Category: Our Books

Muñeca

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by Cynthia Gómez

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

A regular of both the San Francisco Writers Workshop and the Zoom-based Wednesday Edition, where she workshopped this novel, Cynthia Gómez is also the author of The Nightmare Box and Other Stories. Her short fiction has published in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. She lives in Oakland.

Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Preorder on Bookshop.com or at your favorite local bookstore.

Honey in the Wound

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by Jiyoung Han

Young-Ja infuses food with her emotions. She revels in her gift for cooking, nourishing the people she loves with her cheerfulness. But her sunny childhood comes to an end in 1931 when Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire. Young-Ja is cast adrift, her food turning increasingly bitter with grief. When a Korean rebel fighter notices her talents, however, she is whisked off to Manchuria to join a secretive sisterhood of beautiful teahouse spies. There, Young-Ja finds a new sense of belonging and starts using her abilities for the resistance. But the Imperial Army is not yet finished with her…

As an unforgettable family perseveres in the long shadow of colonialism, Honey in the Wound transports readers to mountain forests where tiger-girls stalk, to Manchurian teahouses and opium dens where charming smiles veil secrets, and to the modern metropolises of Tokyo and Seoul where restless ghosts stir. This debut novel is a tender yet powerful multi-generational drama that shines light onto the twentieth century’s darkest corners and gives voice to those who bore witness.

Published by Avid Reader Press. Preorder on Bookshop or at your favorite local bookstore!

The House of Found Objects

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by Jo Beckett-King

Twelve-year-old Bea from Passaic, New Jersey, is visiting her family in Paris for the summer when her grandmother’s most precious heirloom—a drawing by Henri Matisse—goes missing. After a cryptic clue arrives on Bea’s doorstep suggesting its whereabouts, Bea is determined to pursue the lead.

Without the French skills to navigate her way around the landmarks of Paris, she teams up with her cousin, Céline, whose clear-eyed French directness makes her a perfect partner for curious, problem-solving Bea. The girls embark on a city-wide search, deciphering riddles, solving puzzles, and cracking codes as they try to locate the Matisse, find a thief, and identify their mysterious benefactor.

Published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Order on Bookshop or Amazon. Don’t forget to rate and review!

Truther Narratives

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by Tamim Ansary

The latest book by Tamim Ansary, former moderator and beloved leader of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, TRUTHER NARRATIVES: CONSPIRACY THEORY EXPLAINED. WHAT IT IS, HOW IT FORMS, WHY IT SPREADS is a long-form essay which uses conspiracy theory as a lens for looking at a larger issue—the way narrative shapes our experience of social reality and how this impacts and is impacted by culture and history. 

It begins by asking a simple question: what do we mean by conspiracy theory? How does this type of story differ from narratives about real conspiracies (which after all do occur at times)? The search for answers takes the inquiry into psychology, evolutionary biology, social sciences, cultural analysis, and history. Conspiracy theory emerges from this inquiry as a particular type of narrative. The book refers to this underlying template as the Truther Narrative.

A literary critic would recognize a truther narrative as a story built around an archetypal mythic structure: one that all conspiracy theories tend to evoke in common, whatever their surface differences might be. The book spotlights instances in history when this narrative has burgeoned, and has fed movements, and it explores those historical episodes for ideas about why the Truther Narrative seems to be surging in our time and how we as a society might respond to it.

Buy the book here.

I Will Be the Woman He Loved

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by Tania Romanov and Matthew Félix

Revisiting past lives, loves, and lessons, Romanov recounts the challenges of her immigrant childhood in San Francisco and being a successful young female executive in a pre-#MeToo, male-dominated workplace. Facing her loss and grief, she struggles to come to terms with a future very different from what she imagined-one in which she must rediscover her love of life and redefine herself yet again.

Order on Bookshop.

The Nightmare Box and Other Stories

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by Cynthia Gómez

A young queer man finds love at a magical clothing shop—and the courage to stand up to the homophobic cops. A witch who makes custom nightmares wonders why all her victims are connected to the Black Panthers—and who she’s really working for. A soon-to-be father encounters a mysterious hitchhiker who tries pulling him back to the days of his violent past. A brand-new vampire, freshly hired at the blood bank, delights in her heightened sexual desire and superhuman strength.

Cynthia Gómez’s debut collection from Cursed Morsels Press is a magic-soaked love letter to Oakland, brimming with feminist rage. Its twelve stories center ordinary people—Latine, queer, working class-as they wield supernatural powers against oppression, loneliness, and dread.

Buy this book from the publisher or on Amazon. Don’t forget to rate and review.

Short Happy Stories

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by Evan Pellervo

Inspired by Tolstoy, Salinger, and Lydia Davis, these stories try to make the most of the present. Existential uncertainties are explored; the consistent goal is to find a way to optimism.

This eclectic collection contains clouds and journeys and dogs and confused people and every season and a big gamble and… a leaping ocelot!

The world can sometimes seem pretty bleak; Short Happy Stories is a book for anyone who wants to read fiction that is uniquely uplifting.

Evan Pellervo is a fiction writer and an independent contractor who has worked on writing projects in several industries. He currently lives in Monterey, CA.

Buy the book on Amazon

Preventing Senior Moments: How to Stay Alert into Your 90s and Beyond

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by Stan Goldberg

Some senior moments are what they seem—brain glitches no more concerning than realizing the problem arose because of something easily fixable such as wearing hearing aids. But others are the result of complex information processing errors. Unfortunately, until Preventing Senior Moments, no book or article offered research-based strategies for preventing senior moments that range from forgetting appointments to becoming disorientated. Using real life, relatable stories, Goldberg reveals the processes behind senior moments, how to recognize the signs, and strategies for preventing them.

A workshop regular for several years before the pandemic, Stan Goldberg is a person living with cancer, Professor Emeritus who for more than 25 years taught, provided therapy, researched, and published in the areas of learning problems, communication disorders, loss, change and end-of-life issues. For eight years he was a bedside hospice volunteer and currently counsels caregivers.

Buy the book here.

Wildflowers

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by Beverly Parayno

It often takes more than ten years for a talented workshop writer to gather the tools they need to publish their first book. We congratulate Beverly Parayno with her powerful debut WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press). In these nine unforgettable stories, spanning several generations and traversing the Philippines, the Bay Area, and Ireland, Parayno illuminates the emotional and psychological journeys of Filipino and Filipino American girls and women experiencing fear, desire, loneliness, and despair.

Parayno was born in the Bay Area and raised in East San José by immigrant parents from the Philippines. Her fiction, memoir, essays and author interviews appear in Narrative Magazine, Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Warscapes, Huizache, and Southword: New Writing from Ireland, among others. Her work has been translated into Mandarin and published by World Literature, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  

Buy the book here.

Window Eyes

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by Philip Jason

WINDOW EYES is a novel about an eccentric comic book artist and writer Kellan Savoy who, in the wake of a tragedy, created one final work and then disappeared. That work, a series about a man who tries to make a golem to replace his dead lover, is presented here for the first time: Window Eyes is a collection of annotated issue summaries as remembered by the only person to read the work before it vanished with Kellan, Kellan’s best friend Thomas Levi, who hopes that in sharing it, he might be able to shed some light on the mystery of its creation and disappearance. 

Philip Jason attended the workshop in 2014. His stories can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and J Journal; his poetry in Spillway, Lake Effect, Canary and Summerset Review. He is a recipient of the Henfield Prize in Fiction. His first collection of poetry, I Don’t Understand Why It’s Crazy to Hear the Beautiful Songs of Nonexistent Birds, is available from Fernwood Press.

Buy WINDOW EYES from Unsolicited Press.