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Welcome to the Mid-March edition of MWPA's Ex Libris Maine.
This edition offers new books by Maine authors in the categories of Fiction, Crime Fiction, Nonfiction, Memoir, and Poetry.
For more information on any title below, simply click on the book's cover.
Happy Reading!
The Springs
Anne Britting Oleson
Encircle Publications
Larry Ahearne's death in Afghanistan has had a traumatic effect on his friends and family back in Painter's Springs. His best friend Alaric Morgan-who witnessed Larry's last moments-suffers from PTSD-induced mutism, which has forced him to leave the army; only his young niece Isabella seems to understand the depths of his distress. Larry's sister Marty, an artist who is stalled in her tracks, bears the brunt of their mother's grief and fury, only supported by her friend and housemate Caro and Caro's daughter Sophie. The one thing they all have in common, though, is Larry's 1971 Bronco, in storage since his enlistment. Now, restoring that truck is the one thing that might hold them all together.
Braydon Mitchell is a middle-aged psychologist whose life is awash in challenges. While each working day is spent problem-solving with patients, his marriage is crumbling, and changes in the health care industry threaten his very livelihood. His struggle to cope brings out self-defeating behaviors, including an ill-advised office romance which puts the young professional on a collision course with reality. In one tumultuous moment, Braydon realizes he is no less flawed than any patient who’s ever paid for his counsel. Instead, he’s been hiding behind a mask woven from the same tawdry parchment of the fading diplomas dotting his wall. Despairingly, he sees himself as an impostor. With his identity hanging in the balance, Braydon reaches a decision. To identify as anything other than Sigmund Fraud, he will have to confront the biggest therapeutic challenge of his life: himself.
Welcome to Canton, NY, a small farming town nestled in the northern foothills of the Adirondack mountains. It’s the 1930s, and to an outsider’s eye, this idyllic village looks mostly untouched by the Great Depression that is ravaging so much of the nation. But even the most idyllic places have their dark sides. When trouble comes to Canton, the folk there rely on each other to help out. And that includes one young woman in particular. Meet Pauline Gray. A journalist by day and a secret novelist by night, Pauline’s compassion and drive for justice pull her into mysteries that are too small or too peculiar for the police. She would really prefer a quieter life, but when people need her help, she can’t turn them away, no matter what the danger to herself might be.
Tucked into reputedly haunted woods stretching to the horizon, the quaint, small-town ennui of Moon Hill, Maine is shaken by a concurrence of troubling events: a horrific crime, several missing people, and the arrival of a mysterious lone toddler. A years-long manhunt uncovers more than a dangerous killer; an intimate portrait of all involved reaches far beyond town lines, and ventures into secrets too vital to reveal. Kirsten Reed’s second novel reaches into New England’s past, and examines the challenges and moral dilemmas of modern life, in a deep, well-paced character-driven ride.
The Ruins of Woodman's Village: An LT Nichols Mystery
When twin teenage sisters go missing at the height of tourist season in Laurel, Maine, Police Chief Tim Nichols' summer of patrolling beaches and leading parades comes to an abrupt end. A desperate search for the girls takes him from seaside bars and abandoned farms to million dollar estates and cobbled-together shacks. As Nichols doggedly unearths scraps of information and deciphers a steady flow of half-truths, he finds a darkness coursing through Laurel's sunny, tree-lined streets. Nichols races to piece together the girls' disappearance, knowing that doing so may tear the façade off his postcard-perfect town.
Small Off Things: Meditations from an Anxious Mind
In this collection of thirty essays, Suzanne Farrell Smith tells the story of her life, not as a linear progression through time, but as a series of encounters, situations and events that reflect the absurdities and anxieties inherent in living in our world—the “small off things” that can so easily loom large and important. With a keen eye and ironic wit, she examines the surprising power even the least of our interactions can have. Risa Nye, author of There Was a Fire Here has this to say: "At times contemplative, at times raw, these essays will stay with you long after you turn the last page.” Jodi Paloni, author of They Could Live with Themselves, says, “Small Off Things is a great big wonder of a book... I have never read anything like it.”
Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and Genre
Looking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, Michael K. Johnson investigates “speculative westerns”—that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history. Just as “western” refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson’s narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the Speculative Wests that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland’s Deathless Divide (2020) and the complex temporal and geographic borderlands of Alfredo Véa’s time-travel novel The Mexican Flyboy (2016). Focusing on literature, film, and television from 2016 to 2020, Speculative Wests creates new visions of the American West.
Up Home Again is the story of a woman who examines her haunting childhood in a beautiful place when she returns to Maine to resolve ongoing personal dilemmas. Living in Maine again after decades of life in Massachusetts gives her the opportunity to explore her relationship with a place which was for her as beautiful and terrifying as her early life within it.
Traveling between the woods and broken mills of Western Maine and astrological, astronomical, and future spaces, Orbit is a collection of poems angling toward themes of loss and arching back to resolution. Begun during the March 2020 Covid lockdown, Orbit is a search for meaning in stillness and the growth that becomes possible when our usual movements are interrupted, disrupted, and changed.
Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands
When William Harrison Brown (aka Bird) returns to the island of his youth, he attempts to take his place in the long line of landscape painters in his family. Bird, however, paints with a 1961 Underwood typewriter. A series of interlinked prose poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands follows Bird as he attempts to make peace with his identity as a son, islander, and writer in a family of visual artists. The book is part history of grief, part exploration of ghosts and hauntings, part philosophy of landscape painting, and part meditation on the nature of islands. "Innovative and incisive, lyrical and illuminating, Jefferson Navicky’s project inhabits the interior existences of artists and artmaking. This is a painterly-poetic narrative that burrows into the heart; that asks us to see and feel the intricacies of these lives, these imaginations, and our own" — Myronn Hardy, award-winning poet and author.
SUBMISSIONS If you are a current Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance member, and you would like to announce your new book in ExLibris Maine, click HERE. If you are not a member, click HERE to learn more about our member benefits.
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