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Open Books Featured Titles
The Drift That Follows Will Be Gradual
by Alan Rifkin
Richard Leviton is an aging romantic, twice divorced, with visions of literary grandeur. Beginning in the 1980s, a golden age of magazine journalism and a period of unmatched freedom in Los Angeles, and continuing through the convulsions of the 2010s, Leviton grows through a harrowing crucible of circumstances -- romantic chaos,
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Scholarly and Academic titles from around the world
Featured Title 2024
Featured Title 2023
Trigger Warning
by Robert Klose
Within these halls of learning, one must proceed with caution.
Happily ensconced as a tenured Professor of Biology at the small Skowhegan College in the wilds of Maine, Tymoteusz Tarnaszewski--who goes by the moniker "T"--suddenly finds himself in unknown
territory when an incident in a colleague's classroom motivates the college administration to issue a blanket policy requiring the installation of "trigger warnings" in all syllabi.
T, believing that this would constrain his teaching, refuses to comply, even after one of his own students lodges a complaint about something T said during the course of a genetics lecture. The administration's judgment is swift: T will be terminated at semester's end for insubordination.
What recourse, if any, does T have to save his position? And what will he do when he learns the higher-ups knew, early on, that the student who lodged the complaint against him is actually a threat to the school?
Upcoming in Spring 2025
Quantum Voices
by Stephen Spotte
Anax Grayson, a neuroscientist and physicist, enlists in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War and is assigned to an undermanned reconnaissance team. One member, Skeeter Hatfield, came of age in a southern West Virginia coal camp and suffered since childhood from a rare malady known as heautoscopic
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hallucinations during which he sees ghostly, extra-corporeal projections of his dead twin brother. In a journal Grayson records life as a field Marine, his observations of Hatfield's neurological condition, and speculates about matter and time. Hatfield survives a mortar attack and returns home with debilitating wounds. He marries a childhood acquaintance and with her help tries to overcome the terrifying hallucinations of his antagonistic Other. Spotte's narrative mosaic juxtaposes the dysfunctional, barely literate Hatfield family against Grayson's sympathetic erudition, weaving a mesmerizing disquisition on friendship, love, notions of time and space, neuroscience, quantum physics, consciousness, and the myths of agency and selfhood.
Children of Saturn
John Neeleman
Children of Saturn is a literary novel of the French Revolution. Continuing the literary tradition advanced by Hilary Mantel, Children of Saturn is a revisionist historical novel rooted in deep research, which dramatizes the past in order to speak to the present -- the ambition, idealism, corruption, and social unrest of the French Revolution highlighting contradictions that still haunt us today, Children of Saturn dramatizes historical figures who were ahead of their time, hewing close to the bones of history while vividly imagining the inner lives of its cast.
Children of Saturn is told through the fates of three contrasting real-life historical figures -- the English/American political activist Thomas Paine; the French Revolution's leading radical journalist Camille Desmoulins; and the Machiavellian politician Joseph Fouche. In stark contrast to his triumph during the American Revolution, Paine's dreams for global democracy are tested to the limit by the dark realities of revolutionary Paris. Meanwhile, Camille finds himself hunted by the very political hysteria he helps to incite with his incendiary newspaper. And Fouche discovers a talent for ruthlessness and treachery both in the halls of government and on the field of battle. Finally, vexing and beguiling them all is the charismatic Marguerite Brazier, a lover to both Paine and Camille, a fierce advocate for the rights of women, and a character who is never quite who she seems.
Surviving The Warming: Strategies for Americans
Lorin R. Robinson
THE ONE BOOK TO READ ABOUT
PREPARING FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Surviving the coming world of the warming will pose significant challenges for the world's eight billion people. And, despite America’s status as the world's richest, most technologically advanced country, Americans will fare no better than others.
Elevated temperatures, rising ocean levels, and more numerous damaging storms will, within 
several decades, render large portions of the United States inhospitable to human habitation and bring with it economic and social chaos.
several decades, render large portions of the United States inhospitable to human habitation and bring with it economic and social chaos.The author maintains that the heat of the warming will crack, blister and peel away what has always been the thin veneer of civilization -- leading over time to the demise of civil society and the collapse of major institutions.
While continued efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are laudable, they are too little, too late. As he demonstrates, we are already long past the tipping point after which the worst of the warming cannot be avoided. It has become baked in—irreversible. Instead, we need to increase our focus on how to adapt and survive the developing long-term climate calamity.
The book explores coming changes in housing, the economy, family finances, food, water, employment, energy, healthcare, safety and security and suggests ways in which families can prepare for them -- starting now!
Such Stuff as Dreams
by Thomas Garlinghouse
A struggling Hollywood Golden Age screenwriter collaborates with the world's greatest playwright
It's 1936 and Hollywood screen- writer Joe Holliday has a secret. He can see and communicate with ghosts. But because of a difficult childhood, he has long suppressed his ability.
When the mercurial head of Apex Studios tasks him with writing a modern version of a Shakespeare play, Joe gradually regains his ability. Reopening himself to the spirit world brings him into contact with an old acquaintance--someone from his very distant past. This persistent, and very illustrious, spirit has a different writing task for him--some unfinished business the two had embarked upon over 400 years ago.
When these two tasks ultimately come into conflict, Joe is forced to make a decision that will have far-reaching, life-changing consequences.
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Jane Hulse
Jane Hulse graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism. She then worked for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, one of the city’s two major papers at the time, where she reported on major criminal trials and other breaking news.
She covered the 1981 shooting of President Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. and also filed hundreds of stories about killers, kidnappers, and others accused in highly publicized crimes.
After moving with her husband to California, she freelanced for the Los Angeles Times, writing about everything from the giraffe with a crooked neck at the Santa Barbara Zoo to the whimsical “tall-small” house, a four-story jewel built on a tiny lot the size of a garage.
Later, she was city editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press where she received the University of Oregon’s Arcil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, an annual honor for journalists who “report with integrity despite personal, political, or economic pressure.”
Hulse, who has a grown daughter, is married to journalist Steve Chawkins and lives in Ventura, California. She loves running, crossword puzzles, American history, and small white terriers named Sam.
Middle East 101: Navigating Culture, Traditions, Psychology and Business Practices
by Igor Ostapenko
For a large number of people, the Middle East has become more than just a place for shopping and ascending the Burj Khalifa. Expats are coming to live and work here. Yet all these people encounter a new culture and sometimes find themselves at a loss.
Cultural competence allows us to understand other people on the level of motives, values, and conventions. Most importantly, it helps us expand our own horizons. If we all had a slightly better understanding of other nations and cultures, the world would see fewer wars.
Middle East 101 provides a comprehensive guide to successfully navigate culture, traditions, psychology, and business practices within this diverse region. Because the more you know about Islam and the Middle East, the less likely you will fall into the traps of conspiratorial thinking, become a victim of cognitive biases, and explain what is happening around you using cliches. Success in the region can only be achieved with emotional intelligence and cultural competence. Gaining trust in the Middle East is possible only if you communicate with complete sincerity, showing respect for the local religion, culture, and interlocutor.
Unleashed
A Comic Relief
by David L. Gersh
What has the world come to? Can people trust a dog more than they trust a politician?
San Buenasara is ripe for the plucking and the Mexican Cartel wants to pluck it. Walter Carsone, the former Chief of Police is running for mayor, a position left vacant by an unfortunate accident involving a steamroller. There's a lot of outside money behind Carsone. And no one trusts him.
Karen and Jimmy are desperate to save their little town. Everyone is scared. Except Bruno, their brave, long-haired Dachshund. He doesn't have a hat, but he's tossed it in the ring.
It all started as a big joke until it turned deadly serious. Through threats and intimidation, through twists and turns... and a 60 Minutes segment, Bruno is running strong.
Will his luck run out? Or can Bruno unleash the future?
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Witness No More
by Arthur Kevin Rein
Ten months have passed since Max Cherhasky, his father J. Roman, and step-mother Nadine disappeared from their lakeside mansion in Walnut Creek, Wisconsin. Roman's testimony against the Chicago Mob has placed the family in mortal danger. The Witness Protection Program has changed their names, uprooted their lives, and dragged them to a small town in South Dakota.
Max meets Leah, a beautiful artist who possesses a vision for color beyond his understanding, and falls in love. Beyond her, there is no happiness in his new home. As Max's high school graduation nears, he makes plans to escape his family, the town, and the WPP. But the Cherhaskys are hiding from more than the Mob. Back in Wisconsin, a warrant is issued for the murder of Max's mother, Madeline, dead twelve years.
What happens when a murder suspect is under federal protection? Witness No More, the final volume in the Red Wolf Chronicles trilogy, follows Max as he goes off the grid with a partner he has always disdained. But can he forget Leah so easily? And what about the truth he can never leave behind?
alcoholism, home loss, professional obscurity, and cultural transition -- all while attempting to anchor his son Philip's precarious security.
With eloquent, almost intoxicating prose, the nine linked episodes comprise one bittersweet, sometimes funny, deliciously messy journey through the ache of generational drift, the cultural rapids of the 21st century, and the timelessness of young dreams.
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by Charles Dickens
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Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775.
Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she’s the unwilling apprentice to the town’s only midwife—her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father who publishes the weekly Essex Journal.
As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial vaccination.
Sarah finds herself questioning everything: the fight for independence, her father’s judgment, her own failings, and more to the point, why it’s considered unthinkable for a young woman to write for a newspaper.
When she learns the redcoats and the patriots will soon clash over a stockpile of munitions in Essex, she comes up with a risky plan to thwart the bloodbath.
“Oh! I am delighted with the novel, and should like to spend the rest of my life in reading it,” exclaims the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Spellbound by The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine Morland cannot help projecting the novel’s melodrama onto the walls of her friend’s home. She transforms a visit to Bath into a Gothic misadventure, complete with forbidden chambers, family secrets, and utter mortification when her literary infatuation precipitates an offensive misunderstanding.
We readers, like Catherine, graft our favourite stories onto our quotidian lives. She is the child who, upon finishing the Nancy Drew series, begins to see “mysteries” unfolding in her schoolyard, the teenager whose attempts to channel Elizabeth Bennet’s conversational style result in frequent social faux pas, and the university student who, encouraged by The Secret History, enrolls in Latin 1000 anticipating arcane rituals and secret societies.
As readers, we construct our perceptions of the world through ongoing experimentation with the porous boundary between fiction and reality. Like Catherine, we often err in these trials. Sometimes, however, a literary exemplar aligns with a life experience to create a paradigm shift, and metamorphosis ensues. The Alchemy of Stories is a modern, analytic collection of literary criticisms serving as an ode to those moments — the alchemical convergence of literature and life.
Cover coming soon
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence!
Outcasts of Essex
by Jane Hulse
The
Alchemy of
Stories
A convergence of literature and life
Monika Lee
Clara Sebben
Editors
