Bøger udgivet af Spout Hill Press

Inspired by Edward Thomas and his 1913 bike tour, David Caddy climbs on his bicycle and pedals into history, literature and the history of literature. But this is not just a book about books. This is a book about leading a thoughtful life. Biography, autobiography and anthropology happily mix with criticism and observation and grow into something completely new and exciting. David Caddy thinks his thoughts to better illuminate ours. As he finds renewal and meaning in his journey, so too will the reader. This is a book about freedom and culture and what those things mean in a time when we are allowed to do anything and yet so little of it matters. David Caddy matters. Reading this excellent book matters. -Dave Newman, author of Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children

In the Footsteps of the Silver King follows one man's quest to recover his dead father's World Championship silver medal in soccer. Patrick is led through the West Coast and Iran to rediscover his father's past. The world he enters is so wrapped up in its dream of the 1960s that his world and his father's world become entangled. Tayyar explores America's relationship with history, popular culture, music, sports, immigration, and love in a novel that is equal parts comedy, family drama, and nostalgia.

How Formal? takes readers on a wild but accessible ride through sestinas, haiku, sonnets and psalms with some stop-overs in free verse and prose poetry.

New and collected poems from Gerald Locklin spanning from 2010-2015. Topics include jazz, art, and life.

It is the early 1960s. Glendora, California. Along with the country, the city holds its breath between the two most shocking assassinations of the 20th century: Kennedy and King. Shortly before Kennedy's assassination, Joshua Crass suffers from an adverse reaction to penicillin. The six-year-old boy wakes from a coma with no recollection of his parents, his brother, or anyone else in his life. He embarks on a journey to discover who he was, who he is and who he's going to be, but a wall of forgotten memories blocks his path. After King's assassination, he joins the ranks of his textbook heroes to face head on his greatest fear of all, death, only to discover that sometimes the past is better left forgotten.

The Plymouth Papers is a unique, multilayered historical novel about an American founding myth. It is the story of the Mayflower and the founding of the first permanent colony in New England told from multiple points of view and focusing on one of the most interesting Mayflower passengers, Stephen Hopkins, and his family, particularly his sons, Giles and Caleb, and his daughter, Ruth. It is also the story of the Indians, primarily the Wampanoag, without whom the so-called "Pilgrims" would not have survived. What is unique about the story is that it explores not only the relationship Giles has with his wife, a half-Wampanoag woman, but also the relationships Caleb has with a Wampanoag man and Ruth has with a two-spirit woman-man, Pequas. Needless to say, these characters do their best to hide these relationships from the Puritans, whose penalties for homosexuality include whipping, branding, and even death. The "Plymouth Papers" are discovered on Cape Cod during the Civil War by Caleb Taylor, a book publisher, abolitionist, and self-described devotee of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne from Boston. The Plymouth Papers are documents from the 17th century written by some of Caleb Taylor's ancestors: journals, memoirs, and letters by Stephen Hopkins, his sons Giles and Caleb, his daughter, Ruth, Giles's wife, Catherine, and her father, Gabriel Whelden. Caleb Taylor transcribes the manuscripts in 1864 with his own running commentary on the war, the government's separate war on the Indians, and his efforts to dissuade his 16-year-old nephew, Paul, from joining the Union Army. Caleb Taylor plans to publish the Papers himself until he makes a startling, and for him, shocking discovery, and it is not about the fact Stephen Hopkins had been shipwrecked in 1609, reprieved from a sentence of death for mutiny, and returned home to find himself a widower who is later recruited by the Separatist Puritans to sail on the Mayflower and help found New Plymouth in 1620. Nor is it about the fact that Caleb's ancestor, Giles Hopkins, married a half-Indian woman, a Wampanoag. Caleb Taylor's discovery has to do with the longest document in the Papers, the confessional memoir by Giles Hopkins. A member of the Church of England, Giles tells the story of the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony from a non-Separatist point of view sympathetic to the Indians, who suffer atrocities at the hands of the Puritans. As he and his father recount the tale of the founding of Plymouth and Stephen's role as emissary to the Indians, Giles also remembers those who were persecuted by the Puritans because of their religion (the Anabaptists and the Quakers) and tells the story of those who suffered such punishments as whipping, branding, and even hanging for breaking laws against certain sexual behaviors. When Giles discovers a truth about his younger brother, Caleb, Giles snaps and commits a crime so heinous he sends his brother literally to sea. Eventually Caleb dies on Barbados. The stories are connected in several ways. Each main character lives in a time of injustice, war, and puritanical intolerance and hatred. All are related by blood to each other. All feel sympathy for, even a spiritual connection with, Native Americans. All are involved in controversial or contentious relationships either with a significant other and/or with a family member. And all are thoughtful, educated, spiritual men who, like the men and women they love, are seeking to love and be loved. This is the central theme of the novel, this need to love and be loved.

Last Tango in Long Beach completes Gerald Locklin's trilogy of post-modern novellas that began with The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen and continued with Come Back, Bear. In this final story, Locklin explores the 1970s sex drama but backs away from his classic humor to take an inside look at the politics of a real couple. It takes a painfully accurate view of the way life can be in the long run even with people who love each other.

Come Back, Bear is Gerald Locklin's long awaited sequel to The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen. Where Locklin explored the subconscious and the idea of the detective novel in the first novella of the series, here he delves into the Western novel and the idea of loyalty. Locklin is at his best here as he becomes irreverent in his relationships, his love of the classic cowboy novel, and his view of America.

The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen is Gerald Locklin's classic post-modern epic of Los Angeles and gumshoe detectives. At once homage and spoof, the novella follows Bear, a private detective, as he searches for the eponymous blue Volkswagen through the meanest streets of the West Coast and into a more dangerous world, his subconscious. The novella is at once a comedy, a discussion of the detective genre, and a look into the various cultures and subcultures of the 1970s.

T. Anders Carson's I Knew It Would Come To This explores Carson's growing understanding of how his childhood traumas have affected his adult life. Carson shows us how to negotiate the dark through use of the light.

Simon Fruelund's Civil Twilight is a tight, precisely told novella about the surprising interconnectedness of life in the suburbs and about people's attitudes towards religion, death, family, and sex.

Digging a Hole to the Moon traverses the haunting and beautiful story of a generation struggling to survive the realities of the new recession. This collection chronicles the seemingly despair-filled lives of dreamers who try to find spirituality in the haunted mountains, deserts, and crumbling cities of California - Atheist faith healers, despairing angels, and tired immortals brush shoulders with hopeful teachers, politely depressed undertakers, and Byronic suburban street racers as they all search for some impossible transcendence, as they dig their holes toward the moon.

Often poets feel stifled by the structure of formal poetry, but John Brantingham's instructions discuss how the tools of the form can help writers to create work they never would have expected when they approach formal poetry from a completely new direction. These forms can give us ideas that we never knew we could have. They allow for new insights not possible with free verse alone. These ideas and insights are the gift that form gives us.