Public Republic

Debra Fox

It is Barry George’s palpable regard for the cast of characters who inhabit the urban landscape in his haiku collection, Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, that makes it so powerful. Whether he is describing a conductor, a window washer, an accused teen, or a homeless man, George suggests they are all deserving [...]

Barry George

Brian Russell’s Meeting Dad is a memoir of his efforts to reconcile with his natural father. The story unfolds with a sense of urgency and anticipation. Russell is a fourteen-year-old living in Buffalo; Bob Jaycox is a salesman now living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with his second wife and family. [...]

Peter Cowlam

Photo: MAMJODH
Borges – always a free thinker – at no time espoused Christian theology, but did regard one of Christianity’s foremost theological poets as having authored ‘the apex’ of all literature – namely Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose Commedia continues to be studied, and is regularly translated, by other writers. Dante composed his Commedia in [...]

Sheri Wright

Jude Lally speaks with an honesty we could all live by, an honesty that threads us together regardless of our experiences, shared or not. Through his words, we are given a view of what it is to navigate through doorways sometimes difficult for our passing, yet do it over and over again even though [...]

Barry George

Photo: victoriapeckham
In the poems throughout Seed Across Snow, Kathleen Driskell’s careful attention to details creates the feeling of a heightened attentiveness to life. Nowhere is this more evident than in two of her poems about motherhood, “Why I Mother You the Way I Do” and “Seed.” In these two compelling poems, Driskell [...]

By Ellie Ivanova Ponti

Photo: Geoff604
No, this is not related to Julia Child, whose culinary mystique I seem to have missed, being a transplant from a different culture on American soil. It’s about books on cooking in general, the writing of/on cooking and on the pleasure of food. Well, the concept of food is having a [...]

By Ellie Ivanova Ponti
I love browsing through fashion advice books, but it’s always out of curiosity. I like to see a different interpretation of what women should look like – and how that changes through time. I never follow the advice contained in those books because I forget the specifics. And they are so different [...]

Drew Logan

Drew Logan

This is a new book of poetry by Jeanie Thompson, a painter of lush images with words from Alabama. She is the managing director of the Alabama Writers Forum and I was thinking about moving to Alabama until I found out she also teaches at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. I live in Kentucky.

Ellie Ivanova Ponti
A friend of mine recommended the 1960 classic Never on Sunday (directed by Jules Dassin, starring Melina Mercouri) as the film that introduced foreign cinema to the larger American audience.
In fact, it won several Academy Awards nominations and was a huge success. It also caused uproar in Hollywood with the fact that [...]

Elayne Clift

Photo: orangeacid
It takes a lot to shock me, but elementary school kids playing “the rape game” on a school bus? Baby T-shirts sporting “Chick Magnet” on the front? Blow jobs at Bar Mitzvahs? All this and more is documented in Diane Levin’s and Jean Kilbourne’s important new book aimed at helping parents steer [...]

Photo: delgaudm
With her novel “Glass Butterflies” Ludmila Filipova has asserted herself as a capable and experienced author ready to enter unknown and virgin territory. “Glass Butterflies” is written in modern style and contains both attractive and clear messages. It stands out among the most precious achievements of the contemporary Bulgarian prose, a phenomenon which is [...]

Photo: procsilas
Ancient myths from both Bulgaria and the world, historical sources along with a lot fictionalized past, quoted manuscripts with lost ends, roads that cross, and characters in whose destinies events from more than a century and a half ago come together: these are only some of the ideas behind “The Parchment Maze”.
The intricate [...]

Darren Jackson

Photo: carlsonimkeller
Although it’s been many years since I first escaped into the tormented mythology of the Meidosems, the images still hold me the way the Meidosems’ grip one of their children of the soul, dangled by the ankle “in the wind and the rain” (115)*.
I had moved to the south of France for [...]

Michael Todd Burns

Photo: Cia De Foto
 
In Jerry’s first novel we are introduced to Philip Janov, a man whose life has been squelched by obligations not of his own making. On an oft times hilarious ride through his life we see what a contentious older brother, a wildly erratic wife, and an insanely jealous rival can [...]

James Vincent

Photo: semihundido
The fortune read, ‘Accept the next proposition you hear.’  I found the familiar white rectangle outside my office around quitting time. Odd in these troubled times that someone would just leave a fortune laying around.  I wasn’t sure it applied to me.  I didn’t eat the cookie, I didn’t tip the waiter.  I [...]

Linda Cruise

Photo: =ChevalieR=
Since the late 1940s, thousands of published books have been written on the subject of World War II—a seemingly infinite number of stories could be told about this one finite historical event.
Most of these works are nonfiction, but a significant body of that war’s literature exists in fiction form as well, including [...]

Brian Russell

Photo: m o d e
In his deeply moving novel, “Body & Soul,” Frank Conroy employs the fictive technique of compression in both traditional and exciting, less traditional ways that I might dub: hyper-compression.
The traditional use of compression often moves a story ahead in time or condenses what would otherwise be a lengthy scene into [...]

Maggie Creshkoff
Pat Valdata is a poet and uses her words as a poet would, deftly weaving the story of a Hungarian immigrant family in the early decades of 19th century America.

Their triumphs and tragedies over three generations are mirrored by events on the world stage; and their personal loves and losses are echoed in [...]

Ellie Ivanova Ponti

Photo: alicepopkorn
The case of Herman and Roma Rosenblatt’s love story and what critics called their “fake memoir” definitely makes us reevaluate the narrative role of truth in a story.
Why is it important that a memoir be a true accounts of its author’s life? Obviously, it reflects the way its author remembers it. [...]