Multiple Award Winner! Winner: Poetry Category, Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist: Young Adult Nonfiction, Next Generation Indie Book Awards,
Independent Publisher Book Awards, and National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist: How-To, Cover, and Interior Design, Next Generation Indie Book Awards
A new idea in self-help books with an easy, informal style and numerous fun-exercises. It’s sure to delight kids from 9 to 90 and can be used by individuals, friends, clubs, workshops, and classes. Half the price of a textbook, it provides twice the value with an in-depth coverage of words and how to use them effectively, plus chapters on rhyming, rhythm, the iamb from blank verse to the various forms of the sonnet, and exotica like art songs, Pindaric and Horatian odes, terza rima, octosyllabic couplets, the traditional and literary ballad, limericks, rime couée, rime royale, ottava rima, the Spenserian, and various refrain poems like the ballade, roundel, rondeau, triolet, villanelle, and sestina. Dr. Bogen’s coverage of free verse is perhaps unrivaled, with discussions, from the point of view of writing, of examples from Pound, Eliot, H.D., William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Sandburg, as well as older practitioners like the authors of the King James Bible, Ossian, Christopher Smart, Blake, Whitman, and Matthew Arnold. All important for young people in particular is the final chapter on the various forms of publishing from mag to zine capped by an appendix containing a list of 65 little magazines that have assured the author that they would read, seriously consider, and print works by poets never published before.
Bagatelle•Guinevere by Felice Rothman
Edited with an Introduction, Etc., by Nancy Bogen
Our advertising distorts, our politicians mislead,
our neighbors swear to tell the whole truth in court and then all
too often proceed to lie their heads off. Yet when it comes to entertainment,
there’s nothing that everyone likes better than an honest-to-goodness
true story or a juicy fact-filled yarn based on something that "really
happened."
The year is 1976. Felice Rothman, a poet in her
mid 30s, undergoes a series of personal tragedies. Grieving inside
but outwardly quite calm, she answers a call for volunteers to America’s
space program, and more or less passing NASA’s tests, off she
goes into deep space on a hush-hush mission.
Miraculously returning from that venture some time
later, she enlists the aid of a distinguished historian to turn her
scattered notes into a coherent narrative.
And here’s her story!
But what of the alien intelligences that Felice
encountered, all of them egg-laying reptiloids of three genders?
Did they actually exist, or since those beings are nevertheless referred
to as "he," is this some extravaganza concocted by the
usually sane and sober Nancy Bogen, a tongue-in-cheek fantasy having
to do with our own mad, still largely male-dominated world?
Bobe Mayse: A Tale of Washingston Square
by Nancy Bogen
The setting is Washington Square in Greenwich
Village, dominated by the Arch and elegant pink townhouses on the
north side, homes of the well-to-do of old American stock. The time
is the early 1900s, when the horse and carriage were gradually giving
way to the automobile...and residential windows shone either blue
from electricity or yellow from gas lights.
Around this historic spot of green, Nancy Bogen
interweaves the lives of four people:
Martha Ferber, daughter
of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who goes against Papa’s wishes
and idealistically chooses employment as a sewing machine operator
in a factory when she can do better.
Mammeh or Bertha, her mother,
who shows herself surprisingly in advance of her time by advcoating
her daughter’s
right to determine her own destiny.
Young Jerrold Vanderlynn,
a Yankee through and through, who comes to bustling manhattan from
rural tarrytown to
look for a job in an office, and finds his lodgings at Mme. Catherine
Branchard’s now-famous boarding house for artists and "misfits" at
Number 61 Washington Square South.
Hippolyte Havel, an anarchist
and ex-lover of Emma Goldman, who runs (as he did in real life)
a basement eatery
on nearby Macdougal Street, where of a night one can find gathered "Red
Emma" and her circle, Mary Dreier, Helen Marot, and their stalwart
associates in the newly-formed Women’s Trade Union League, as
well as a host of other colorful Greenwich Village hangers-on like
Max Eastman, then a suffragette symptahizer.
Factory girl, mama, new
guy in town,anarchist – their
stories unfold against the background of the Great Shirtwaist Strike
of 1910, in which 20,000 Jewish and Italian young women took on the
cockroach bosses and literally put the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union on the map, and the Triangle Fire, a tragic sequel
to those glorious moments, which claimed 145 of their lives.
But BOBE MAYSE (which is
Yiddish for "old
wives’ tale") is more than a meticulously researched historical
novel. Through all its characters, but most especially through Martha,
it is the story of you and me and the people next door.
Suffused with a keen understanding of the human
heart, it is, in a word, the story of every person in any season.
Award Winner! Finalist: Eric Hofner Book Awards, 2009, Legacy Division
To read Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home is
to enter the Ancient Greek world inside out. On the surface, it offers
a multidimensional view of the home front during the Trojan War,
with Klytaimnestra, wife of Agamemnon, supreme commander of the Greek
forces, as the centerpiece. On this level, one critic has said that
author Nancy Bogen surpasses Virginia Woolf in her ability to penetrate
and lay bare each character’s psyche and at the same time to
hold the fabric of her narrative together.
On another level, Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at
Home attacks the Ancient Greek conception of the hero, and
by extension our own Western one. Odysseus, who was upheld by Homer
as the archetypal hero because of his craftiness in mind and body,
is presented as evil through and through and the true author of
the Trojan War. And there are many more levels yet to this novel,
as another critic has pointed out.
Highly lyrical, imaginative, and a good all-around
yarn — what more could a serious reader want in a challenging
work of contemporary fiction.
