Kirjahaku

Five and Ten, by a prize-winning poet and novelist, includes a fairy tale, a few poems, and a fable for children illustrated by the author's young daughters. "The Golden Squirrel" was originally published in "Modern Day Fairy Tales." "A Fable," first appeared in "ELM: Eureka Literary Magazine" and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and subsequently in "The World of English," China, with Chinese translation. The poems originally appeared in the following publications: "The Caterpillar," "Lucid Rhythms," "Rattle & Rictus," "The South Carolina Review," "The Dirigible Balloon," and "Spring: A Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society."

Serge Bering-Strait, a young poet who lives with his activist mother and four aunties in a Greenwich Village brownstone, has just gone to work as copywriter for "Women's Omnibus" magazine. Serge would much rather have remained up in his garret room writing poetry, but his mother, Dagmar, and his Auntie Janet have insisted that it's high time he got out into the world--it isn't natural to be a recluse at twenty-three--his Auntie Janet, in fact, has secured the job for Serge by calling in a favor from the editor at "Women's Omnibus," Bettina Battle. Ms. Battle, the "Battle of Britain," as she is often referred to by her underlings, hails from "Swinging London"--the magazine as well as the city. In this New York work-a-day situation of the swinging Sixties, Serge finds himself the object of unwanted sexual advances from his lady boss editor. It is all too upsetting to this young, shy, poet. He has spent his whole life under the thumbs of five very tough, aggressive women and now the additional pressure from Editor Battle, out to deflower him, brings him to a crossroads. He must assert himself In the beginning, he has only one true supporter in this struggle: Juanna Donna Lorca, his childhood transexual nanny-cum general housekeeper for the family, who is partial to flamenco dresses. Serge, somewhat inspired by his love of the classics, and perhaps somewhat inspired by the idea of poetic justice, and simply pressured to let off steam, begins a novel--Resurgius. Coincidentally, or not, he begins his novel immediately after meeting the girl of his dreams. It is a futuristic tale of a universe governed by women who bear a striking resemblance to his mother and aunties. In the nation called Atalanta, however, trouble is brewing. The enslaved Dongs, as males are called, are in revolt. In fact, there's an underground leader in ascendancy--one Resurgius. This stalwart Resurgius bears an uncanny resemblance to Serge, obviously a wish-fulfillment, for he has everything that Serge has not--especially muscles and courage, though he is several I.Q. points down from Serge himself and wears Serge's actual horn-rimmed spectacles. Through the process of writing his novel, and with the help of his transgender friends, and his girlfriend, Amanda, Serge, who has been taught by his dominating female family to pee sitting down, stands up for himself, at last.

"Schorb has an ear for the manifold accents of American speech, and that adds significantly to the amazing variety of this book. As for locale, these narrations will take you from North Carolina Outer Banks to Polynsia and points in between, with sorrowful or merry stays in New York Greenwich Village. A character, Jimmy Whistler, appears in several stories set in the Village, and this recurrence of actor and locale is a skillful esthetic counterpoise to this amazing variety of riches. Schorb also has a special touch, almost Dickensian, for depicting egoism in enduring ways and unvorgettably despicable characters. This book will amaze you by the variety of what it offers." Ricardo L. Nirenberg, Editor, Offcourse Literary Journal

The Secret of Jessie Judas spans the last year in the life of a famed marine biologist and author, who has suffered most of her life from a haunting sense of something dreadful in her past. As a young girl growing up practically orphaned, with little or no education, on a nearly deserted Outer Banks island, Jessie has the good luck to meet a visiting writer, a folklorist. The writer becomes Jessie's protector, mentor and, eventually, her virtual mother. Unknown to Jessie, her father, who has been serving time in prison since she was an infant, returns to the island, incognito. His only desire is to observe his daughter and make sure that she's safe. He has no intention of interfering in her life, if he's satisfied. He finds twelve-year-old Jessie living with her step-father, an eccentric travelling evangelist, who might well be psychopathic; but since Jessie is also under the protection of her friend, the folklorist, her father hesitates to reveal himself and intrude in her life. His hesitation to do so inadvertently triggers the event which creates in her the sense of tragedy that ever after shadows her otherwise successful life.

This book engages the literary, the bawdy, and the surreal. Beyond its obvious skill, the feeling that comes through most clearly is a respect for the versatility of light verse--the forms it can be found in and the subjects it will accommodate.

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.Albert Einstein

What is most striking about the collected poems of E.M. Schorb is their subtle musicality and intellectual range. They demonstrate that Mr Schorb is a poet of great skill and keen wit. His work hearkens back to the great poems of the first half of the twentieth century, to the masterpieces of Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden and William Dickey. They bespeak the presence of a major American poet, one whose mastery of forms is unparalleled and whose voice is resonant, passionate and true long after his book is returned to the shelf.

Transit: Tales of Mystery, History, and Crime is a collection of stories, from novel-length to the very brief, in which fictional and historical characters struggle with good and evil, from a prize-winning story teller.

A collection of humorous stories, prose poems, poems, and cartoons, originally published in magazines from around the world and including several excerpts from two award-winning novels.

"A Portable Chaos is an historical novel that brings to life the transformation of the United States from the con-forming Fifties to the volcanic social eruptions of the "swinging Sixties"-from the private chaos of Jimmy Whistler's childhood to the public chaos of his youth, the former shaping himself, the latter shaping all Ameri-cans."

A Portable Chaos opens with a stream-of-conscious-ness flash-back to a childhood incidents that resemble James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," which gains significance as the novel unfolds. The main character, Jimmy Whistler, is a decent guy overflowing with un-tapped potential, who walks away from opportunities and the wrong sort of success and follows his bliss as a poet. Whistler and his friend Marsayas, a Zoroastrian hippie, belong to the generation of men who were possible or actual cannon fodder during the U.S.A. war in Vietnam, the generation that witnessed the end of the dominant myth of American difference, or American innocence. After a pretty squalid time living "la vie Boheme" (vividly written, conjuring up the ghosts of 1960s' past), Whistler emerges from the slough and finds validation, the girl, fame, fortune, content-ment, and reconciliation with all those childhood demons.

Needleneck is an unusual, vivid tale, combining elements of sexual compulsion and enduring love, of violence and intellectual questioning, of action so handled that it becomes morally symbolic, of the carnal and the spiritual. This is a fast-paced adventure and a moral dream that turns into nightmare. The dialogue rings with the truth of the spoken word and the story moves with shocking speed.