Tag: CBR Press

• Summer of the Cinetherapist

  

  My story “Summer of the Cinetherapist” was a runner-up in the 2011 Wisconsin People & Ideas short story contest and subsequently appeared in Rosebud Magazine (Autumn 2011). Now it’s a CBR Press ebook single. And for a limited time it’s a free download from Amazon. (Otherwise, 99 cents.) I’ve outfitted the text with a handful of public domain film stills courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Curious fact: While films and publicity photos typically fall under copyright law, pre-1964 movie trailers often don’t, nor do trailer screenshots. Wikimedia, to my surprise and delight, has public domain trailer screenshots from movies that are integral to “Summer of the Cinetherapist,” such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Mildred Pierce, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Voilà: an illustrated edition of “Summer of the Cinetherapist.” Enjoy!

  August 28, 2012

  Bob Wake, CBR Press, Rosebud Magazine, Summer of the Cinetherapist, Wisconsin People & Ideas

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• Fisherman’s Beach publicity tour

  

  Two great opportunities to read excerpts from our CBR Press 50th Anniversary ebook edition of George Vukelich’s Wisconsin novel, Fisherman’s Beach. First, you can read an excerpt from Chapter Eight in the Spring 2012 issue of Rosebud, available in bookstores or for purchase online. It’s one of our favorite chapters from the novel: 12-year-old Reuben LeMere receives a .22 caliber rifle for his birthday and quickly graduates from tin-can target practice to irresponsibly shooting at seagulls on the Lake Michigan beach. He earns the wrath of an irate lighthouse keeper and, worse, a stern lesson from his father, the book’s central moral force, Old Man LeMere.

  

  Next, you can check out the May 2012 issue of Madison Magazine, now on newsstands and online. In addition to Wisconsin State Journal columnist Doug Moe’s Foreword to Fisherman’s Beach, you’ll also find (exclusive to Madison Magazine online) a lengthy excerpt from Chapter Ten. It’s another one of the novel’s highlights: 34-year-old Germaine LeMere, home from the Second World War, joins three of his brothers on the family’s fishing tug for a day of harvesting lake trout. Sibling tensions mount between Germaine and his brother Roger over hot-button topics like who’s better suited to run the ailing Old Man’s fishing business and, perhaps the hottest hot-button topic of all: Germaine’s former sweetheart, Ginny Dussault, who’s now dating Roger.

  April 21, 2012

  Cambridge Book Review Press, CBR Press, Doug Moe, Fisherman’s Beach, George Vukelich, Madison Magazine, Rosebud Magazine, Wisconsin State Journal

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• Fisherman’s Beach ebook goes live

  

  CBR Press is proud to present this 50th Anniversary ebook edition of Fisherman’s Beach, the masterful debut novel by the late Wisconsin author and long-time Madison newspaper columnist and radio-host George Vukelich (1927-1995). Originally published in 1962 by St. Martin’s Press, Fisherman’s Beach charts the postwar struggles of a Catholic fishing clan in Two Rivers, Wisconsin headed by a dying patriarch, Old Man LeMere. Often at odds with his Irish wife, his five sons, not to mention his doctor and his priest, LeMere represents a tradition and moral force that seem to be breaking down around him. The enhanced 2012 ebook edition features a Foreword by Wisconsin State Journal columnist Doug Moe and photos of Two Rivers by photographer Thomas J. King. Bonus ebook supplements include biographical and critical essays on George Vukelich and Fisherman’s Beach by August Derleth and James P. Roberts. There are also discussion questions for book clubs and classrooms.

  “I couldn’t be happier that on this, the 50^th anniversary of the original publication of Fisherman’s Beach, Cambridge Book Review Press is bringing it to a new generation of readers.”—From the Foreword by Doug Moe, columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal, and author of Lords of the Ring: The Triumph and Tragedy of College Boxing’s Greatest Team.

  “One of the best family novels of our time—not the family novel that moves from one generation to another … but the novel that is the portrait of the family seen at a time of crisis.”—August Derleth.

  “This impressive first novel by George Vukelich has all the turbulence, surge, ebb and, sometimes, serenity of the great body of water which is its setting—Lake Michigan … Every character is as true as life.”—The Milwaukee Journal.

  March 28, 2012

  August Derleth, CBR Press, Dan Parent, Doug Moe, Fisherman’s Beach, Fisherman’s Beach ebook, George Vukelich, James P. Roberts, St. Martin’s Press, Thomas J. King, Two Rivers Wisconsin

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• Stephanie Bedford on “Redshift: Greenstreem”

  Book critic Stephanie Bedford in The Capital Times (week of Jan. 4-10) pens some wonderfully trenchant remarks about Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem (now a CBR Press ebook):

  

  Cambridge’s CBR Press has just reissued the short, punchy and funny sci-fi “micro-novel” Redshift: Greenstreem by Cambridge resident Rod Clark. First published in 2000, it’s an unapologetically geeky piece of futuristic sci-fi set in 2093 Los Angeles, in a world where what we quaintly refer to as “the 99 percent” have been enslaved by debt and inflation. These consumer drones inhabit “Redshift,” an area where their whimsical desires, fanned by a constant stream of advertising, can be transformed against their will into binding agreements to purchase. Redshift presents a satirically exaggerated dystopia, but one that pointedly resembles our own here and now. Wonky appendices hark back to other sci-fi classics like 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, but Redshift is more intent—if only slightly—on tickling your funnybone than giving you nightmares.

  January 4, 2012

  CBR Press, Redshift: Greenstreem, Rod Clark, sci-fi, Stephanie Bedford, the 99 percent, The Capital Times

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• Del’s Supper Club

  

  John Lehman stopped by this morning for coffee and audio. We’re celebrating the release of the Kindle ebook edition of John’s poetry collection, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, first published by Cambridge Book Review Press in 1998. The ebook includes Spencer Walts’s wonderful illustrations. Here’s John earlier today reading “Del’s Supper Club”:

  Del’s Supper Club / John Lehman

  They used to sit on car hoods
  along the beach
  or turn radio knobs and cigarettes
  and watch the coil
  of sun go out
  and wait
  for distant rumblings,
  for the smell of lightning
  from across the lake.

  Now they applaud
  tumbles
  of liar’s dice
  in a leather cup—
  white shirt, short sleeved men,
  who might sell appliances or tires
  their wrist hairs coil
  so smoothly
  over chainlinked bands.
  Laughter barks
  from gesturing hands.
  They caress a party glass
  with a pin-up in a dress
  that disappears
  behind ice and gin
  as the incandescent sign
  through an open window’s screen
  blurs
  into a lipstick blot,
  red taffeta,
  eye glass frames of plastic bone.
  They drift to midnights long ago
  when bodies slid from clothes
  and in the river glided over rocks,

  their fingers slipping into moss,
  while pines reeked, overripe
  as rotting cantaloupe.

  They hesitate,
  alone,
  at urinals,
  with feet raised on rails at bars,
  and in parking lots
  at the door handles of their cars,
  listening
  to a green strand of neon
  snap.

  December 1, 2011

  CBR Press, Del’s Supper Club, ebook, John Lehman, Kindle, Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, Spencer Walts

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• Rod Clark reads from “Redshift: Greenstreem”

  Rod Clark joined us this morning for coffee and a recording session. Listen as Rod shares a young boy’s perilous shopping adventure from his sci-fi micro-novel Redshift: Greenstreem. First published by CBR Press in 2000, Rod’s dystopian tale of hyperinflation and grocery store products that stalk customers like prey, feels more real and scarier than ever. Redshift: Greenstreem is now available in a 2011 second-printing, and as a Kindle ebook.

  

  Jem had never been in a “real” store before, and the store knew a rookie customer when it saw one. As he slid his goggles to his forehead to see clearly in the gloom, the glittering tiles lit up beneath his feet, and a thousand soft hooks reached for his eyes. Rainbows of choice wove radiant tentacles about him! How could the severe Saver exchange malls wreathed in black crepe have ever prepared him for this? JUST KEEP MOVING, KEEP MOVING, DON’T LET YOUR EYE REST ANYWHERE, he told himself, walking firmly down the aisle toward the seemingly distant and unreachable counter. But the dreams were stacked so thick and bright on the shelves; it hurt not to reach out and touch them. Bright bottles of soda with their implicit promise of fun-filled romps with laughing girls, menthol cigarettes pitched by tinnily singing penguins holostitched on the cartons. KEEP MOVING! JUST KEEP MOVING!, he thought. But narcotic lollipops in myriad flavors leaned toward him like flowers toward a rare beam of sun. Bottles of cheap gin and mescal featuring skimpily clad sirens of several genders invited him to an afternoon of debauchery, cheap blue packets of cockroach editing software gave confident promise of virtual pest control, and rows of laundry soaps emanated their sweet and sickly perfumes, strangling him softly in a paradise of fluffy towels and sun-drenched sheets.

  

  The lemon yellows and sweet purples of the packagings made him dream of synthetic blossoms—lawns of artificial grass, fanned by a climate-controlled breeze under a fluorescent sun. Meadows of cool, quick, sweet feeling spread in front of him, lands where true joy and real pain were equally impossible—landscapes looking into sunlit kitchens that were somehow everybody’s kitchens, full of always happy faces and endless platefuls of the world’s most delicious waffles. Mmm! Looked pretty tasty—especially the frozen ones with the pink bunny doing somersaults on the box, and perhaps … NO! NO! JUST WALK TO THE COUNTER! LOOK AT NOTHING! TOUCH NOTHING! FEEL NOTHING!

  November 17, 2011

  CBR Press, Redshift: Greenstreem, Rod Clark

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• “Redshift: Greenstreem” on Kindle!

  Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem with illustrations by Spencer Walts is now available in a Kindle edition for $2.99 and includes two bonus stories! The 2011 paperback second-printing is also available for $8.00 from PayPal and Amazon.

  

  September 16, 2011

  CBR Press, economics, Parnell Nelson, Redshift: Greenstreem, Rod Clark, Rosebud, science fiction, Spencer Walts

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• Now on Kindle

  Walk Awhile in My Autism by Kate McGinnity & Nan Negri has been a consistent seller for CBR Press since the book’s publication in 2005. Over 3,500 copies have been sold through workshops and online. We’re pleased to announce that Walk Awhile in My Autism is now available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com.

  “A must for every parent, every professional and every child who lives with autism. Buy it. Read it. Love it.”—Anne M. Donnellan, Ph.D., Director of the University of San Diego Autism Institute, and Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  “I especially liked the quotes from people with autism, Planet Autism, and the visual, auditory and tactile exercises to simulate the sensory problems of people with autism. The main thing is all the exercises people can do so teachers, parents, and others can experience how a person with autism senses and feels the world.”—Temple Grandin, Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and author of Emergence: Labeled Autistic, and Thinking in Pictures.

  June 5, 2011

  Anne M. Donnellan, CBR Press, ebooks, Kate McGinnity, Kindle, Nan Negri, Temple Grandin, Walk Awhile in My Autism

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