Books & Blogs @ The Vox!
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Books & Blogs @ The VH! hosts a number of our books and author blogs, while providing the latest information about our publications and the international literary and publishing scene, particularly related to small and mid-size publishers. Additionally, you can visit the Vox Humana Literary Journal where some of our writers and many other international scribes are featured.
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Some of Vox Humana Books’ exciting new titles coming in 2010. International writing at its very best…eclectic literature with a human voice!
ISBN: 978-965-7504-00-0 338 pages
Stealing Fatima’s Hand, A Moroccan Sojourn: (Now Available!) Click here for the Vox Humana Book Store
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“ …Finally a grand taxi stopped and offered to take us to the train station for the unbelievably low fare of twenty dirham, so unbelievably low, that I was not a little disappointed when the driver didn’t rob us, slit our throats, and dump our bodies into the Strait of Gibraltar… “
Stealing Fatima’s Hand is an unforgettable collection of interconnected narratives presenting an alternative view of Morocco – a country not of labyrinthine alleys, Kasbahs, and smoky tea rooms – but a more madcap Morocco, one left to be discovered after all the coach tours depart.
Imagine the impossible: one finds oneself in a heady and mysterious locale on the edge of North Africa, a country replete with colourful characters, incomprehensible customs and taboos, a spoken language lacking an alphabet, often frustrating religious practices and, in spite of all this capital ‘E’ exoticism, one still don’t want to marry a local? Or turn a decrepit ryad into a boutique hotel? Or write for the travel page in the Sunday paper? Carolyn Thériault does more than imagine it.
After making a rather drunken New Year’s Resolution to toss aside their conventional lifestyle and pension plans, Carolyn, a somewhat cynical, snarky ex-pat and self-proclaimed square-peg, with her photographer husband Chris decide to walk away from their comfortable jobs in the Land of the Round Doorknobs (Canada) to travel the world. Because their long-suffering attempts at financial independence (weekly lottery tickets) have not borne any fruit, the only apparent means to rectify this situation they believe is to teach English overseas. And Morocco seems to fit the bill. But does it?
Unconventional and candid – Stealing Fatima’s Hand stands out as an irreverent black sheep in the literary travel genre, succeeding in undoing for Morocco everything that Peter Mayle has done for Provence. The book spans two years of Carolyn’s experiences in Rabat, where with humor and honesty she struggles with Moroccan bureaucracy, sexual harassment, the threat of terrorism, devious students, randy co-teachers, and the temptation of having French pastries washed down with gin & tonics for every meal. All this in a country, where apart from her, the only vegetarians are the sheep and the goats.
Essayist, photograopher and novelist, Carolyn Thériault currently resides in Turkey where she is at work upon her second book and a number of other print and other media projects. Visit Carolyn at: http://carolyntheriault.com
ISBN: 978-965-7504-01-7
New Edition To Be Released December 15th, 2010
Zdravka Evtimova’s short story collection “Pale and Other Postmodern Bulgarian Stories” consists of 23 short stories all of which have been published in leading literary magazines and short story anthologies in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Syria, Poland, Russia, Iran, South Africa Germany, and Denmark.The stories describe life in contemporary Bulgaria where the author of the short story collection was born and has been working for years. This singular short story collection is profoundly moving for it reveals with fine touches the sentiments and impressions which are a priori little palpable: the flow of time and its influence on strong and rough characters; sex, lies, loss of illusions; the transmission of essential values from generation to generation, disloyalty both to one’s country and to one’s family; love of a mother for her son and her sacrifice; betrayal as opposed to unity and love in the family and community; loyalty to a cause that makes man live on and survive despite vicissitudes of life; the supreme mystery of death and the strength to go on living and be human in spite of evil. And above all – the all pervasive and ennobling power of music.A bitter-sweet book, terribly funny at places and deeply sad at others, two of the shorts stories have attracted the attention of the film makers in Bulgaria, “Blood of a Mole” and “Vassil”, and another story, “The Twins”, has been transformed into a successful theatrical piece.
Zdravka Evtimova was born in Bulgaria, and lives and works as a translator from English and German. Her short stories have been published also in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, India, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, New Zeland, Romania, Argentina, Turkey, Nepal, Macedonia and Serbia.
ISBN: 978-965-7504-02-4
Largest Island In The Sea: (Available Now!) Click here to order from the Vox Humana Book Store
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-What did I “know” about Naples? That it was an important city historically, formerly the capital of a kingdom; that it had been in serious decline for centuries, that it was full of pickpockets, purse-snatchers, and counterfeit watches, pocketbooks, and pens. I knew that it lay in the shadow of Vesuvius, that Pompeii and Herculaneum were nearby, that many Italian-Americans (among whom I grew up in New York) came from southern Italy, and that it was supposed to be a splendid city, despite the corruption, squalor, and decay. I once heard a company of marvelous young musicians from Naples play and sing medieval and renaissance music, so I knew there was high level musical activity there…-
Naples is an overactive city of nobility and squalor, sprawling in the menacing shadow of Vesuvius, and Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean. The streets of Naples are lined with Africans and Asians selling sunglasses and watches, and young men from North Africa, seeking work, lounging in the streets. It is here, an island battered by successive waves of war and conquest – from the rivalry between the Phoenicians and the Greeks in the sixth century BCE – through the battles of World War II – that Europe merges with the Third World.
Jeffrey Green had wanted to visit these places since his childhood in Greenwich Village, New York City, which, as much as it was a haven of poets, painters, bohemians, and intellectuals, was also the northern fringe of Little Italy. The faces he saw, the voices he heard, the stores he passed on MacDougal Street on his way to school, were all Sicilian and Neapolitan. Hardly a month went by when he and his parents didn’t eat at least once in a family-owned Italian restaurant. The fragrance of Italian food was the fragrance of his New York Jewish childhood.
At the age of 60, he finally got to Sicily, in the company of Judith his wife, and another couple. By the time he got there, it meant much more to him than an echo of his Manhattan childhood, for he had been living in Israel since 1973, and was now a citizen of Mediterranean civilization himself. So his exploration of Naples and Sicily, although frustratingly brief, was also an exploration of an assumed identity. Travel can give us both knowledge of the world and lead to a deeper self-knowledge. Just as on a trip, no matter how carefully one plans, there are always surprises, some propitious, some untoward; in this book the reader will not necessarily find what he or she expects.
Jeffrey Green grew up in Greenwich Village, New York, attended progressive schools, then went on to Princeton for a BA and Harvard for a PhD in Comparative Literature. In 1973 he moved to Israel. Since 1979 he has worked as a free-lance translator for several important Hebrew authors, including Aharon Appelfeld. He was the ghostwriter of the Holocaust Memoir, A Daughter’s Gift of Love by Trudi Birger, which has been published in more than a dozen languages. Additionally he has published hundreds of book reviews, various articles, short stories, and poems. He is the author of two books in Hebrew, as well as “Thinking Through Translation,” published by the University of Georgia Press.
Zimmerman On Solitude: (Available May 2010!) Click here to pre-order from the Vox Humana Book Store
Samuel Tzara: Zimmerman On Solitude (Now Available On Amazon!)
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ISBN: ISBN: 978-965-7504-03-1 104 pages
“…The dead can speak. Their long forgotten words can be reborn, dug out of the trashcans of time, revitalized and transformed to continue their mission of enlightening audiences across the barrier of time and place, across generational, cultural and millennial events so diverse yet powerful that to minimize those historical impacts would be nothing more than criminal – just as to let those words long out of print which impacted during their original day, be just as significant a travesty against enlightenment -–as ignoring History itself – if they are too not reborn in new writings during our time…”
A young veteran of a middle-eastern war flees his country of birth, relocating to Amsterdam. There, living the life of a civil servant by day and a “slam” poet by night, he attempts to discover some order and put some sense into his life while recovering from the violent past he has known. After falling in love with a Dutch woman, he watches as the dissolution of his marriage takes place before his eyes, accepting it, yet doing nothing to remedy or try and restore the relationship before it is too late. At his place of work, our hero stumbles across an insidious secret that complicates his life even further, as he is forced to test his own morality in his efforts to reveal a terrible hidden history to the rest of the world.
Strangely, at about the same time the above events are taking place, our main protagonist – a lover of literature and the arts – stumbles across a book in a little shop run by the “Moonies” on a backstreet of the city. The book, entitled “Solitude”, authored in the year 1837 by a forgotten Swiss philosopher, named John George Zimmerman, becomes the young man’s “gospel”, serving as a tool, guiding him in his quest as he tries to integrate his past into his present and ultimately some kind of future working reality.
A magical synergy occurs as the young man’s life and story begins to mystically become as one with the ruminations on Solitude of JGZ. And as the philosopher’s words begin to merge with those of our hero, it becomes difficult for the reader to separate the two “authors” and the lives they have lead so many decades apart from one another.
About The Author
Samuel Tzara is the pseudonym for a well-known artist and poet living in the foothills of Jerusalem.
ISBN: 978-965-7504-04-8 112 pages
Canaan Barred: (Available April 2010!) Click here to order from the Vox Humana Book Store
Philip Hyams: Caanan Barred (Available Now!)
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“I believe I would have killed Ahmed. Oh why did they prevent me? Yet…I know it is not him. He cannot be held to blame. We are produced by a culture. A culture is fabricated from the years, the centuries of crime which preceded it. I too am guilty. Maybe this is also the reason I am locked up here behind these walls. I am guilty of believing in an ideal. It was a crime for my culture to instill those ideals within my soul.”
A contemporary twist on the classic tale of forbidden love, Canaan Barred is the story of one man’s desperate attempt to find meaning in a world where prejudice, bigotry, and hatred conspire to destroy his humanity.
By way of intensely personal and haunting images – visions both dark and futile, yet also poignantly hopeful – the reader is swept through the story of a great love, an emotional tempest complicated by the struggle for survival of two proud peoples.
On a deeper, more symbolic level, Canaan Barred is a novel about escaping the bondage of historical and collective hate. It is a book about peace and individual freedom, an allegorical and profound love story. When considering the current situation in the Middle-East today, it could possibly be even a true tale.
In an age when religious and political fundamentalism of all kinds is proliferating – Canaan Barred courageously argues for human dignity, love, tolerance, and the sanctity of Life.
About The Author
Philip Hyams is a Canadian/Israeli publisher, writer and film producer. Born His first novel Canaan Barred was published in 1995 by Tell Books – New York/Toronto and his writing has been published in more than 250 print and electronic journals around the world from the U.S and Britain to Sweden and South Africa. His non-fiction is represented by Paul Zack. While living in Europe he performed his work under the auspices of the internationally known One World Poetry Organization along-side poets such as Jack Micheline and Gregory Corso and as an artist was very early on affiliated with the “Copyart” movement producing graphic works on large-format XEROX color copy installations. Currently, Mr. Hyams is involved in a number of feature film, commercial and creative print and web-centric projects. Mr. Hyams is listed in Who’s Who In The World – 2002 – 2010.
Sari S. the Kiss Girl, an American artist has been brutally murdered. Why? Her primary activity in life, her raison d’etre was only the creation and milestone launch of her self-therapeutic Calendar of Kisses. Her circle of acquaintances and friends, stunned by the terrible fate which has befallen her, are just as puzzled as to who would have perpetrated such a hideous crime. Yet…could their fates be inextricably tied to that of the Kiss Girl?Historically, Amsterdam has served as a haven for artists, religious minorities and other free thinkers who have taken up residence in the city either due to self-imposed exile or because they were left with no other prerogative. It is against the backdrop of this pastoral, cobble-stoned, canal-lined western European Mecca that the novel is set.
Philip Hyams is a Canadian/Israeli publisher, writer and film producer. Born His first novel Canaan Barred was published in 1995 by Tell Books – New York/Toronto and his writing has been published in more than 250 print and electronic journals around the world from the U.S and Britain to Sweden and South Africa. His non-fiction is represented by Paul Zack. While living in Europe he performed his work under the auspices of the internationally known One World Poetry Organization along-side poets such as Jack Micheline and Gregory Corso and as an artist was very early on affiliated with the “Copyart” movement producing graphic works on large-format XEROX color copy installations. Currently, Mr. Hyams is involved in a number of feature film, commercial and creative print and web-centric projects. Mr. Hyams is listed in Who’s Who In The World – 2002 – 2010.
“The orangery tree
grew through the roof
the third floor glass of Mavor’s
room, who pruned it once
and lies in bed with gnarled bones”
Company’s come. In a ramshackle mansion, meet a family in the same condition – ancient, vast, decayed. There’s the brooding Duke, and his riotous brother. There’s Grandam, lost in the wilds of herself. There’s a vicar, a philosopher, an angel, a ghost or two. And of course, in the highest garret, a frail and a forgotten man …
Inspired by a period of dreaming, Mavor’s Bones is a poetry book nonpareil. More akin to a novel or play than a standard book of verse, Bones sports a cast of dozens, and an approximate plot. Mysteries, ambiguities, and loose ends so abound as to invite the reader, filling in the gaps according to his own whims and tastes, to finish the narrative in his own way.
In these tales of love, loss, and survival, Pierides embroiders a tableau detailing the lives of a refugee family in Athens, circa 1957. The novel is set in the house of the family on Alexandrias Street, where they came to settle years after their flight from Smyrni, now Izmir, Turkey. Framed by this house – a concoction of tin, cement, wood and mud, a paradise, a refuge and a prison to those who nestle in it – they struggle to come to terms with their predicament, attempting to establish themselves in Greece. Without idealising its characters, the novel unfolds – a tragicomic story, full of ethnic colour, warm sensuality and psychological insight. The book encompasses the “Catastrophe” of Asia Minor, the Greek Civil War, accusations and blackmail, adoption and betrayal, as well as the refugees’ love and bitterness towards their country. The characters’ traumatic past and struggle for survival, in a country that is both home and hostile to them, requires their ability to tap into psychological resources of generosity, masochism, denial and ruthlessness – and above all – humour and forgiveness. In a quick-paced narrative straddling both the genres of novel and short story, Stella Pierides recreates a world within a world, miles apart from the well-trodden tourist trail to Greece.
“…Vox Humana Books…eclectic literature with a human voice…”
