Serving House Books

From Pantyhose to Spandex: Writers on the Job Redux

The authors of From Pantyhose to Spandex: Writers on the Job Redux take you on a tour through a single night in a taxi in Copenhagen while listening to Mahler’s Ninth, through the “Melancholy House” of a maximum-security prison and assigning juvenile delinquents as their sentence to do the sentences of… Read more…
Essays
Paterson Light and Shadow

Description Paterson Light and Shadow tells the stories in poetry and photography of Paterson, New Jersey, from one of the most gifted poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and fine art photographer Mark Hillringhouse, who together have spent a lifetime living, growing up and working in and around one of America’s most… Read more…
By Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Mark Hillringhouse Photography and Poetry
Reaching Beyond the Saguaros

Description In Reaching Beyond the Saguaros, a book titled for its beginning roots in the Southwest, contributors write themselves around the globe, connecting pieces of their individual hometowns. Read more…
By Heather Lang, et al. Anthologies and Poetry
Miss Manners for War Criminals

Description Dean Troost is working on his master’s thesis in history and can’t seem—even though he realizes he must—to get beyond counting the war dead from the present war and innumerable past wars. Read more…
By Jack Smith Fiction
Sorrow Bread

Description In this collection, poems selected from a distinguished thirty-year career converse with each other across books and across time. Soulful, artful and yet accessible, these poems explore essential connections–one’s relationship to poetic tradition, the reader, the natural world, other lives, language itself. Read more…
By Mark Cox Poetry
Jungle: Stories from The Sewanee Review

Description Among Gladys Swan’s many short story publications, a number of the most significant have appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest, continuously published literary magazine in America. Now they are collected for the first time, together with the prize-winning story, “Jungle. Read more…
By Gladys Swan Fiction
The Miscreant: Selected Stories 1949-2016

Description Having lived under and outlasted two globe-girdling empires, the Portuguese and the British, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro considers himself to be a pre-postcolonial writer, one of the last survivors of a dying breed. Read more…
By Victor Rangel-Ribeiro Fiction
The Fifth Eye: A Collection of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Description This debut story collection depicts a wide range of compelling characters and their worlds: a hermaphrodite falling in love, a veteran Marine’s “piercing” attempt to cope with PTSD, preparations for the anticipated destruction of a hurricane, aging and the aftermath of breast cancer, immigrants fleeing famine, a mother’s worst… Read more…
By Roisin McLean Fiction
The Pleasures of Language: From Acropox to Word Clay

Description A provisional title for this collection was “Fifty Stabs at the Truth of Language,” which despite its weight, I remain fond of because of its nod to Montaigne’s Essais, which the French master thought of as stabs at the truth of his experience. Read more…
By Skip Eisiminger Essays
The ABCs of Enlightenment

Description In these rich and incisive essays, Robert Day reveals how his “learning” as a student defined his “teaching” at Washington College, the University of Kansas, the Iowa Writers Workshop and other colleges and universities. Read more…
By Robert Day Essays
Road to the Sea

Description In this poignant story of new found love and love discarded, reminiscent of some of Graham Greene’s novels, Tim Schell takes us to Central Africa where a young American, an African prostitute and the seventeen-year-old daughter of American Baptist missionaries are on the run from the police and other… Read more…
By Tim Schell Fiction
The Silver Baron’s Wife

Description The Silver Baron’s Wife traces the rags-to-riches-to-rags life of Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor (Lizzie). This fascinating heroine worked in the silver mines and had two scandalous marriages, one to a philandering opium addict and one to a Senator and silver baron worth $24 million in the late 19th century. Read more…
By Donna Baier Stein Fiction
All the Dark We Will Not See

Description The place is Washington, D.C., and the year,1984. The ruthless dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell has not come to pass. Or has it? Under the presidency of a former Hollywood actor, the struggle for America’s soul has begun-a trial of conscience and idealism versus idolatry and political dictatorship. Read more…
By Michael B. Neff Fiction
Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life

Description In this stirring new collection, Ronna Wineberg explores our essential bonds to partners, children, parents, and friends. Intimacy, marriage, parenthood, adultery, divorce, and the legacies left by the past unfold in these beautifully written stories. Men and women search for happiness and love, yet face longing, disappointment, and loss. Read more…
By Ronna Wineberg Fiction
Ancestors

Description In Ancestors, Hawkins, a man adrift, finds himself in a Native American homeland called Chaco Canyon, a place of relics haunted by history. Read more…
By Gladys Swan Fiction
Being

It’s a winter of snow of mythic proportions. Caught in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, Philip Fellows is meanwhile happy to be immured inside with his lover—free to dodge undesirable work—as he seeks continual sensual pleasure. Read more…
By Jack Smith Fiction
Paris, Etc.

A collection of poems, stories and essays that explore what Paris means to writers who have visited and lived in this fascinating city. Read more…
By Jessie Vail Aufiery Anthologies
No Rule That Isn’t a Dare

I offer up, in summation, writer/director Ron Shelton’s refutation of a younger generation of filmmakers’ blind allegiance to “Show, don’t tell.” “(The) old canard that action defines character is only partly true,” Shelton argued in an interview. Read more…
By Bill Mesce, Jr. Essays
There’s This Place I Know

This book shares an abundance of delightful discoveries. As a viewer-reader, you can’t be sure where the journey will take you next. At one moment you’re intrigued by a green vista that’s next to a close-up of a bird on a patch of parched earth. Read more…
By Heather Lang & H.L. Hix Photography
Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind

Robert Day has invented a new form, the Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind memoirs–brief, whimsical, sometimes touching, reminiscences about his brushes (often friendships) with literary greatness. He treats Shakespeare, William Stafford, Mavis Gallant, John Barth, Ray Carver, Walter Bernstein, and Michael de Montaigne. Read more…
By Robert Day Memoir
Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life

In Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life, four editors and numerous poets and essayists pool their understanding of and admiration for a brilliant poet/ essayist/ teacher/ animal-rights advocate/ political activist and self-proclaimed “all-around no good troublemaker” who died April 2, 2015. Read more…
Anthologies
The Winter Dance Party Murders

With his customary pyrotechnics, Herriges gives us a “what if” tale written in a swift, agile manner that has become his signature style over the course of seven luminous novels. Read more…
By Greg Herriges Fiction
Surviving the Twenty-First Century

Parenting, Corporate Thievery, Aging, Technology, Ideals – one might easily feel overwhelmed. Read more…
By William Eaton Essays
Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices

As Chloride, a dying New Mexican mining town, whirls toward a rendezvous with truth, its people find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. Read more…
By Gladys Swan Fiction
The Eight Corners of the World

Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man’s struggle to adhere… Read more…
By Gordon Weaver Fiction
Hyacinths from the Wreckage

Madeleine Beckman’s Hyacinths from the Wreckage, her third book of poetry, is a glittering collection that embraces body and place, and the constantly changing geography of an emotional landscape. The language of these poems wrenches, arouses recognition and empathy, and, finally, sings a persuasive song with the promise of renewal. Read more…
By Madeleine Beckman Poetry
Beginnings: How 14 Poets Got Their Start

Each of the fourteen interviews in this collection tells the story of a poet’s career, starting with origins that in many cases overcame unlikely beginnings and went on to fortunate educations with inspiring teachers who often became friends and colleagues, and in at least one case a spouse. Read more…
By Derek Alger Interviews
A Dark Gamble

A Dark Gamble, a Western epic inspired by the great epic of Gilgamesh, is set in New Mexico during the era when gold and silver were being discovered and prospectors, miners and ranchers were pouring into the territory, the local Apaches consequently being hunted down and displaced. Read more…
By Gladys Swan Fiction
In a Vertigo of Silence

Can the truth really set one free? In Miriam Polli’s debut novel, In a Vertigo of Silence, Emily, the young protagonist, discovers a family secret and thinks, I know now that secrets run in the blood and bones of those who came before. Read more…
By Miriam Polli Fiction
Like a Soprano

After the death of James Gandolfini in the summer of 2013, David Starkey decided to pay poetic homage to The Sopranos TV series and its star. Like a Soprano features one poem for each episode, with the poem sharing the episode’s title. Read more…
By David Starkey Poetry
French Kisses

Twelve stories depicting Americans in France, a broad array of characters and situations- -a boozy basketball player colliding with bigotry; a vet at Omaha Beach confronting a memory; a boy sent abroad while his parents divorce; a jealous sister coveting one last heirloom; a killer seeking peace at Lake Geneva;… Read more…
By David R. Poe Fiction
The Narrow Gate: Art, Writing & Values

The Narrow Gate presents 19 short essays that explore ways in which literary writing and visual art affirm and clarify values, in our personal lives and in art, itself, with topics ranging from “resilience” to “madness” to “art + work. Read more…
By Robert Stewart Essays
Ravenous: New and Selected Poems

Ravenous: New & Selected Poems by Rick Mulkey provides new and returning readers an opportunity to consider recent and previously published work in a collection containing wide stylistic variety with deep unifying themes and concerns. Read more…
By Rick Mulkey Poetry
Letters to My Younger Self: An Anthology of Writings by Incarcerated Men at S.C.I. Graterford and a Writing Workbook

In this anthology incarcerated me in the Prison Literacy Project at S.C.I. Graterford contribute pieces about regretful decisions made or painful experiences in their youth, fearlessly exposing their vulnerability. Read more…
By Jayne Thompson and Emily DeFreitas Current Events
Icon

When Mr. Finger builds his first Finger a half mile high flipping off the fabulously wealthy, Peter Boatz, a professor of Icons, finally has a fertile subject for his Icons of Power book. Read more…
By Jack Smith Fiction
Too Cool

Sixteen-year-old Elbert Earl Evans (known as Triple E) bursts out of Goodpasture Correctional Facility and speeds toward freedom in a stolen Oldsmobile. As he outraces the police, his car stalls in the Colorado badlands in the middle of a snowstorm and he is stranded with his girl, Jeanne. Read more…
By Duff Brenna Fiction
Runnin’ Around: The Serving House Book of Infidelity

Infidelity anyone? Vicariously enjoy the unfaithfulness of twenty-four writers in this anthology, Runnin’ Around, subtitled The Serving House Book of Infidelity. The cover is a black- and-white Mark Hillringhouse photograph of an appropriately seedy motel advertising day-rates. Read more…
Anthologies
Local Music

A man who can’t bring himself to return to the apartment of his failing marriage, a woman spied on by a neighbor, a father terrified by the four-year- old next door, a boy living in a house haunted by his mother’s madness, a mother whose children are freezing in a… Read more…
By Walter Cummins Fiction
Sympathetic People

Both the beauty and frailty of human connections are seen in the thirteen stories collected in Sympathetic People. Here are women and men struggling to find love, meaning, happiness in marriage, adulterous affairs, art, meditation, and even the passage from life to death. Read more…
By Donna Baier Stein Fiction
Wagon 537 Christiania

Frivolity, joy and self discovery are the things which, Les Stein, the protagonist of Wagon 537 Christiania, arrives at in his two-year sojourn in the freetown of Christiania. Read more…
By Per Šmidl Fiction
Hidden Lives: My Three Grandmothers

Hidden Lives presents compelling true stories of three New York City immigrant families—one Jewish, one German, and one Italian—set in three tenement neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, the South Bronx, and Hell’s Kitchen—during the first decades of the twentieth century. Read more…
By Carole Girabaldi Rogers Memoir
Streethearts

John Spector is a seasoned high school teacher with 22 years in the trenches of a ghetto school filled with struggling teenagers, gangs, apathetic students— but also students “who make an indelible impression, kids with souls and hearts as big as the world. Read more…
By Greg Herriges Fiction
It Must Give Pleasure

It Must Give Pleasure is both a memoir and a deeply imaginative treatise on poetry, literature, art and life. Read more…
By Roberta Bienvenu Memoir
By Cunning & Craft: Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers

Writing successful fiction is a balance between trusting one’s own instincts and making the right conscious choices. In By Cunning & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story writer Peter Selgin shows you how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity. Read more…
By Peter Selgin Craft of Fiction
Locals: A Collection of Prose Poems

Claire Bateman’s Locals is a narrative atlas of prose poems as intimate as they are unpredictable, each a keyhole glimpse into the life of a different realm where our normal logic doesn’t apply. Read more…
By Claire Bateman Poetry
Lost Transmissions

The poems in David Memmott’s poetry collection Lost Transmissions speak to the need we have to explore the depths of our own psyches, a need so insistent that many of us would sell our souls to unearth the answers to what motivates our lives—what motivates our actions. Read more…
By David Memmott Poetry
The Law of Falling Bodies

Fifteen-year-old Virgil Foggy is trying to survive on a failing dairy farm in Minnesota. Virgil’s mother is pregnant-an unwelcome addition to the family. Virgil’s older brother joins the army and goes to war, but warfare is also close to home, much of it between Virgil and his stepfather. Read more…
By Duff Brenna Fiction
A Vision of Neon

A Vision of Neon is a story of two friends—one who survives the complex years of adolescence and one who does not—and the unconditional love and commitment between these young girls. Read more…
By Angela M. Graziano Memoir
Between Frames

Mark Hillinghouse’s Between Frames integrates poems previously published in many magazines with more than twenty striking black and white photographs. Read more…
By Mark Hillringhouse Photography and Poetry
Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging

29 women artists and writers explore aging through art, comics, poetry, photography, and essays. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sublime, each entry adds insight into the many ways we learn to be women. Read more…
By R.A. Rycraft and Leslie What Anthologies
Minnesota Memoirs

Mesmerizing: In 17 riveting stories set in the author’s native Minnesota, Duff Brenna’s edgy tales journey from the mid-19th century to our current 21st century. Read more…
By Duff Brenna Fiction
Made Priceless: Some Things Money Can’t Buy

Made Priceless presents snapshots of objects that their holders treasure: a 1950s swivel rocker, a fortune-cookie fortune that reads “The rubber bands are heading in the right direction” a marble with a world map painted on it, a bread-baking pan, a bar of soap, crocheted doilies, a masonry trowel… Each… Read more…
By H.L. Hix Ideas
Shadows and Ghosts

Ida Mae Glick, a critically acclaimed filmmaker, has lived and taught in the small town of Willow Bend, New York for five years without drawing attention to her troubled past. Read more…
By Barbara Froman Fiction
What Island

What is it like to go abroad but not for vacation? What business do we have? What right-minded, haunted search for community, for family, for social justice takes us beyond our borders, domestic rooms, and familiar walls? What responsibility is there—those of us who’ve been to the two-thirds world, met… Read more…
By P. K. Harmon Poetry
Desperate Love: A Father’s Memoir

In this searing memoir, a father confronts the complex issues of love and hate as he struggles to deal with his emotionally troubled and often violent son. Desperate Love examines the lengths that parents go to preserve their families and rescue children from themselves. Read more…
By Richard Reiss Memoir
Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging

Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer and Stephen Dunn, Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins, National Book Critics Circle Award winners Albert Goldbarth and Jack Marshall, and twenty-three other notable authors are in Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, an engaging collection of poems,… Read more…
By Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy Anthologies
The Bay of Marseilles and Other Stories

These stories, Greg Herriges says, were born of individual, fleeting glimpses and memories, seemingly unbound by any linear reason. Read more…
By Greg Herriges Fiction
The Memoir of Jake Weedsong

Jake and Estuko Weedsong live a bucolic life on their vineyard in rural Oregon. Read more…
By Timothy Schell Fiction
The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories

The stories in this book have been selected from the six previous collections of short fiction, as well as from recent work, Gladys Swan has published in that genre over the past four decades. Read more…
By Gladys Swan Fiction
George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity

Liam Mac Sheóinín’s George W. Bush Buys Coke in Mid-Eternity, a Menippean satire, relocates James Joyce’s Dublin to the New Jersey shore with the same spirit of inventive wordplay. Frank McCourt called an excerpt “a language mad romp with many, many laughs along the way. Read more…
By Liam Mac Sheóinín Fiction
The Girl with Red Hair

The Girl with Red Hair is a collection inspired by centuries of red hair lore, but especially the languorous photo on the front cover. Read more…
By Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins Anthologies
What Can Buddha Teach the Rain?

The mythical T’ang poet Han-shan, placed somewhere between the camps of Daoism and Zen Buddhism and the alleged author of some three hundred poems, probably remains a post-T’ang literary invention – and a good one, it seems, since ‘his’ poetry is being read, translated and re-translated to this very day. Read more…
By Lars Rasmussen Poetry
The Coast of Death

Thomas McCarthy’s The Coast of Death is a literary thriller of IRA tensions. In the edgy lull between the Good Friday Agreement and the formation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, there is frantic manoeuvring. Read more…
By Thomas McCarthy Fiction
and then there were three…

Supriya Bhatnagar’s and then there were three… is a collection of personal essays about a family rebuilding its life after early tragedy. Read more…
By Supriya Bhatnagar Memoir
The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke’s Fight Against Torture

The Meeting with Evil contains three chapters from a book about Dr. Genefke’s work to rehabitate torture victims from throughout the world (translated by Thomas E. Kennedy and first published in New Letters) and Kennedy’s interview with Dr. Read more…
By Thomas Larsen and Thomas E. Kenndey Current Events
Lurid Confessions

Steve Kowit’s Lurid Confessions, his first full-length poetry collection, had two printings with Carpenter Press in 1983 but has been out of print for years. It’s been our loss not to have access to the wit and insights of so many excellent poems. Read more…
By Steve Kowit Poetry
The Book of Worst Meals

The Book of Worst Meals contains essays by 25 writers on their worst culinary experiences, tales of wretched dining in Paris, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships. Read more…
By Walter Cummins and Thomas E. Kennedy Anthologies
Out-patients

In Out-patients, Elisabeth Murawski transforms the vulnerabilities of our bodies into poetry, her precise lines evoking hospitals and cemeteries, malignancies and bomb blasts, The birth of a child prefigures its end: “this life / slated to be brief / as a poem.” These poems confront our inevitabilities. Read more…
By Elisabeth Murawski Poetry
Don’t Mean Nothing

Susan O’Neill’s Don’t Mean Nothing, a powerful story collection now in a Serving House Books edition after initial publication by Ballantine Books and then the University of Massachusetts Press, is the first work of fiction by a woman wno served in Viet Nam, revealing much about that war from a… Read more…
By Susan O'Neill Fiction
The World of Carnival

In this chapbook, you will find the first chapters of Carnival for the Gods, and the three novels that form a sequence from Gladys Swan’s comic fantasy, first published in the Vintage Contemporaries Series. Read more…
By Gladys Swan Fiction
Gone Haywire and other Old Sayings

All these poems come from a suite-in-progress called Old Sayings. They are based on English clichés, bromides, idiomatic locutions, &c. Actually, “based on” is not correct; sometimes, a phrase is the starting point for a poem (e.g. Read more…
By WIlliam Zander Poetry
What We Choose to Remember

What is the relationship between memory and imagination? How unbridled is the power of story? How intimidating? The narrative essays in What We Choose to Remember tread the tenuous, shifting grounds of memory, revealing how our imperfect recollections shape not only how we live our lives, but the act of… Read more…
By Steve Heller Memoir
Come Raw

A world of strange, haunting tales, sometimes lyrical, sometimes dark as deep Danish winter night, and sometimes both, and sometimes all of these things. Read more…
By Lars Rasmussen Fiction
Satyr’s Wife

In these poems, Rita Signorelli-Pappas fuses classical, aesthetic, and personal history. She summons a world in which mythic time mercurially flickers into the present, and transformations erupt and intersect with Ovidian force. Read more…
By Rita Signorelli-Pappas' Poetry
Savage Pilgrims

Susan Tekulve’s Savage Pilgrims includes five poems and five stories, most of which were first published in journals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Denver Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Emrys, Connecticut Review, and Clackamas Literary Review. Read more…
By Susan Tekulve Fiction and Poetry
Coronology

Coronology is a compendium of the crowns we bear, from the asbestos crown that insulates our thoughts to the zeitgeist crown, “a collective rather than an individual illumination,” and provides pertinent information concerning crown birth, crown anatomy, the medical treatment of crowns, and more. Read more…
By Claire Bateman Poetry

The drug generic priligy online comes in tablet form; its main component is Dapoxetine (Priligy). This substance increases blood flow to the vessels, and accordingly - and the cavernous body of the penis, resulting in an optimal erection for sex. Read more:

As inherently interesting and thought-provoking as they are original and consistently entertaining, the fifteen stories comprising Ronna Wineberg 'Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life' are true literary gems by a writer with a genuine flair for deftly crafting truly memorable characters."
- Midwest Book Review's Small Press Bookwatch

In reading Mark Cox’s finely rendered Sorrow Bread, I was struck how often the poems live up, unambiguously, even relentlessly, to its title. They offer us sorrow and regret, and as in the title poem, pose a central question, 'What do you do when there’s nothing you can do, but/you can’t do nothing?'”
- Stephen Dunn

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