Read the beginning of "Sleep" from Sleep in Me byJon Pineda:

"A week later I would start seventh grade at Great Bridge Junior High. The building had actually been the high school building from the year before. The new one was down the road on Hanbury, the one Rica would have graduated from. As I walked the hallways of my new school, I couldn’t help but wonder which of these lockers had belonged to my sisters. I would have given anything to know. In which shadowy corner had each of them kissed their boyfriends, whispered plans to skip, or just meet up with friends after school.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Sleep in Me by Jon Pineda”

Read the beginning of the title story, "Bliss" from Bliss and Other Short Stories by Ted Gilley:

"All my life, I seem to have been mistaken for someone else. The other day, a woman stopped me in the produce aisle at the market and said, “Michael?” When I pick up heart pills for my dad, the pharmacist always says, “Hi, Tim.” When I correct him, he smiles and says, “Good to see you.” When I walk down Idle Road from my apartment to my job, or along the highway, people I don’t know wave at me from cars. I wave back, it can’t hurt. One day a girl leaned out of a car as it shot by and yelled, “I love you, Jamie!” I am introduced to people over and over again. “Have we met?” they say. “It’s Walter, or Phil, or Daniel, isn’t it?” I have wondered if wearing a name tag would be a bad idea. Hello, I’m Cleave. Who could forget such a name? When I look in the mirror I realize that I am, to some extent, a fabrication. The face looks like mine, all right, but also looks, vaguely, like anyone’s: a racial cameo of smooth skin, fine hair. Mouth, nose, and eyes all where they should be, but somehow indistinct—the anonymous, undeclared face of a baby. A face you could put a face onto, including your own, or that of someone close to you whom you’ve not seen in you can’t remember how long. “Michael?” When the lady in the store said that, I just smiled and shook my head—and she looked confused, hurt, angry. Who had she lost? Yes, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Yes, it’s me.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Bliss and Other Short Stories by Ted Gilley”

Read the beginning of the first chapter from Stolen Horses by Dan O'Brien:

"Since Erwin Benson was a young man he has been an early riser. Belief that the darkness would cease and that the sun was on its way made him hopeful and was as close to religion as he ever managed. From time to time he wished he could believe in more. He always knew that such a leap would have made life easier, but he could never take that leap and had to settle for the predawn. His early morning ritual has served him well enough. He was eighty-five years old and still working. Already this morning he made his way in the dark from his house on Calvert Street to his office in the Lakota County courthouse. He moved through the inky air like a blind man in his own home, navigated by the scent of waning lilac and columbine. By feel he found the office key on a ring of many. Without switching on the light, he puttered with the coffeepot and wandered the three rooms of the county prosecutor’s office waiting for it to perk. He glanced out the window and was pleased to find the darkness still exhilarating. There was still the sense of risk. There was a chance that today was the day the sun would not rise. Rising early was an act of faith.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Stolen Horses by Dan O’Brien”

New in paperback, read from the Introduction to Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country by Robert V. Camuto:

"It was a perfect day to lose faith in wine. By midmorning on June 21, 2005, the heat and humidity were conspiring to make it another in a series of stifling hot days in Bordeaux. I’d set out from Saint-Émilion in my tiny Citroën rental car—windows rolled down to make up for the lack of air conditioning—en route to Vinexpo, the world’s largest wine convention held once every two years in the sprawling convention site north of the city.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Corkscrewed by Robert V. Camuto”

Read the beginning of the Introduction from Swords from the Sea by Harold Lamb, edited by Howard Andrew Jones, Introduction by S. M. Stirling:

"One thing we tend to forget about the pulps was how many of them there were, and how much was written for them. The science-fiction and fantasy segments and the superhero pulps remain freshest in memory, because they were at the root of traditions that have continued and flourished ever since; and the Western, if not in such condition, is not forgotten. But in fact, the adventure pulps contained dozens of distinct subgenres: Western, Oriental, Detective, South Seas, any number of historical types such as the pirate story or the tale of the Crusades. And miscegenation in plenty—tales of detectives having adventures in Chinatown, for example, or of super-science set among Tibetan mahatmas (the last a specialty of Talbot Mundy, a contemporary of Lamb’s), or psychic Chinese detectives involving “spicy” tales of white slavery.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Swords from the Sea by Harold Lamb”

Read from the Editor's Introduction to Nature's Aristocracy: A Plea for the Oppressed by Jennie Collins, edited and with an introduction by Judith A. Ranta: "Jennie Collins wrote Nature’s Aristocracy; or, Battles and Wounds in Time of Peace: A Plea for the Oppressed at a time when questions about the meaning of work and about relations between labor and capital were being passionately debated. During the headlong postbellum expansion of American industry, people struggled to understand the changing workplace. One journalist wrote in 1869, “It is becoming more and more plain, and being more and more freely admitted, that this … Continue reading Off the Shelf: Nature’s Aristocracy by Jennie Collins

Read from the Foreword to Swords from the East by Harold Lamb, edited by Howard Andrew Jones:

"Harold Lamb wrote that he’d found something “gorgeous and new” when he discovered chronicles of Asian history in the libraries of Columbia University. He remained fascinated with the East thereafter, which is evident from his first stories of western adventurers in Asia to the last book published before his death in 1962, Babur the Tiger. All of his popular fiction is anchored in Asia, whether it be the cycle of Khlit the Cossack, descended from the Tatar hero Kaidu, or Durandal’s Sir Hugh of Taranto, who travels into Asia during the conquests of Genghis Khan, or even the adventures of Genghis Khan himself, as related in “The Three Palladins” in this volume.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Swords from the East by Harold Lamb”

Read the beginning of the Introduction from A Summer to Be: A Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland by Isabel Garland Lord, edited and with an introduction by Keith Newlin:

"Readers who come to A Summer to Be because of an interest in Hamlin Garland will discover a fascinating side of the writer that he never revealed in his eight volumes of autobiography—the intensely-loving, domineering father whose deep love for his eldest daughter led him to change the trajectory of his career even as that love impeded his daughter's independence. Garland was ill equipped by temperament for marriage and fatherhood, to which he came late, marrying in 1899 at age thirty-nine. He had spent his adulthood in almost incessant travel as he fulfilled lecture engagements and indulged his own wanderlust by exploring the West, by visiting the goldfields in the Yukon, and by journeying to England to meet the authors with whom he had been corresponding. As he entered his fourth decade, he found it difficult to break his solitary habits and enter the inevitable compromises of marriage and family life. Though he was a devoted father who spared no effort to ease the passage into adulthood of his two daughters, Mary Isabel, born in 1903, and Constance, born in 1907, his fatherly guidance was as often overbearing as it was loving—as Isabel (who dropped her first name in her late teens) amply illustrates in her memoir.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: A Summer to Be by Isabel Garland Lord”