Four Winds Press – serie

Inspired by the spirit and approach of Bertolt Brecht's Manual of Piety, the poems of Laughing Cult often employ the structures of ballads, folksongs, and other traditional forms to create miniature sketches marked by romantic ambiguity, occultism, science fiction, and quirky angst. As cool in tone as a Lee Konitz solo and as lacking in affect as pop art, this first collection includes numerous poems that have appeared on the Exquisite Corpse website. To shape something aesthetically charged out of the spent elements and enervated thoughts of a slowly failing society: that's the challenge Laughing Cult has set for itself. These are two-dimensional poems for a one-dimensional age.

Politics is everywhere these days; we are drowning in it. The Voyage of the UnderGod holds up a mirror to this sad state of affairs by creating a world animated by partisan political feeling, every utterance up for grabs as an allusion or parody or gag or prank or desperate cry for help. In a reality TV show a 19th-century tall ship sails the south Atlantic, doubling back to Rio de Janeiro, then down the coast to the deadly Cape Horn. Its celebrity captain is Luther Dorsey, a presidential hopeful whose back-story combines elements of Reagan, Limbaugh, and George W. The tone is mock-heroic yet charged with dramatic intensity as Luther makes his last grasp at the greatness he thinks he deserves.

An invitation from a dead man propels a Chicago plumber on a perilous journey from Hong Kong to Inner Mongolia in search of a fabled map of the Invisible World Andrew Mann's mundane existence ends the day his jet-setting childhood friend, Clayton Smith, sends Andrew an airplane ticket to Asia along with an invitation to his own funeral, dispatched shortly before his mysterious suicide. Stylish, elegant and thrilling, Stuart Cohen's debut novel draws readers into a treacherous world of artists and smugglers, duplicitous friends and seductive enemies. Invisible World is both a novel of adventure and a mesmerizing exploration of an unseen world.

"Pirate's Gold" is story of a great American fortune, a man with the Midas touch, and his descendants who inherited more money than was good for them. A small-town boy from Massachusetts, Henry Huttleston "Hell-Hound" Rogers helped build Standard Oil into the world’s largest oil company, gaining renown as a notorious Wall Street “pirate.” After he died, his children inherited $49,000,000--billions in today's money. None of his descendants lived so large as Rogers’ son, Colonel Henry Rogers Jr., and his two children, Millicent and Harry. During the 1920s, the public was fascinated by the saga of Millicent’s ill-fated marriage to Count Salm, the Austrian tennis champion with matinee idol good looks. In the 1930s Harry’s involvement in the death of an actress at a drunken party was front page news in every city in the country. "Pirate's Gold" looks beneath the headlines to uncover the roots of these stories: the struggles over money and love, and the difficulties of living up to one’s famous family name.

What do we remember of our formative years? For Louisa Foulke Newlin the answer is, practically everything.The recollections in JIGSAW capture not only the cultural atmosphere of the ‘40s and ‘50s, but also the emotions of a young woman finding her place in the world.By turns comic, insightful, and poignant, the puzzle pieces of this narrative are assembled into a satisfying whole.

A new collection that oscillates between erudition and slapstick, from Virgil and Dante to a man who juggles his eyeballs.The poems of I Could Have Been More Wrong come out of nowhere to proclaim eccentric half-truths with deceptive simplicity. Declaring that the spirit of life is the spirit of play, Kevin McCaffrey delights in confronting the cacophonies of experience and trying to make them rhyme. These verses, mostly set in traditional forms, draw energy from the joy of singing out, almost spontaneously, about the sometimes quirkily ordinary vicissitudes of being.

While a student at Oxford, Oscar Wilde was courting a beautiful Dublin girl, Florence Balcombe, and on Christmas Day 1876 he presented her with a love gift of a golden crucifix. Two years later, Florence surprised Oscar by suddenly marrying another young writer from Dublin, Bram Stoker, the future author of Dracula.Dutch writer Maarten Asscher uses that crucifix as a fulcrum to examine Wilde’s early development as an artist, from a seminal trip to Greece to his whirlwind tour of America and beyond, including real-life encounters with Walt Whitman and Arthur Conan Doyle. Asscher draws on the complete panoply of Wilde scholarship to supplement historical fact with imaginative reconstruction, including a myth-busting account of Wilde’s deathbed in Paris, and a fictional solution to the mystery of the crucifix delivered by none other than Sherlock Holmes.  The result is a convincing and original interpretation of Victorian history, and a literary tour de force.

In Buenos Aires, a corrupt cop is assigned to investigate a murder he committed Commissioner Miguel Fortunato is nearing retirement after a long, dishonest career. Six months ago he was ordered to kidnap foreigner Robert Waterbury for reasons left unclear. The kidnapping turned to murder. Now the Americans are sending their own investigator, and Fortunato is assigned to support her. Fortunato is quickly drawn into the dazzling world of his victim, a failed novelist who came to Buenos Aires desparate to make a big score. As he uncovers the vast outlines of a global crime, Fortunato begins to unravel not only the murder, but the deeper mystery of his own career and the lies that have sustained it.

What does it mean when people say "You can't compare apples and oranges"? Are comparisons across genres inherently invalid, or can they be insightful and illuminating? In this brilliant and provocative collection of essays, Dutch author Maarten Asscher maintains that comparisons can be the highest form of argument. Asscher makes his case with examples drawn from classical to contemporary history, art, and literature: Hamlet in Ithaca and Telemachus in Elsinore, the Mediterranean and the North Sea, writing from a prison cell and writing from a room at home, the "suicide" of Primo Levi and Japanese Kamikaze pilots, and so on. With graceful erudition and idiosyncratic wit, Asscher demonstrates how the comparative method can provide insight not only into two subjects simultaneously, but also into fundamental issues they may have in common.

Sacred Bones is based on the true story of Deusdona ("God's gift"), a ninth-century Roman deacon who worked in the catacombs, digging up worthless bones and selling them off as the holy remains of saints and martyrs. Deusdona thanked God for his worldly success, but he was also a clever businessman who knew how to strike deals with abbots and kings. It didn't hurt that no church could be sanctified without a relic in residence, and that the more relics a church displayed, the more pilgrims came to visit with their coins and their prayers. Deusdona was a Willy Loman of the Dark Ages, trafficking in bones. Every spring, when the snows melted from the Alpine passes, he traveled north with his "samples" -- arms, cheek bones, toes -- filling orders from the previous summer and drumming up business for the year to come. Whether he is floating in the buff in Charlemagne's baths or gathering body parts in Rome's underground City of the Dead, Deusdona offers us a vivid portrait of daily life in the early Middle Ages at an early stage in the transformation of ancient Rome into the City of God.Sacred Bones is both a medieval whodunit and a wry portrait of an age that has seldom been brought to life in such detail. Readers will relish the chance to immerse themselves in this oddly contemporary world.

In March 1964, a secret task force of United States warships and tankers set sail from the Caribbean bound for Brazil. The flotilla, which had the code name Operation Brother Sam, included the world's largest aircraft carrier, several destroyers, a troop carrier, and three tankers. Its purpose was to support the Brazilian military in its meticulously planned coup d'etat against President Joao Goulart, which was successfully completed on April 1. In this work of fiction, Peter Hornbostel deftly weaves fact and fiction to draw a classic example of U.S. intelligence operations in Latin America out of the shadows, and to speculate on what the role of the United States may have been. The novel's protagonist, Ambassador Anthony Carter, maneuvers to influence unfolding events despite being kept in the dark by the CIA and the Brazilian military. Although the success of the coup is inevitable, the novel demonstrates how U.S. hegemony mixed with Cold War hostilities to escalate the crisis, and how the outcome could have been much worse.In addition to the political intrigue, this is the story of Ambassador Carter's love affair with his Brazilian mistress, Marina, a woman as sultry and intriguing as the city of Rio that is the backdrop to their romance. Carter is torn between the deceptions that surround him in his public role and the intoxicating honesty of his private life, both integral to his identity as the Ambassador to Brazil.