Omar’s friend Art Serrano, a world-famous painter, is dead–either that or he’s disappeared and has left behind what appears to be a suicide note. As months go by, as Art becomes the focus of a media feeding frenzy, who better to supply the authoritative accounts of his past and present life than his old friend, Omar, a journalist, to whom Art's last messages, it turns out, were dedicated? In the meantime, Verónica, a factory-worker-turned-prostitute in Juárez, Mexico, is murdered outside a discotheque attended by the city’s young and rich. Her roommate, Esme, quickly learns the police have no desire to find the killer. In fact, Vero’s death is the most recent in a chain of slayings of hundreds of young girls and women in a city still clinging to the outlaw and desert-saloon mentality that has characterized the northern border for years. She unites with an angry, graying priest, blackballed by the church for his liberal ideologies, and the two attempt to follow the trail of the killers.

Know Your Baker

Literature & Fiction

Keller, John M.

Literary

Dr. Cicero Books

Fiction. Fargo Burns is a man suffering from the delusion that he is a dog. While receiving treatment for this, he makes the mistake of falling in love with a hitman's beautiful girlfriend. "Fargo Burns, the madly baffled, restless and beguiling subject of Kos Kostmayer's compelling novel, bounces like a pinball between excess and sobriety - as do we, his unsettled readers. Kostmayer's visceral account of one man's quest for quiet normality is dark, tense, playful and deeply affecting."--Jim Crace

New Plays Volume 2

HARRISON, CAREY

Dramas & Plays

From the author of the bestselling Know Your Baker, John M. Keller’s second novel explores the gated city of Beverly Hills, Brazil, capital and seedbed of the world’s soap opera industry, sitting halfway between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where admission is contingent upon fulfilling a physical requirement, a place no one ever goes to or leaves. Sylmara, a 17-year-old actress on the brink of becoming the city’s next great export, is shocked when her celebrity aunt, famous for her award-winning breasts--and in whose foosteps Sylmara is poised to follow-- leaves the community without telling anyone and immediately turns up dead. Will Sylmara follow suit by leaving, and dying in the favelas just outside the gates?

The Box and the Briefcase, the Moleque and the Old Man and the First Coming of the Second Son of God

Fiction. Carey Harrison's panoramic new novel takes us from the deep caves of South-West France to the towering Lion Rock in Sri Lanka, and back again. Roland Watkins is an archaeologist who invents a new form of psychotherapy. It sweeps the world. He can save other people's relationships. Can he save his own?

Who Was That Lady?

Where do commas go? Where you breathe, you say. Where else? Between items in a list. Anywhere else? Is that it? How often do you breathe? And when? It seems that, in the last twenty years, teachers have stopped teaching grammar. Perhaps they thought students couldn’t learn it, or didn’t need to. All around the country, people who haven’t been taught grammar are throwing commas into sentences without thinking twice, or else avoiding them. But how do we learn to write well when the basics have not been taught to us at the high school level? While teaching grammar in the classroom, novelists Carey Harrison and John M. Keller developed a new, simpler way for students to understand grammar: “Where did you get that bitch?" Or is it: "Where did you get that, bitch?”

Where Did You Get That Bitch?: The Basic Grammar They've Stopped Teaching You

Computers & Technology

Programming

John M. Keller’s mind-spinning, continent-spanning new novel takes off from a term coined by the word-intoxicated poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Its intimations of flying-carpet magic and pierrot lunaire adventure are fully realized in this tale of Americans at large in South American, European and African landscapes. Marcus, our narrator, is a former-athlete-turned-gypsy who finds his way, along with his scandal-raising sister, Connie, to the unlikely refuge of Montevideo. When their quixotic journalist pal, Felip, gets into deep waters in his heedless investigative crusading, Marcus is flushed from his Uruguayan hideaway and exposed to the perils of global intrigue.

Abracadabrantesque

A history teacher abandons his life and takes to the roads of Britain, where after many years of solitary travel by foot, he has become a mute. One night, waking from woodland sleep, he witnesses a murder. He winds up sharing a house with the murderer, his life once more transformed.

Dog's Mercury

There is a tiger on the loose in Hoboken; Tony now has a wild creature of his own at home. His old mentor, Javier, a Jesuit father, still occupies Tony’s memories, and the book describes their relationship from both Tony’s and Javier’s points of view. A tiger has also figured in the Jesuit’s life, a period of which was spent in India. There he comes face to face with the ferocious wild beast and, by facing directly the possibility that he will lose his life, he develops a new sense of himself in the world.

Tiger

Mayne, Ashley

United States

Poetry. The Red Dress is a series of deliciously poised, witty, often amorous poems by Billie Chernicoff, a poet who has received the highest praise from her fellow-poets and readers alike. "THE RED DRESS: CHARMS TROUBLED & AMOROUS, by Billie Chernicoff, brings to mind an afternoon spent in a botanical garden of the old world: a Venetian garden of earthly delights, of rare carnivorous and medicinal plants, of opium poppy blossoms and lush mystery. This lovely collection of poems guides us through a woman's sensual and full life."&mdash;Brenda Coultas "For all of the resonant, bewitching talismans of the old world and gathered leaves her poems proffer, for all the lovers that inhabit these rooms, Chernicoff is too wise to get lost in the lustres of the materials&mdash;however beguiling or charged. THE RED DRESS works as a kind of tarot, shifting dimensions, spheres, and earthly elements as it unwraps the soul stuff. Folio of all your faces I wed is a poet (and seeker's) electrifying vow."&mdash;Kimberly Lyons "In her slow, slender lines she invites collusion with the reader's breath, so we find ourselves breathing along with the text, startled by what she's just made us say. She leads us into a sensuous world of vivid, unsentimental love, love not just for bodies but for moves and circumstances."&mdash;Robert Kelly

The Red Dress (Dr. Cicero Books Poetry)

Chernicoff, Billie

Poetry

Electrifying thriller set on the island of Sri Lanka, by a noted Sri Lankan author. 'Asmita' takes you from the genteel world of Colombo society to the seamy side of town: Asmita herself, the heroine, is expensive, well-educated - and for sale.

Asmita

Abeyratne, Seneka

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