Patience: Taking Time in an Age of Acceleration
Akiko Busch
Sterling, 2010, $14.95
Design writer, essayist, and Hudson River swimmer Busch’s elegant contribution to Sterling’s good-things-in-small-packages Arts of Living series is a graceful suite of four meditations on time and nature, touching on Buddhist thought, the Slow Food movement, the changing of seasons, and the timelessness of Beacon Mountain. Reading 11/5 at 7:30pm, Oblong Books & Music, Rhinebeck.
Comeback Love
Peter Golden
Staff Picks Press, 2010, $16.95
Can long-lost love reignite? Thirty-five years after a low draft lottery number changed his fortunes, Gordon Meyers reconnects with the woman he left behind. He’s divorced, she’s widowed, and both are blindsided by “memory’s guile, its sad and evil magic.” Journalist Golden skillfully interweaves present and past in this heartfelt first novel. Reading 11/6 at 4:30pm, BookHouse, Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany.
Ghost Prints
Jason Gehlert, Tammy Gehlert, and Robert Milby, sketches by Andrew Berkery
Black Bed Sheet Press, 2010, $16.95
Grass-roots horrormeister Gehlert presides over an extended-family collection of prose and poetry from the dark side, invoking his late mother as part of his “inner creative team” and including work by his wife, his artist brother, and friend Robert Milby—poet and Theremin Ghosts performer—alongside his own blood-stained stories. Reading 11/14 at 1pm, Barnes & Noble, Mohegan Lake.
Learning To Be Human
Jason Stern, edited by Brent Robison
Codhill Press, 2010, $20
Chronogram publisher Stern culls highlights from 13 years of his philosophically eclectic and deeply personal “Esteemed Reader” ruminations. As Robison observes, “by being gathered from multiplicity into oneness, the disparate segments are transformed” into a unique and cohesive vision. Book launch party 11/14 at 7pm, BEAHIVE, 314 Wall Street, Kingston.
Lost Knowledge of the Ancients: a Graham Hancock Reader
edited by Glenn Kreisberg
Bear & Co., 2010, $18
Woodstocker Kreisberg presents a tasting sampler of writings by alternative historians, including bestseller Hancock on multiracial early Americans, John Anthony West on the limitations of traditional archaeology, Robert Bauval on Egyptian astronomy, and other provocative ways to look at the old through new eyes. The reading originally scheduled for 11/18 at 7:30pm, Oblong Books & Music, Rhinebeck has been postponed indefinitely.
Child of My Child: Poems and Stories for Grandparents
edited by Sandi Gelles-Cole and Kenneth Salzmann
Gelles-Cole Literary Enterprises, 2010, $14.95
The generation that didn’t trust anyone over 30 has gone grandparental, and this wide-ranging anthology explores new paradigms and timeless bonds. Shunning traditional “greeting card verse,” the Woodstock editors offer emotional, wise, and surprising works by more than 60 seasoned writers. Reading by local contributors 11/20 at 8pm, Arts Society of Kingston.
This article appears in November 2010.
