Bücher veröffentlicht von Coyote Arts LLC

A Million-Dollar Bill surveys our lives in America up close and personal from the first young summer taste in "Watermelon Seeds" to the hopeful hand-made creation of legal tender to purchase the necessities and accessories of the American Dream in the title poem.Quirky, original, and astute, this expansive and engaging poetry collection by Eric Paul Shaffer entertains even as each poem presses readers to pause and think for a moment.From love to death to parking the car, from rain to ice to sky to falling stars, the little insights that grow large in language are here for the reading. Best of all, with A Million-Dollar Bill, you can keep the change.

"Through the alchemical magic of his marvelous prose, Spranger somehow manages to transform the inferno of human suffering into a luminous paradise of pure literary delight." - Edward Deville"Like some sort of hybrid of La Rochefoucauld and Frankenstein, Christopher Spranger has dusted off that venerable relic of literary taxonomy, the epigram, and reanimated it for the twenty-first century. The precocious Spranger has been compared to Cioran not only for his gravity, profundity, spookiness and gloom, but also because no one since the great Romanian has used the aphorism with such verve and vitality, obliquity and subtlety, originality and eloquence. The maxims and micro-essays that make up Spranger's The Comedy of Agony trace their ancestry to Dante as much as to Diogenes; each of the volume's gnomic distillates stings like Schopenhauer, bites like Bierce; each is a sententious sermon, an elegiac word-capsule suitable for inscription on Chamfort's tomb. Spranger's comedy does not pretend to be divine but instead attempts to illuminate the fineries of our hellish existence." - Gilbert Alter-GilbertThis book is the fruit of my desire to perform simultaneously two feats impossible to perform simultaneously, two feats that could not even be per- formed separately, by myself: to write the next Commedia, and to bring forth a volume whose every page would remain pure of the word "God." Needless to say, the more I tried to exclude this latter from my concerns, the more I was haunted by Him. God is like a disease whose etiology is not well understood of which the helpless victim seeks to cure himself in vain. As for redoing Dante's epic: my total inability to detect even the slightest hint of reality anyplace outside of Hell turned out to be a considerable obstacle to the completion of this enterprise. To save Purgatory from what I perceived as its insipidity and to make it into something more than a mere watered-down Inferno, I was forced to transform it in my mind into a realm where one got stuck, into a realm where one waited forever for a delivering call that never came. Nor could I seriously entertain any Paradise save that death consisting in complete extinction promised us by the utopian doctrine of reductive materialism. In case the consequences of this weren't already catastrophic enough, there is yet another way in which I failed to meet up to my own expectations: aspiring to a very serious and solemn tone, to a tone as black as midnight and as cold as the moon, I wound up writing a book riddled with laughter and not a little frivolous. I flatter myself some dismal notes ring out amidst so much diverting music, but all too few, I fear. Lest this should produce the impression I am one of those lofty Stoical beings capable of smiling indifferently at Fate's demonic pranks, I will say now for the record I am not. As a matter of fact, the mere idea of ataraxia gives me the blues. My blood, my nerves, and my heart unite in repudiating ancient and modern therapies alike. In literature, however, anything is possible. Save genuine happiness, of course - which isn't possible anywhere. Even the idea of Heaven appears to have no other purpose than to amplify the pain of the universally damned. So long as the human mind is poisoned by the faintest hope of "something better," we shall all be tormented in the same way as Tantalus is tormented by that water he so longs for and will never taste. - Christopher Spranger

Green Leaves: New and Selected Poems collects work from Eric Paul Shaffer's seven volumes and thirty-five years of publication. On voyages around the Pacific Rim, from California to Okinawa to Hawai'i, Shaffer's sharp eye for natural and human detail delights and illuminates. A charter member of the "Clear Pool School," Shaffer writes direct, profound, and often funny poems celebrating the American vernacular and encouraging a broader sense of the human, humane, ecological, and planetary.

The Secret of the Old Cloche is a crochet cozy mystery inspired by Nancy Drew. After one too many glasses of wine at a business dinner, Agatha Christine is suddenly out of work, losing both her CIA job and her cover job in the same day. Following her financial planner's advice, she moves back to her home town to live with her mother, while she builds a new career as a crochet designer. She is offered an investigative job, and with bills to pay and a career to launch, she can't afford to say no. She is thrust into a mystery where pet lovers and crafters in this DIY wonderland battle with NIMBY socialites for control of an inheritance locked up in the confusing last wishes of Amelia Dettmer an eccentric heiress and animal welfare advocate. If Agatha is unable to uncover the truth, the people and pets of Amelia's beloved Quercus Grove Animal Rescue Society and Thrift (QGARST) will be left out in the cold.The Secret of the Old Cloche is the first Agatha Christine mystery.

In conjunction with UNESCO''s designation of 2007 as the "Year of Rumi," Joe Martin (Yousef Daoud) released a stage adaptation of Rumi''s Mathnavi. For ten years, Rumi had been the best selling poet in America. But until Joe Martin''s book, most English speakers had found it almost impossible to get a sense of the world of his greatest work, the Mathnavi. The first edition of Joe Martin''s dramatic adaptation provided that opportunity. But the first edition has been unavailable for about five years.The second edition will again give a wide audience an authentic taste of Rumi''s six-volume work, in a reader''s edition, accompanied by photographs from the 2005 production of the play. The adaptation utilizes loyal renderings directly from the Persian and Reynolds Nicholson''s famous six-volume Persian and English version of the major work by the man often called the Shakespeare of the Middle East. Rumi''s spiritual philosophy and strangely postmodern ability to shift between genres-from parables, to commentaries, to lyric flights of poetry-combine to make his work the most all embracing, open-hearted and powerful of texts to come out of the Islamic world. Rumi''s writing is one of the single greatest antidotes to the "clash of civilizations" thinking used by ideologues on two sides to challenge the peace of the world. A dozen key parables and songs demonstrating the Sufi philosophy of the Unity of Being provide the body the text. Rumi''s Mathnavi was first sponsored by the Center for Global Peace and the Department of Performing Arts at American University in a reader''s theatre version in 1999 and 2000. Versions of it have been produced at the La MaMa ETC main stage in New York and elsewhere. In 2006, the piece toured the East coast cities as a theatre-for-peace project-with discussions hosted by Quakers, conflict resolution specialists, Imams, Rabbis, a Sufi Sheikh, and well-known peace activists including Iraqi-American Andy Shallal. Performed in the traditional Sufi circle with live musicians and Persian dance, it became a ritual realization of Rumi''s book. UNESCO in conjunction with the Turkish Embassy -- representing the country where the Persian poet lived most of his life-has issued a medallion for the year of Rumi, recognizing his present importance for the world. The events scheduled for this year that also honor Rumi and his incomparable poetic work include a documentary film on current-day students of Rumi and a CD of his poetry set to music. A feature film on the life of Rumi is currently in the works.

His first two collections of short stories, Toothpaste with Chlorophyll (1973) and Maritime Hot Baths (1980), published here for the first time in English, have long established Papadimitrakopoulos as one of the leading Greek writers, one whose work recalls such painters of the triste and ephemeral as Peter Altenberg, Sait Faik and Dezso¿ Kosztolänyi, with here and there a maudlin, funny-sad brushstroke of James Thurber.

Unlike most books of poems nowadays, Goodbye, Ice by Lawrence Millman has a strong ecological bias. The book offers a window on the natural world of the Arctic and its tradition-bound indigenous people. Climate change, inevitably, raises its ugly head in many of the poems, but the book itself is a lament not just for the loss of ice, but for the loss of the Arctic itself.