Stillhouse Press – förlag

"e;We have a situation that borders on a snake pit."e; - Robert F. KennedyIn 1987, following a public outcry about its questionable medical practices, Staten Island's Willowbrook State School for people with intellectual disabilities closed its doors for good. Flat broke and almost finished with graduate school, Dan Tomasulo -- now a core faculty member at Columbia University's Spirituality Mind Body Institute -- was hired to relocate Willowbrook's most severely disabled inhabitants into a groundbreaking community-based group home. American Snake Pit is the story of the disregarded souls who ended up in Tomasulo's care; of the eccentric, resilient staff who helped make such a momentous success possible; and, most of all, of one man's persistent struggle to give voices to those who could not advocate for themselves.

From the glittering heat of India's Pink City to the palm-lined streets of Silicon Valley and the vanilla-bean fields of Madagascar, Anita Felicelli's debut collection delivers a dazzling array of precisely drawn characters searching for identity in the seemingly narrow spaces of their everyday lives. Imbued with magic, Felicelli's stories center on first- and second-generation Tamil Americans--immigrants, daughters, and lovers exploring what it means to lose and to love, to continually reinvent oneself while honoring the personal histories and lost continents that shape us all.

When a seemingly routine medical procedure results in her mother's premature death, Anne Panning is left reeling. In her first full-length memoir, the celebrated essayist draws on decades of memory and experience as she pieces together the hard truths about her own past and her mother's. We follow Panning's winding path from rural Minnesota to the riverbanks of Vietnam's Mekong Delta and all the way back again-a stark, poignant tale of two women deeply connected, yet somehow forever apart. Dragonfly Notes is a testament to the prevailing nature of love, whether in the form of a rediscovered note, a sudden moment of unexpected recall, or sometimes, simply, the sight a dragonfly flitting past.