We are pleased to announce three unique new eBooks soon to be available in our catalogue! Eye Exams, by Richard Krause, is a collection of witty aphorisms that will catch you off-guard, make you smile, and pause with new understanding of the world around you and the people within it. Metamorphosis is our long-awaiting anthology of short stories by fifteen talented writers, and each will linger with you long after you’ve finished reading. Simple Gratitudes, by Hannah Greenberg with Rivka Gross, is a beautifully written series of chapters based on daily life that will invite you to step back, take a deep breath, and find ways to bring the sacred into your own everyday experiences.
Each will be available in paper formats later this year.
Eye Exams, A Book of Epigrams, by Richard Krause.
He started out carrying a notebook walking the streets of New York City, riding the subways, or just sitting in his taxi cab at night with a notepad on the front seat, writing what he saw and what occurred to him. Every morning he’d sit down and the shorts would be copied or new ones would come. At first, he looked through all he had read to find them. How could they come from him? Who was he to write them? But except for a few, he soon realized they were his and decided from then on, he would go where his mind led him.
Eye Exams is the production of the last four or five years, his struggle with the world outside and within. His sole object is understanding. The twists he imagines make them his, part of the aesthetic that confers value. Occasionally something comes out unadorned as a simple truth. He is surprised by that, feeling he has no more right to it than anyone else. Some that come from within are so thoroughly his own nature that he has to look on them as estranged. Writing these confers a certain immunity. He cannot be touched with shame or embarrassment, any more than he can be entirely proud of them.
For any readers still with him, the author hopes you will find something here you either were or were not looking for.
Metamorphosis, A collection of stories. Edited by Propertius Press.
An old woman boiling laundry in her yard on a remote mountain top suddenly sees a rabbit and thinks dinner is on the way. A young student dealing with the aftermath of rape lashes out, opening a deeper wound. A poet, in despair over making a living, finds the keys to another world – whether real or imagined. A couple of brothers paint remarkable frescoes on the ceiling of a church. The individuals who make up the stories in this collection encounter the unexpected, and don’t necessarily live to tell about it. Working around the theme of life-changing experiences, these twenty-one tales were selected from over two hundred submissions received over a period of three years.
We recommend you take them in slowly, one at a time.
In the preface to the beautiful and inspiring work, Simple Gratitudes, Hannah Greenberg begins, “It’s neither riches nor social status that makes our tenacious hanging on to life worthwhile. Rather, it’s our integration of challenging “sensibilities,” of deep feelings which might be sweet, but which are necessarily sharply disconcerting, that stretches us and that enables us to grasp the best qualities of this world. “Gratitude,” not “entitlement,” remains the proven route, within our mortal existence, to serving The Almighty and to finding joy in our service.
What’s more, it both behooves us to see the entirety of our commonplace experiences as spiritual, and to elevate all of our spiritual happenstances. So much work has yet to be completed in our process of releasing personal and social expectations and in replacing those anticipatory notions with simple faith. Simple Gratitudes invites us to live by working for The Boss.” With simple but clear-minded and visually rich descriptions, the author elevates normal everyday happenings to a spiritual plane that lies deep in everyone’s heart in a way that transcends religious creed, race, and time itself. No matter where you are or your pattern of belief, you will find her words resonate with gifts of a universal truth.
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