In order to keep young Mario busy for a while, his grandfather assigns him the task of looking after a cow that's tethered to a stake in the pasture. Mario has adventures with the cow

Mario and the Cow

Children's Books

Ortiz, Miguel Antonio

Animals

Irene Weinberger Books

In order to keep young Mario busy for a while, his grandfather assigns him the task of looking after a cow that's tethered to a stake in the pasture. Mario has adventures with the cow!

Mario y la Vaca (Spanish Edition)

A must read for anyone who's ever wanted to take a trip down someone else's memory lane, and at the same time revisit the warmth of their own. Mitch Levenberg writes about writing and reading his writing.

Write Something

Humor & Entertainment

Levenberg, Mitch

Humor

The Dementia Diaries is the story, in journal form, of the last five months of the narrator's mother's life in an assisted living facility in Florida. As time goes on he begins to realize it is no longer he who can depend on his mother but she who now must depend on him for her very survival. At the same time, with her oncoming Dementia, he must cope more and more with her feelings of frustration and humiliation. "If I tell her she needs to take her medication . . . she gets angry and wants to die," he writes. 'Why are you doing this to me?' she says. 'Why are you doing this to your mother?' "She begins to remind me," the narrator says, "of the Exorcist when the devil takes over the priest's mother. 'Why do you do this to me!" she screams at him. 'You are not my mother!' the priest screams back. But he is wrong. She is his mother. She is all our mothers and we are all her sons."

The Dementia Diaries

Literature & Fiction

Short Stories & Anthologies

When Meredith Sue Willis's first novel, which tells the story of a troubled preacher's family in West Virginia, first came out in 1979, it was declared a cause for celebration by the Los Angeles Times. Comparing Willis to Anne Tyler, the Times wrote: "She has written with depth and honesty about a life style available to many of us only though books." A Space Apart, according to The Philadelphia Bulletin, "weaves a web of subtle suspense and poetic perception." Now the electronic re-issue of the novel, making it easily and economically available, is again a cause for celebration, and those keeping running tally on the pros and cons of technology's impact on literature, have got to put this new incarnation solidly in the "pro" column. Certainly this is true for me, having missed the novel the first time around. I have, however, long known Willis's short story collection, In the Mountains, which shares a similar West Virginia setting, and has the same ability to render ordinary speech so lyrically that you stop and repeat sentences to yourself. (This is something I think only small town Southerners--and maybe a few open-space Westerners--can achieve.) I loved those stories. But A Space Apart, which I had not read, is even better, fiercer, nailing the place and the people to the wall as only a passionate first novel can do. Narrated by different characters, this is the story, first, of John and Mary Katherine, young adults who have survived, barely, their upbringing in a tiny village by the old Preacher, a harsh, sanctimonious, selfish man whom we first meet as an aged and drooling invalid. Though he has one foot in the grave, he still manages to make life hell for his offspring. Perverse to the end, he demands, after railing against the Catholics for a lifetime, to confess to a priest on his death bed. John, who becomes the new Preacher in the larger town of Galatia, struggles, as does his sister, not to resemble the furious, doctrinaire, self-involved old Preacher. But we feel that John's immense effort to create himself as the opposite of all he has known leaves him little space for his own humanity. Boring himself in one of his own sermons he hears the yawns in the congregation, feeling that there is "no one to listening but God, and God is bored too." And by bringing home a pretty, affectionate but slightly unhinged young wife, Vera, the new Preacher sets himself up for a lifetime of crisis. Unable to even pretend to keep house, for example, she is tormented by church ladies who often drop by to check up on her. On one occasion, realizing she has badly blown the visit of an important three-person committee, Vera slips away from her guests, and without apparent thought, ("her mouth began to grin, to peel back over her teeth") opens a dress-up box and reappears as a dance hall girl in open-toed red shoes and a "pink nylon hostess gown she never wore because the neck was cut so low." The ensemble is completed by a green plastic ring from a Cracker Jack box, a not-so-subtle jab at one of the visiting ladies who ostentatiously wears a large ring over gloves. The committee is of course scandalized and John's prospects of advancement are destroyed. It is trouble he doesn't deserve and that Vera will never live it down; still the scene is a guilty pleasure for any reader who has experienced the sanctimony of some church folks. At first Vera had loved the town nestled in the mountains; she felt herself becoming "almost became an adult." She "loved John for beauty and Mary Katherine for moral excellence and the old Preacher for being perfectly himself." When her first baby, Lee, arrived Vera wore the infant "like a jewel." But soon Galatia "grew as vast and uncertain as the whole world" and her daughters, beloved but raised in a frustratingly haphazard way, grew angry and confused and, before long, became "old enough to judge."

A Space Apart

Willis, Meredith Sue

Genre Fiction

Mario is pleased to carry home some just-caught fish for his grandfather, and glad for the company of a cat, but soon one cat becomes twenty-five, noisy and hungry cats.

Mario and the Cats

WITNESS 2017-2020 chronicles four years of troubles, shootings, wildfires, racial reckoning, planetary murder, plague, monumental lies, crazy delusions, me-too, an uprising for justice, and more. But a failed far-right insurrection had to be the capstone of these terrible times, and the nation is not done yet. What was once unfamiliar and strange ("flatten the curve") has become common, even banal, demanding a poem. Language has to keep up, and Hilton Obenzinger presents a powerful testimony filled with rage, fear, laughter, and joy. Hilton Obenzinger bears witness to a time like no other in recent memory. A virus that won't let go, the raging fires provoked by global warming, and the state terrorism that menaces with neo-fascist criminality and has taken the lives of so many unarmed black youths all combine to shape a period in which we cry out for justice and for peace. These poems tell it like it is. When this poet tells us that he had a dream in which he was walking through beautiful woods with Moses, and that he doesn't mean Charlton Heston but "more like the old graybeard Walt Whitman," we know where these poems are headed. Go with them. I promise you won't regret it.

Witness 2017-2020

Obenzinger, Hilton

Poetry

First Stars

Klokker, Jay

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