Pelekinesis: 37 books

Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature explores the intersection of literature and life in personal essays about traveling, teaching, reading, writing, living, and dying. Each essay's narrative arc is formed and informed by the act of reading literature that makes a reader feel like...

To mark his 20th anniversary at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, David Allen goes back to the beginning to survey his first four years of columns, when the valley was new territory for him. After unpacking endlessly, he reports for jury duty in Chino, attends a Mexican wrestling match in Pomona and...

This powerful character-driven tale follows Larry Simmons through several life-changing events as 1957 looms on the horizon. Should he continue his athletic aspirations? Will he be inspired by more poetry? What does high school mean to him? And what is happening with Cameron Mitchell?

The poems in Surf Music are all pretty short, and some of them are funny. Their subjects include being at the beach, believing people, believing things, losing people, encounters with plants & animals large and small, rain, machines, rocks, and sunlight.

Tales of a Minstrel follows the adventures of a minstrel named Finbar as he travels from village to village telling his stories. His own experiences, however, tend to outshine even the most exciting story he tells. The first chapter begins with Finbar struggling to hold onto his life while...

These Footprints in Wet Cement are just that: stories some experienced, some homespun, some dredged from the fertile detritus of dreams; impressions gathered and ruminations fermented over the past decade or so—the fleeting imprint of a life left to harden in the tenuous mold of language. Straddling...

The Difference Between is a collection of 66 poems that invite comparisons between seemingly disparate words, ideas, or things. Sparked by the poem "The Importance of the Whale in the Field of Iris" by Pattiann Rogers, this series similarly pairs and juxtaposes to create surprising parallels...

Lita faces her future with trepidation. Her brother lies unconscious in the hospital following a brutal attack, her ex-girlfriend has cut off all meaningful communication, and now her daughter has gone missing in the middle of an ice storm. The town has pulled together to help find the child but will...

The characters in this fierce and darkly humorous collection see themselves and others through distorted lenses. Out of kilter with reality, their response, as they go about their everyday lives and try to recapture their youth, is disquieting, unforgettable.

Most of the pieces in Rain After Midnight can be thought of as filmic, as "long story short." The shortness of the form works, like the compression required in a good poem. There are four distinct groupings or sets of stories:  One set has to do with film, cinema, movies; a second springs...

The Lonely Young and the Lonely Old is a collection of quiet and brutal jewels. Told in the words of an unnamed narrator, each story gives voice to the easily dismissed: the lonely high school student, the elderly widower, the pining woman in her twenties, and the worn-down mother in her mid-thirties....

Allen Callaci is a librarian, a rock and roll singer, and a heart transplant recipient. Heart Like A Starfish is the account of his death-defying heart transplant journey and the healing that follows, for both himself and those around him. With illustrations by the author and beautiful cover art by Amy...

The fourteen stories in Heiberg's Twitch were not selected for their resemblance to one another, but for their differences in character, tone, and form. The aim is to deploy imagination and invention to furnish tales about the variety of human conditions, the scope of thought, the diversity of experience....

"The Underwater Typewriter" arrives as a collection of weathered shards, through which light and by implication love pass kaleidoscopically. Its shifting patterns reveal the variety and range demanded of a poet traversing brutal terrain, tempted by but refusing bitterness.  Zegans’ poetry finds human...