The Maharishi hadn’t yet hustled The Beatles, India and Pakistan hadn’t yet become nuclear powers, Bangladesh hadn’t been flooded out by cyclones, and John and Yoko’s meditations hadn’t dispatched my generation on a simpleton’s goose chase.

So, my Hindu accent was still okay and my character diabolical, a complex being who, beyond his fierce and scheming interior, presented himself as an addled older gentleman whose faith had been defiled by America’s hamburger fetish. He was a man with a mission. But the 50-foot Hindu had proven to be no match for Ratman.

In the finale, the superhero and his diabolically tragic foe squared off in a revolving restaurant high above the city.

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About the Author

Charles Degelman is an award-winning author, performer, and producer living in Los Angeles. After graduating Harvard, Degelman left academia to become an antiwar activist, political theater artist, musician, communard, carpenter, hard-rock miner, and itinerant gypsy trucker. When the dust settled, he returned to his first love, writing.

A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the rural counterculture of the 1970s, collected a Bronze Medal from the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Awards and Gates of Eden, set during the anti-war movement of the 1960s, won an Independent Publishers book award.

Degelman’s screenplay Fifty-Second Street garnered an award from the Diane Thomas Competition, sponsored by UCLA/Dreamworks. A second screenplay, The Red Car, reached finalist status in Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest.

In addition, Degelman has written and produced documentary and educational films for TNT, Churchill Films, Pyramid Films, and Philips Interactive Media. He co-founded Indecent Exposure, a Los Angeles-based theater company dedicated to creating original, high-quality, socially relevant work for the stage. Degelman is on the faculty of California State University where he teaches writing in the Communication Studies Department.

His latest book is the historical fiction, Rocked in Time.

Website: https://www.charlesdegelman.org/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CDegelman

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charlesdegelman/

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