Recent & Forthcoming

The following books are being published by Turtle Point Press this Fall, 2008

Fiction

All Aboard
by Joe Ashby Porter

With All Aboard acclaimed fiction writer Joe Ashby Porter ventures into new, sometimes unprecedented territory, from the luxe restraint of Merrymount through the stops-out eroticism of Pending, and the distilled heebie-jeebies of Dream On. Here reading, travel, and sexual orientation (and disorientation) loom larger than before in Porter, and the dialogue gives new play for what Harry Mathews has called Porter’s golden ear. The whole collection unfolds as does each component, laying track just ahead of the speeding train of thought.

“He takes types typically represented as American disasters and rehabilitates them through their own ability to articulate themselves. What’s more, Porter in this process sustains an effort to reclaim for all a considerable portion of our very own language that has steadily been bobbing out with the tide. Understanding perhaps the possibility that the narrower our lexicon, the more likely we are to be victimized by our own minds.”
— James Tierney

Poetry

Without Saying
by Richard Howard
978-1-933527-14-7, $16.95

We always say what Goes Without Saying, or we try to: anything is preferable to a certain silence.

In Richard Howard's new collection, voices of myth and memory prevail, if only by means of prevarication — the voice of Medea's mother trying to explain her daughter's odd behavior to an indiscreet interviewer; or first and last the voice of Henry James, late in life, faced with the disputed prospect of meeting L. Frank Baum and then, even later on, “managing” not only Maetrlinck's Bluebeard but his own unruly cast of characters, including Mrs. Wharton and young Hugh Walpole…

Richard Howard, one of America’s finest poets, continues to write poems of dazzling virtuosity, work which is intricate, amusing, and brimming with youthful spirit. He is the long established master of personnae and he is able to shift from voice to voice and era to era with grace, wit and dexterity. James Dickey once wrote that “Howard’s learning is so lightly and clearly held, his wit so delicate and hair-fine, and his poetic skill so unobtrusive, that the reader enters the poems with none of the pain that poets usually exact, but with delight, gentleness and joy.”

Sources
by Devin Johnston
978-1-933527-16-1 $15.95

“Sparkling with energy and intelligence, these poems are likes chips in a mosaic, spare, hard, precise, and with a classic humanity and grace.”
— David Malouf

Sources, Devin Johnston’s third book of poetry, returns ad fontes: to sources in Greek and Latin, secret derivations, wellsprings of feeling, and forces of nature. Sonically alert, these poems attend to the world with restless curiosity: “Pacing rugs/ or battered roads / we wait for what / we know we know.” Charged with expectation, they often take place on thresholds and sills, coming and going between house and street, private involutions and common life, past and present, human and animals, friends and strangers.

Memoirs

Dresden
by Lord Berners
978-1-933527-15-4, $9.95

A newly uncovered memoir of time spent with a German family in and around Dresden at the turn of last century and during Berners's colorful formative years. Dresden was edited with an introduction by Professor Peter Dickinson.

The following books are being published by Turtle Point Press this year, 2007

Fiction

The Secret Lives of People in Love
by Simon Van Booy
978-1-933527-05-5 $14.95

This is a first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact,and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In prose that is sweet-toned and measured, Van Booy writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

“Van Booy’s prose is as economical as it is powerful. His characters are so real—and their stories so poignant—that I yearned to reach out and assure them of my understanding.”
—Caroline Upcher



Now Voyagers
Some Divisions of the Saga of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Oltrano, Authenticated by Persons Represented Therein, Book One: The Night Sea Journey
by James McCourt
978-1-933527-08-6 $17.95

Here is the long awaited sequel to James McCourt’s first novel, the comic masterpiece, Mawrdew Czgowchwz. In gloriously flamboyant prose, James McCourt in Now Voyagers tells the story of the charged atmosphere surrounding a legendary diva (and possible CIA agent) turned psychoanalyst. This rich and brave novel about the opera world and New York in the mid 1950’s is touching, inventive, and outlandishly funny. Susan Sontag called James McCourt, “a literary countertenor in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov.”

“Tragic wisdom, we discover, can also be le gai savoir, and James McCourt has made a real specialty of transforming intricate wisdom into no more than discerning frivolity, no less than divine frenzy; as he puts it: a running neon paradigm of the quintessence of divadienst! For the purposes (if that is not too grandiose a word) of such fiction, fun is fun, but folly a kind of fate.”—Richard Howard



Earthquake
by Susan Barnes
978-1-933527-11-6 $10.00

Earthquake, with its visually acute, roguish, and intimate reflections of a girl’s childhood spent in Alaska and outside of Boston, is a novella in three parts. It is a tiny, humane and quietly humorous tale of a thoroughly unconventional girlhood. Barnes writes in an unaffected style. She is a master of candor and subtlety. Susan Barnes is a painter who lives and works near Portland, Maine. Her artwork is in the permanent collections of several museums in the United States. One of her paintings was selected by Robert Creeley for the cover of one of his poetry chapbooks.

Poetry

Work Life
by Paul Kane
978-1-933527-07-9 $16.95

“Work Life, Paul Kane's wonderfully varied and assured third volume, is simultaneously literal and lyrical, imbued with the magic of the matter-of-fact....I can think of no other poet whose work is as polished, pleasurable, and affecting as Paul Kane's.”—John Koethe

“A remarkable medley of wit and sobriety....The poems in Work Life bespeak a wholeness of life and language, a fitting of elegy, diatribe, natural description, meditation and blessing into the same large work of mind and heart.”—Rosanna Warren





The Late Show
by David Trinidad
978-1-933527-09-3 $16.95

“Deeply personal, yet cooly postmodern, no other writer besides David Trinidad makes the interface between our private memories and our cultural ones appear so seemless. At times, variously giddy, gossipy, melancholy, obsessive, and euphoric, his voice has an amazing plasicity as he slips between genres and forms, tradition and invention,with assurance and grace. The Late Show is a unique collection of interlocking facets: art literary memoir, part film encyclopedia, part shrine and momento mori—and always undeniably, pure poem.”—Elaine Equi