Pfp: 27 books

As a young man from Meridian, Mississippi, Steve Forbert managed to carve out a niche in New York City’s vibrant club scene, playing now-iconic venues like Gerde’s Folk City and CBGB’s during a time when rootsy rock was fading out and the Ramones, Talking Heads, and other New Wave and punk acts...

Leaving Losapas begins on a tiny atoll in the equatorial Pacific. Leo Markin, a young US Marine and Vietnam combat veteran who survived the war, found himself so changed by the experience that he simply could not find a way to return to his home, family, and his fiancée in a working class city of his...

There is a stream that courses through American roots music. Its source is in the Appalachian foothills in a place called Maces Springs, Virginia. It was there that A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle began their careers as three of the earliest stars of country music. These...

In direct contrast to the venerable Paris Review interviews, Talk Show puts contemporary writers on the late night couch and poses questions about everything except writing.  Tune in for questions and answers about first concerts, movie remakes, childhood heroes, family myths, worst jobs, first...

During the ten years author Roland Merullo (Breakfast with Buddha) taught at the university level, and during the numerous writing conferences and workshops he has been a part of since then, he has heard volumes of advice about the technical aspects of writing including plot, character, pace, description,...

Ellie Rifkin is a nineteen-year-old college student from a privileged Jewish background when she meets forty-one-year-old professor Gerard Babineau. Already twice-divorced, he is a hard drinker, an ex-peacetime marine, and a practicing Catholic from southern Louisiana who is angry and complicated and...

The Wall Street Journal called Vatican Waltz "a welcoming place for parishioners and interlopers alike," continuing "Catholics will identify with its plaintive call for this kind of renewal . . . But others, too, if they have kept their minds open, will be surprised at how uplifted they are by its...

Most avid golfers believe that there is a profound connection between the joys and challenges of golf and the joys and challenges of living that the more devoted we are to the game, the more we learn about ourselves. In Passion for Golf, Roland Merullo looks carefully at those connections and at the...

Heartbreaking in places, hilarious in others, Lunch with Buddha takes its readers on a quintessentially American road trip across the Northwest. That outer journey, complete with good and bad meals, various outdoor adventures, and an amusing cast of quirky characters, mirrors a more interior journey--a...

A tapestry of suffering, joy, transcendence…a journey of guilt and hope…In these remarkable short stories by native South African Tony Eprile, men and women play out dramas that echo the tumultuous din of their homeland. With a particular emphasis on exiles whether expatriates or those people alienated...

A novel both literary and suspenseful, Revere Beach Boulevard tells the story of a family that rallies around an errant son, even as a long-hidden secret that has touched all their lives comes to the surface. Peter Imbesalacqua has bent the rules and battled a gambling addiction for most of his adult...

Rinpoche's Remarkable Ten-Week Weight Loss Clinic brings back two main characters from Roland Merullo's beloved Buddha Trilogy (Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Buddha). This time, though, instead of cruising the American road together, Otto Ringling and Volya Rinpoche are part of the famous meditation...

More than simply a golf story, Last Call portrays a round of golf played by, Sylvie, a middle-aged woman whose father lays terminally ill in a hospital bed two hours away.  Since she and her father have always shared a love of the game, she decides to call him from the course, and then keep her cell...

Tornado Alley is a story of a man and a woman who are on a dangerous collision course. Marie Boule is a love-starved young woman who grew up in a small, impoverished town in Pennsylvania, and her one desire is to find a comfortable, easy life. She thinks she is capable of hardening her heart and making...