Baobab Press – serie

Donovan James enjoys his routine. Wake up. Catch the El. Teach high school English. Run the track. Return home on the train. Repeat. In a turbulent Chicago, this routine keeps his mind from wandering. Well, from wandering into the less-immediate world anyway. You see, Donovan can’t seem to stop watching the people who frequent his morning commute, or from dissecting their lives based on these regular but limited encounters. He believes that he knows them well. That is until one morning, he runs late, and by a series of minuscule events he runs into her, the lady in the blue coat, a passenger on his train car whom he has seldom paid attention. The moment is fleeting, but now everything has changed. The routine is disrupted. Lives are not what they seem. Soon Donovan will be caught up in the investigations of Detective Lesley Powell as well as a train full of other lives and their lies, careening toward something mysterious and sinister. Donovan knows where he got on this train, but where will he get off? In M-theory, Tiffany Cates meticulously layers America’s societal, spiritual, and moral tensions in a plot that travels through the streets and elevated tracks of Chicago, creating a riveting thriller with an endearing love story at its beating heart. As inventive and intelligent as it is entertaining, M-theory marks Tiffany Cates as an important voice in American fiction.

Cartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love's name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.

Three novellas, Teresa Carmody's Today Must Be Sunday, Kim Chinquee’s I Thought of England, and Allison Pitinii Davis’s Business, unique in style and narrative, deal with longing, loneliness, fear, and the relationships their characters make, and break, on their way to something like peace, if not happiness. Entering and abandoning social contracts and expectations across the country in the pursuit of the somewhat ethereal notion of contentment, these stories highlight the struggles of women across American cultural eras, armed only with their ability to think and to act. These three novellas describe the harrowing, soul-rattling actions and choices made by women in the pursuit of defining their lives.

For readers of C.D. Wright, Natalie Diaz, and Tim Earley, Surgencies responds to the sounds and movements alive in rural northern Wisconsin. In each line Abraham Smith includes an excitement in answer to frog, coyote, eagle, barn swallow. Surgencies is a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster. In Surgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left-hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast. Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that "kicked skulls roll funny." Prepare to get honey-skulled.

In Catherine Gammon’s The Martyrs, The Lovers, Jutta Carroll and her lover Lukas Grimm are found shot to death in their home. Was it a murder-suicide? Was it the work of their political enemies, or possibly someone close to them? From WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, The Martyrs, The Lovers is a novel wrought with the best of mystery, historical, and metafiction. Gammon, wielding prose like a surgical scalpel, peels back the layers of history to explore the forces and motivations—external and psychological—that drive politics, passion, and activism, as well as the counterforces that threaten their progress. By probing all of the possible motives behind Jutta and Lukas’s deaths, Gammon tells a tale of individual roles in world politics, considers the role of Western narrative structures, how and why we tell the stories that endure, and the (im)possibility of Truth.Loosely based on the life and death of the activist and founder of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly, and her partner Gerd Bastien, The Martyrs, The Lovers calls attention to the perennial challenges that informed the lives and deaths of these activists; to environment, to peace, to justice, and to feminism, which, if anything, are more prevalent than ever today.

This book offers a unique look at a little-known aspect of immigrant culture in California and Nevada during the first half of the twentieth century. The years 1920 to 1950 represented the high point of the sheep industry in the western U.S. The mountain meadows of the Sierra Nevada were an important source of summer forage, and Basque sheepherders, many recently arrived from the Pyrenees, were primarily responsible for tending the flocks. The shepherd's life among the aspen groves was isolated and solitary, and it led many herders to utilize the trees as a means of self-expression. Using simple tools such as pocket knives or nails, the herders turned to the white bark of the aspens. On this living canvas, they etched a remarkable series of carvings, recording everything from their own names to observations of the natural world around them, memories of the Basque Country, and not surprisingly, erotic fantasies. Over time, the living and perishable nature of the medium subtly altered the sheepherders work, and eventually doomed it. Most of the carvings are now lost.

Take one long-married and occasionally exasperated couple getting along in years, their well meaning daughter and precocious grandson, a clueless dog, an independent minded cat, plus assorted other quirky but endearing characters and you have the world of Pickles, Brian Crane's beloved comic strip that takes a wiry but good-natured look at the foibles of family and friends.

Hats Off to the Cap is a collection of poetry that discusses a variety of topics including the narrator's youth and commentary on the excesses of the modern era.

Getting old is not for sissies. But as Brian Crane's crotchety but endearing seniors Earl and Opal Pickles do it, it can be humorous and often touching. For over twenty-five years, Crane's comic strip, Pickles, has been delighting readers around the world. This seventh collection continues the adventures of grandparents Earl and Opal; their precocious grandson, Nelson; quirky family members and friends; and the family's dog and cat, who offer their own distinctive views of the goings-on. Crane's view of the foibles of a long-married, often cantankerous couple and their extended family and friends is wry, honest, and always warm-hearted.

The days are cold. Winter is coming fast to the Nevada Mountains. The white ducks need a warm spot to sleep; so does the old mountain lion. Like children who want to snuggle with their moms the ducks find a purrrfect spot to sleep. And the old mountain lion gains something he never had before.

Nevada Grown: A Year in Local Food is a celebration of Nevada's thriving food culture and an invitation to discover how rich and diverse the bountiful harvest Nevada's hardworking and talented farmers deliver. We invite you to source your ingredients from local farms to find out how delicious turnips and beets are when they're young, tender, and fresh from the field. Rediscover the taste of beef and pork raised on local ranches. Relish the flavor and freshness of locally produced eggs and honey. Try Nevada-grown dates and pistachios. See why Fallon cantaloupe is considered the best in the nation. Delight in kohlrabi cakes, sorrel soup, and kale salad. Be brave and add sunchokes and fennel to your farmers market list. But most of all, enjoy your culinary journey around our state.