Out of Print

A bilingual collection (French / English) of poetry.

Adamah is a spiritual but abstract journey within the self. The book takes its title from the Hebrew word adamah for earth in order to answer the zen koan: "Who then is wearing that body devoid of life for you?" as the author takes us on a journey through grief, memory and the resolution to march forward.

David Winner’s debut novel The Cannibal of Guadalajara, winner of the 2009 Gival Press Novel Award, is a powerful tale of an unlikely ménage-à-trois between Alfred (caught in the stranglehold of a mid-life crisis), his ex-wife Margaret, and a disturbed young man from Brooklyn. The book reads like a fable told by an omniscient, tenderly ironic narrator; the tone fluctuates between discreet indulgence in the characters’ foibles and a drier, more distanced sort of wit. The divorce propels Alfred to Latin America on a soul-searching quest-of-a-lifetime and Margaret to a teeming singles bar downtown, where she meets the considerably younger Dante, who turns out to be crippled by post-traumatic flashbacks to his Mexican childhood. Winner’s controlled language is interspersed with adroitly incongruous adjectives that illuminate the absurdities he presents in ways that are psychologically subtle and often hilarious. But it’s also a book about American culture seen through the eyes of a writer who has spent enough time traveling through Latin America to alter his frame of cultural reference enough to identify and appraise that peculiar brand of American expatriate whose most ardent wish is to be reborn as Che Guevara." - Andrea Scrima

The Day Rider & Other Stories presents characters nominally situated in one world who seek to join another, while being themselves. Many main characters ‘pass’—not merely in the conventional sense, of appearing as one race and acculturating as another, nor as one sexual orientation and moving conveniently into another as affections and conventions dictate, but also in its ‘unconventional’ senses, of moving from mortality to immortality, or from the oppressed and disadvantaged to being the oppressor and the privileged. This collection discusses the wide sweep of ‘passing’ and wonders whether doing so is an anathema to humanity or inherent to humanity.

A chapbook of haiku in French about historical events and people of France.

Julia & Rodrigo is a Romeo-and-Juliet story set in Guatemala against the backdrop of the country’s civil war. 

The novel centers on Julia García and Rodrigo Rax, two young people from the small, mountainous town of Santa Cruz, Verapaz, who fall in love. Julia is Evangelical and Rodrigo Catholic, and their different religions, as well as their different races (Julia is ladina, Rodrigo half Maya Indian) and social classes (Julia’s family is intact and financially stable, Rodrigo’s is fatherless and poor), complicate their relationship. The novel features strong secondary characters, including an idealistic African-American Catholic named Alejandra and a Mephistopheles-like foil named Pedro Mendez. Rodrigo is an exceptional soccer player, and he signs with a professional team. Because a soccer career is likely to make Rodrigo wealthy, Julia’s father consents to his daughter marrying him. But after Rodrigo is badly injured, Julia’s father withdraws his permission. Rodrigo and Julia make plans to marry anyway. 

A month before they can elope, however, Rodrigo is impressed into the army, where long stretches of boredom are broken by disturbing encounters with guerrillas and violent interrogations of Maya-Indian villagers. Meanwhile, Julia goes off to college, where she becomes engaged to a classmate. She doesn’t forget Rodrigo, however. Indeed, she feels his presence everywhere. Although she plans for a future with Oscar, her fiancé, she wonders if her engagement is all a charade she is putting on until Rodrigo’s return.

The Last Day of Paradise, the first novel by emerging writer Kiki Denis, a Greek educated in the United States, tells the colliding stories of the teenager Sunday and her mother Chrysa. Denis has all the right instincts to tell a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age tale.... ...the characters are intriguinlgy kooky.... ...the jagged language sparkles with beautiful riffs like 'love is boiling hot, velvety red and infinitely massive,' adding sizzle to the palette of weirdly tender characters and pastoral scenes.... This is fascinating territory...." —Kathimerini English Edition, Greece, 1/25/2007

Out of Print

A collection of essays that trace the influence of African culture and literature on literature of the world. In this very comprehensive volume Ogunyemi traces the influences of African literatures across the six continents of the world. This book offers one many wonders and will definitely change the way one thinks about the concept of a 'national' literature.

Out of Print

Short stories set in Appalachia.

Poetry collection

Second Acts is a novel about time travel, a hermaphrodite Native American guide named Bunny who invents therapy, the world’s most beautiful labia, and the 19th century version of Oprah. Somebody, please make this movie! Dan Connor, a network administrator geek, time travels from the year 2015 into the past to follow his estranged wife, Rachel (possessor of aforementioned labia) who, along with her University of Chicago physicist boss, has become one the first people to accomplish the feat. All parties land successfully in the wilds of 19th century Illinois, near Chicago. 

When Dan discovers Listening Rabbit (nicknamed 'Bunny') on a vision quest, she volunteers to be his guide. Believing her to be a rather homely young woman, he’s later surprised to find out she’s actually a two-spirit 'berdache'—one of the most interesting aspects of this well-researched novel—with a gift for listening (thus, her name). The two follow the trail of Rachel and her boss, Bruce, through the woods to the big town, and then by boat from Chicago to New York. En route, they encounter various real historical personages: Albert Gallatin (founder of New York University), Sylvester Graham (early advocate of dietary reform and inventor of the Graham cracker), the Locofocos (radical faction of the Democratic Party circa the 1840s) and Lydia Maria Child (abolitionist and activist for the rights of Native Americans and women). 

The seamless weaving of these real characters into a plausible fiction narrative about time travel is the novel’s strength (as is the way in which all loose ends are tied up in a highly satisfying and logical conclusion). - Sharon Mesmer

Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award

"Barbara de la Cuesta's The Spanish Teacher has everything to thrill you--pace, a great balance of description, gesture and action, charmed, perfectly-tuned dialogue, and most notably, a character we follow as closely and sympathetically as if we were living right there inside the story with him... So many books show us a character who seems to capably hang and move like marionettes from the strings of a fairly competent puppeteer, but rarely do we see a full drama like this, where every bit of the writing extends from, grows out of, is part and parcel with the author's complete realization of and connection to her character..."

—-Don Berger, judge for the Gival Press Novel Award

Out of print

Linda, a difficult, sometimes depressed criminal defense attorney, finds that her life mirrors what the Rolling Stones call That Demon Life. Here in over the course of a grueling week, Linda encounters a parade of thugs, slackers, and eccentrics—hookers, lawyers, bartenders, cab drivers, and political fixers of various stripes with echoes of A Confederacy of Dunces. She loses her job, falls back into a relationship with her now-married ex-fiancé, and convinces her best friend to seduce and blackmail the man she holds responsible for her misfortunes. Linda’s absurd and dislocated life reflects the rhythms of the city and culture she lives in, yet when she finally confronts her enemy who she then attempts to rescue, she discovers that the joys of love and revenge are not all they’re alleged to be.

Overwhelmed by the growing AIDS crisis and the pressures of medical residency, Elena Tristani abandons an outwardly successful life and takes a job writing grants for The Spirit Gate, a holistic clinic that treats recovering drug addicts with acupuncture. Fascinated by the clinic’s founder, who treats Georgetown’s elite and drug detox patients with the same imperturbability, Elena reconsiders her own views on medicine and health. As Elena comes to know the world of the clinic, she is seduced by an ancient Chinese medical text, The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, and begins to see a different relationship between Eastern and Western medicine as well as a new path for herself.