<div>Leonora (Leo) is an Italian Asian American teen-ager with a rotten attitude and a genius I.Q. Thrown out of twelve schools and fluent in as many languages, she's sent to live with her grandmother in the Philippines, where she spends all her time in a computer environment called Apeiron - a parasitic virtual reality program which drove its mad creator to dive headlong into a gorge. Only in Apeiron can Leo shed the awkward body of an adolescent girl and emerge in the persona of Fergus, the warrior; only in Apeiron can she hobnob with Socrates and John Lennon. But one day the only boy she's ever liked disappears, and Leo, in a quest to rescue him, finds herself lured into the program's computer generated hell. A post-modern tilt atAlice in Wonderland, a computer-ageHuckleberry Finn, leo@fergusrules.com is above all the story of a young woman's search for the lost world of her ancestors in a society in which technology has replaced community. Arne Tangherlini received his A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard and his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He was a teacher for many years both in the Philippines and the United States and the co-author ofSmart Kids: How Academic Talents are Nurtured and Developed in America. "Leo @ fergusrulesrules.com is a fantastical coming of age story about a brainy, racially mixed teenage girl...who spends much of her spare time in her bedroom, jacked into a cyber wonderland called Apeiron. This computer-generated 3-D world is a timeless landscape, home to a historical line-up of digitally re-created dignitaries, such as Confucius, Julius Caesar and Napoleon... She also encounters relatives and ancestors, including her great aunt, who as a young woman survives being shot by American soldiers in the Philippine American War. Other dangers include pterodactyls with giant Barbie-doll bodies that dump guano and screech, 'Nike, Guess, Benetton, Levi's! Tommy, Tommy, Tommy-boy!" and a child-steamrollering Zamboni that is operated by gnomelike people and has a control room guarded by a three-headed dog. Needless to say, Leo is a trip...a 21st century homage to the works of Argentine poet and author Jorge Luis Borges</div>

Leo@fergusrules.com [Electronic Edition]

Children's Books

Tangherlini, Arne

Literature & Fiction

Leapfrog Press

Known for his powerful readings and unusually warm and compassionate voice, Charles Coe's poems speak to the heart and mind as well as the ear. Combining subjects as diverse as Afro-American history, myth, jazz, and family as well as surprising observations of those unexpected moments of joy to be found in a work-a-day inner city life, Coe offers us poems as personal as the tale of a sister who opened his life to literature and closed her own with dope; as quietly momentous as the story of Rosa Parks. Here are poems for Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Mingus alongside a haunting homage to the 'guests' of a battered women's shelter. Above all, Coe's poems touch upon what is essential in us all and speak of life as a gift that is far from perfect but all we have. Charles Coe is the winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship. A jazz and popular vocalist, he was born in Indianapolis, lives in the Boston area and travels widely to perform and record his work. Get on Up! Can anybody else here say that in the summer of 1967, when they were fourteen years old, their mama took them to a James Brown concert? Did you walk alongside her Through the gates of A minor-league ballpark On a hot, cloudless Indiana night When the moon shone like a spotlight On the rough wooden stage? Was anybody else here sittin' beside their mama On those hard benches When James's band, the Famous Flames Came out to lay down A red carpet of funk And the announcer whipped that crowd Like a bowl of black cream 'til the Godfather of Soul finally skated onstage like a waterbug, tellin; everybody 'bout his brand-new bag? If your mama yelled like everybody else, Then let it now be told! Let everybody know how She clapped her hands raw As James flew back and forth across the stage, Sweat and grease from his conked-up hair Pouring down the front of his ruffled shirt, Purple satin jacket ripped off and tossed aside. Let everybody know how she stomped her feet When he grabbed that mike like a dog grabs a bone, Fell to one knee, And begged for: "just one more chance, Baby, baby please," And then when he fin

Picnic on the Moon

Self-Help

Coe, Charles

Relationships

The Kitchen Man

Wood, IRA

Humor & Satire

The author of two exuberantly praised novels, Annette Williams Jaffee returns with a wise and sensual tale about pursuing the one great passion of our lives, not in our youth, but at that last dangerous moment when everything we own and everyone we love is at risk. The Millers are the envy of all who know them, a 'successful' couple on the verge of the best years of their lives. Suzanne's first book is enjoying national attention while Barry can write his own ticket to teach at any law school in the country. But a spate of recent deaths and the absence of her children, away at college, force Suzanne to confront the fact that her marriage is cold and empty. 
 When Suzanne meets Robert Parrish, a silver-haired banker from East Texas with a talent for real friendship with a woman and an appetite for sensual pleasure-suppressed for years in his own straight-laced marriage-she must decide between the secure life she chose after the shameful ending of her first, youthful love affair or the disdain of her children, the loss of friends and the financial uncertainty awaiting a woman who uproots her life in pursuit of the true intimacy she has long denied herself. With rare insight, keen social satire and some of the most touchingly rendered erotic scenes in recent memory, The Dangerous Age is above all a story about seizing ecstasy in our livesregardless of age, in spite of the consequences. 
"Set aside a block of uninterrupted time to read Jaffee's new novel... Her writing makes the reader feel everything, with the result being that this is a book that refuses to be put down. A touching and absorbing story that lingers long after the final page has been read; highly recommended."-Library Journal (starred review)
"The pages turn themselves."-Los Angeles Times Book Review 
"How glorious to give oneself up to a great late-in-life passion."-New York Times Book Review 
Annette Williams Jaffee is the author of Adult Education (Leapfrog) and Recent History (Putnam). She lives on the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The Dangerous Age

Jaffee, Annette Williams

United States

Best Poetry of 1999-Library JournalWell known by readers of gay and lesbian fiction for her award-winning short story collections and novels; notorious in the legal profession as the nation's "foremost authority on lesbians and law" (Village Voice), a professor at the City University of New York, a young mother raising a son, Ruthann Robson's breadth of experience is unique among American poets. With seamless use of poetic craft and ironic wit, Robson tackles subjects as political as they are bizarre: the young woman chained to a radiator by her mother to keep her safe from harm; the teenager who gets herself knocked up because it's less dangerous to be an unwed mother than a lesbian. Affecting, terrifying, but always bathed in a clear hard light, these poems introduce a stunning intelligence and a bold new voice in American poetry.
"Ardent, passionate, and exquisitely queer…Robson's sense of playfulness is wonderful …The poems in Masks are startling not only for their quirky, often whimsical, humanity, but also for their imaginative use of form… There is history in this book. Witch burnings. Concentration camps. Poverty. Robson covers terrifying, white hot terrain with unflinching honesty and a poet's heart… She takes the magnifying glass of poetic language and investigates detail by detail every aspect of the female condition."-Lambda Book Report
"Another excellent book of poetry from 1999, Masks reveals how time and the moment of vision drive the poet to turn upon experience and make language out of it. These impressive poems swallow any distance between maker and reader as they pass from the glories of relationships to the price of loss. Some of Robson's best work is poems about famous women such as Frida Kahlo, Alice B. Toklas, Diane Arbus and Isadora Duncan. This is a truly marvelous collection that haunts the reader and never diminishes the art of the poem."-Bloomsbury Review
"Robson gives you more than you bargained for...Her first collection of poetry is terse yet throbbing, filled with the raw, aggressive energy of someone who can't be bothered with niceties...there is definite craft here: these lines aren't just thrown out but clearly thought and ret

Masks: With an Introduction by Marge Piercy

Robson, Ruthann

Poetry

The 'Grrrl' phenomenon is a contemporary expression of young women's humor and rage exploding in books and zines, concerts, films, and the internet. In homage to a new generation of tough young feminists, Marge Piercy presents a gathering of poems that reveal the poet as an early 'Grrrl.' Comprising over ninety poems selected from four books now out of print; poems previously published in literary magazines but never before collected and very early poems never published, this volume presents the bold and passionate political verse for which Piercy is well known alongside poems celebrating the sensual pleasures of gardening and cooking and sex; funny poems about New Year's Eve and warring boom boxes; vulnerable poems in which a young working class woman from the Midwest takes stock of herself and the limits of her world. For longtime fans and those new to Piercy's early work, this volume is an indispensable addition to the oeuvre of one of America's best-known and best-selling poets.
Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen novels and fifteen books of poetry, most recently The Art of Blessing the Day (Knopf, 1999) a selection of Piercy's Jewish-themed poems. What Are Big Girls Made Of?(Knopf, 1997) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and selected as one of their Most Notable Books of the Year by the American Library Association. In October, 1999, she will be a featured poet on the Bill Moyers' PBS-TV poetry specials "Fooling with Words" and "The Sounds of Poetry" and her newest novel, Three Women will be published by William Morrow.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface, .xi
From THE TWELVE SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
The meaningful exchange, 4 Five thousand miles, 5 The summer invasion, and the fall, 6 Nothing you can have, 9 Archipelago, 12 The first salad of March, 15 Exodus, 16 Ask me for anything else, 18 What is permitted, 20 A gift of light, 22 Short season, 27 Ghosts, 29 The new novel, 31 Women of letters, 32
From LIVING IN THE OPEN
The token woman, 37 The clearest joy, 39 Make me feel it, 40 Sage and rue, 42 River road, High Toss, 44 Paradise Hollow, 45

Early Grrrl : The Early Poems of Marge Piercy

PIERCY, Marge

History & Criticism

Leonora (Leo) is an Italian Asian American teen-ager with a rotten attitude and a genius I.Q. Thrown out of twelve schools and fluent in as many languages, she's sent to live with her grandmother in the Philippines, where she spends all her time in a computer environment called Apeiron - a parasitic virtual reality program which drove its mad creator to dive headlong into a gorge. Only in Apeiron can Leo shed the awkward body of an adolescent girl and emerge in the persona of Fergus, the warrior; only in Apeiron can she hobnob with Socrates and John Lennon. But one day the only boy she's ever liked disappears, and Leo, in a quest to rescue him, finds herself lured into the program's computer generated hell. A post-modern tilt at Alice in Wonderland, a computer-age Huckleberry Finn, leo@fergusrules.com is above all the story of a young woman's search for the lost world of her ancestors in a society in which technology has replaced community. Arne Tangherlini received his A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard and his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He was a teacher for many years both in the Philippines and the United States and the co-author of Smart Kids: How Academic Talents are Nurtured and Developed in America. "Leo @ fergusrulesrules.com is a fantastical coming of age story about a brainy, racially mixed teenage girl…who spends much of her spare time in her bedroom, jacked into a cyber wonderland called Apeiron. This computer-generated 3-D world is a timeless landscape, home to a historical line-up of digitally re-created dignitaries, such as Confucius, Julius Caesar and Napoleon… She also encounters relatives and ancestors, including her great aunt, who as a young woman survives being shot by American soldiers in the Philippine American War. Other dangers include pterodactyls with giant Barbie-doll bodies that dump guano and screech, 'Nike, Guess, Benetton, Levi's! Tommy, Tommy, Tommy-boy!" and a child-steamrollering Zamboni that is operated by gnomelike people and has a control room guarded by a three-headed dog. Needless to say, Leo is a trip…a 21st century homage to the works of Argentine poet and author Jorge Luis Borges

Leo@fergusrules.com

Arne Tangherlini

About the authorBefore becoming Chief of Police in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Richard Rosenthal spent twenty years in the New York City Police Department, where he ran the Heavy Weapons and Undercover Weapons Training programs and, as a detective in the Bronx dealt with homicide, narcotics, and armed robbery. Before joining the NYPD, he worked for U.S. Air Force military intelligence as a Russian language specialist. Pocket Books published his two popular books of police craft, Sky Cops and K-9 Cops, as well as his novel, The Murder of Old Comrades, "a spicy police procedural about KGB assassins on the loose in Manhattan," according to The Wall Street Journal, which "put Mr. Rosenthal on the map in big-league publishing."
"A strange true tale of a Jewish NYPD cadet recruited into the department's elite intelligence unit to spy on the Jewish Defense League, offering vivid portraits of a politically incendiary era and revealing secrets of intrusive police tactics...This is a well-tuned portrait of the stress and acrimony that permeates such radical cliques, and of the lonely, paranoid personalities at their centers - and it offers insights into the radically charged violence of the early 1970s...Rosenthal has a fine eye for human detail and a cop's mordant sensibility. Altogether an exciting tale of unusual police practices, and a solid portrait of a quintessential fringe radical group inhabiting insecure, volatile times.-Kirkus Reviews (June 15, 2000)
Excerpted from Chapter One
Sol Hurok immigrated to the United States from the village of Pogar, Russia in 1906 and made a small living for himself by producing concerts for New York City's burgeoning labor societies. Over the years, the workers' craving for high-brow entertainment grew to such an extent that his concerts were staged in the enormous amusement hall built by P.T. Barnum, the Hippodrome. Hurok became the personal manager of the great Afro-American contralto Marian Anderson and arranged the first U.S. tour for the young violin sensation and son of a poor Israeli barber, Itzak Perlman. Within several generations Hurok became known as The Impresario, importing such world class entertai

Rookie Cop: DeepUndercover in the Jewish Defense League

Biographies & Memoirs

Rosenthal, Richard

Professionals & Academics

"Lev Raphael is a daring writer—one who will not be -restrained by genre, but who tells his story with all the tools at his command. The German Money combines all of Raphael’s estimable talents, delivering an emotional thriller about a totally believable contemporary family coming to terms with fifty years of silence."—Edmund White
Best known for Dancing on Tisha B’Av, the groundbreaking story collection exploring the lives of children of Holocaust survivors, Lev Raphael is also the author of five popular mysteries. Now he combines his talents in a story of emotional suspense.
Paul has spent his life running—from New York, the city of his birth; from his beautiful beshert; from contact with his own siblings; but mostly from his mother, a Holocaust survivor of inexplicable coldness. Upon her mysterious death, the children face shocking questions. What caused her to die? Why did she divide their inheritance so that Paul, the least favorite son, was singled out to receive the most, the dreaded "German money,"a bequest of a million dollars accrued from German reparations to survivors . . . a gift as cynical as it is generous.
"Lev Raphael’s new novel is a powerful, haunting and erotic tale. The stunning narrative builds to a shocking -denouement and kept me turning pages faster and faster to learn the truth."—Linda Fairstein
Lev Raphael is the author of thirteen books and known internationally as an insightful chronicler of the lives of the children of Holocaust survivors. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, among many prizes, his short works have appeared in two dozen anthologies, including American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories. He is a book critic for National Public Radio and mysteries columnist for the Detroit Free Press.

The German Money

Raphael, Lev

Literary

For over ten years, Marge Piercy and Ira Wood have been teaching two popular master classes in the art of writing fiction and memoirs. They attract students nationwide who have failed to improve their work in courses concentrating on process' rather than craft, and want to go beyond :journaling" and "writing as therapy" to break through and publish their work.
Drawing on talks, exercises and examples proven in the classroom, So You Want to Write addresses: How to begin a piece by seducing your reader, How to create characters that embody the infinite contradictions of human behavior, How to master the elements of plotting fiction, How to create a strategy for telling the story of your life, How to learn to read critically, like a professional writer, How to realistically approach publishing.
Combining over seventy years of writing experience, other chapters include: The overlooked powers of dialogue, Creating descriptions that move readers emotionally, FAQ's about agents, rejections, submitting work effectively, what writers really earn, Overcoming shame and the difficulties of writing about loved ones.
Marge Piercy is the author of 35 books of fiction and poetry. She has lectured or performed at over 300 universities, and sold over 3,000,000 books worldwide. Ira Wood is the author of three novels, a publisher, and a popular writing teacher, whose classes address writers' feelings of hopelessness and despair. They live on Cape Cod.
Two: BEGINNINGS
Fiction is as old a habit of our species as poetry. It goes back to telling a tale, the first perceptions of pattern, and narrative is still about pattern in human life. At core, it answers the question, what then? And then and then and then. And memoir is equally old: it's telling about your life, perhaps originally to children or a prospective mate or a new acquaintance.
Poetry is an art of time, as music is. Rhythms are measured against time: they are measures of time. A poem goes forward a beat at a time as a dance does, step by step, phrase by phrase. Narrative, whether fiction or memoir, is about time. First this, then that.

So You Want To Write

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