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ERIC LARSEN, FOUNDER & PUBLISHER
ADAM ENGEL, ASSOCIATE EDITOR
"The Nation's Last Truly Independent Press" | |
OLIVER ANNOUNCES PUBLICATION OF
DANCE WITHOUT STEPS
A MEMOIR BY
PAUL BENDIX
"a unique and clear-eyed journey, brave beyond imagining" | |
 IN THE SPRING OF 1967, WHEN he was twenty-one years old and a senior at Berkeley, Paul Bendix was shot in a street robbery and made a paraplegic. Now, in Dance Without Steps, he deftly chronicles the following four decades of his life. You stand at his elbow as he makes pea soup with one unfeeling hand. You share his self-conscious wheelchair journeys through suburban downtowns, and you learn the perils inherent in simply taking a shower. Yet there is no room for self-pity in Dance Without Steps as Bendix looks unflinchingly at the life he was dealt and at the many and fierce complexities that came with it. There is nothing Bendix is afraid to look at, nothing that unsettles his humane equanimity and philosophic poise, not even when he looks back at the moment of the shooting itself that was to leave him with the use of only one arm and one leg.
If not with ease, then with humor, dignity, and grace, Bendix makes the most of a life of never-ending accommodation. His disability worsens over the decades, yet his life expands-as in his building a good marriage and balancing the roles of helped and helper. He travels with his beloved wife, gardens assiduously, observes the curiosities of the world around him-and, always, he writes. As a boy, the only responsible figure among a weak father, younger brother, and profoundly neurotic mother, Bendix gained the habit of indispensability to others, along with the tolerance, generosity, and forbearance that were to remain his through life. The disaster that befell him would have crushed others, but his own courage is boundless-not only when he is shot but again, years later, when his wife dies of cancer and leaves a hole in his life the size of half the earth.
In his ability to observe without judging, to suffer without self-pity, and to laugh without derision, Bendix is in the company of Chaucer, Swift, and Beckett, all the while writing in a limpid style akin to those of a Joseph Addison or E.B.White. His book is a unique and clear-eyed journey, brave beyond imagining.
AND NOW: CHOICES, CHOICES, CHOICES!
To read a brilliant excerpt from Dance Without Steps, GO HERE.
To see Oliver's web page for Dance, and/or to buy a printed copy, GO HERE.
To buy a Kindle edition of Dance Without Steps, GO HERE.
To buy Dance Without Steps for the Nook, GO HERE.
To buy Dance Without Steps from Amazon, GO HERE.
To buy Dance Without Steps from Barnes & Noble, GO HERE.
PAUL BENDIX, AUTHOR OF DANCE WITHOUT STEPS, A MEMOIR
FOLLOW THE AUTHOR ON HIS BLOG, RANGE OF MOTION
FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER
AND FOLLOW HIM ON FACEBOOK
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OLIVER ANNOUNCES PUBLICATION OF:
LISTENING TO THE THUNDER
POEMS BY
HELEN TZAGOLOFF
"Reading [these poems] is like looking through a vivid and truthful photographic album of an entire life." |
OLIVER KNOWS OF NO BETTER WAY
to introduce this poet and this remarkable book than to cite from that book's Foreword, written by Andre Gritsman:
Helen Tzagoloff is a Russian-born American poet who has lived most of her life in the United States. She is an example of a writer with mixed sensibilities: those of an American and of a "genetically" Russian with a childhood rooted in Russia. Listening to the Thunder is unusual both in its artistic approach and subject matter that recalls the author's childhood memories of the Second World War and of the hardships endured by her parents and relatives during that tumultuous period. These early recollections are juxtaposed with the later experiences in the United States. An illustrative example is the excellent title poem:
When it thundered, mother
would draw the drapes, sit silently
away from the windows.
She would ask us to turn off the radio,
hang up the phone, stop washing dishes,
get out of the shower.
She once saw a man struck
by lightning. He was standing
under a tree holding his son's hand.
When I hear thunder, I turn off
the computer, sit on the sofa, drink
coffee and listen to the thunder
Gritsman goes on to say that the dual-cultured Tzagoloff "is an American in all respects with a soul reflecting a strange and complex blend of sensibilities that act as a fountain for" her poems, many of these being pieces of work that are drawn from "remembrances of events spanning a lifetime." Reading them, he writes, "is like looking through a vivid and truthful photographic album of an entire life."
AND SO, AGAIN, CHOICES, CHOICES, CHOICES:
To see the table of contents of THUNDER, click here.
To read an excerpt from THUNDER, click here.
To buy THUNDER from Amazon, click here.
To buy THUNDER from Barnes & Noble, click here.
For Oliver's web site on THUNDER, click here.
ABOUT HELEN TZAGOLOFF
Born in Moscow, Helen Tzagoloff immigrated from Russia to the United States at the age of eight. She studied at Syracuse and Rutgers Universities and Benjamin Cardozo School of Law and has held a variety of jobs, among them research scientist, proofreader, translator, attorney and Small Claims Court arbitrator. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blueline, Evansville Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Interpoezia: Stranger at Home Anthology and other literary magazines and anthologies. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was the winner of the Icarus International 2002 Literary Competition.
MORE PRAISE FOR LISTENING TO THE THUNDER:
Helen Tzagoloff is a poet who speaks with the wry wit of a seasoned storyteller. In this autobiographical collection, she chronicles a Russian family's literal and spiritual emigration. In doing so, she enables us to read history from a distinctly personal point of view. Rather than a mere series of events, these poems give us actual lived experience. They are funny, tragic, passionate and most of all, surprisingly able to transmit a spirit of adventurous optimism.
--Elaine Equi
You fall quiet when you hear a great truth, and each one of Helen Tzagoloff's riveting poems in Listening to the Thunder lets you enter that silence of significance. From pictures of World War II Russia in a very young child's eyes to images of post-war America from an adolescent's view, to the perspective of a sophisticated woman and mother, these poems are piercingly clear, without judgment, in their stunningly deadpan lines. Huge upheavals funnel down into a single artifact, say, an abandoned apron, in Tzagoloff's unforgettable mixture of innocence and experience. The poems are searing, funny, moving and as charged with atmosphere as the moments before and after thunder.
--Molly Peacock
BORED? VISIT THE OLIVER ARTS & OPEN PRESS
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OLIVER PUBLISHER EMBARKS ON ESSAY CAMPAIGN IN SUPPORT OF DR. JUDY WOOD, HER PROOF OF DIRECTED FREE-ENERGY TECHNOLOGY ON 9/11NOT |
IT'S A MATTER NOT OF THEORY OR CON-jecture but of fact that 9/11 was a demonstration to the world of the destructive power of directed free-energy technology in weaponized form. Dr. Judy Wood's landmark book, Where Did the Towers Go? The Evidence of Directed Free-Energy Technology on 9/11, has been out now for over two years and not a single morpheme, syllable, particle, step, or utterance of the scientific case it makes has been rebutted in any way whatsoever by anyone in any rank, of any stature, of any profession, or of any persuasion, anywhere. The book's case is scientifically and empirically watertight. A new kind of energy, known to the great scientific thinker Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) but programmatically suppressed since his time, is now in the possession of undeterminate but highly authoritative powers that, on 9/11, demonstrated it before the eyes of the entire world.
The integrity, incontrovertibility, and solidity of Dr. Wood's scientific work, however, hasn't protected either her herself or her extraordinarily powerful, complete, and elegant proof from studied barrages and ongoing programs of smear, innuendo, and attack both from groups and individuals intent, for reasons known best to themselves, upon defaming and if possible destroying the reputation of Dr. Wood herself, the paradigm-changing book she has written, and the knowledge, incontrovertibly true and invaluably important, that she has offered to us all.
In light of this sordid, mean, elaborately planned, broad-based, and seemingly indefatigable attack-and-disinformation campaign, Oliver publisher Eric Larsen has embarked on the writing of a series of essays that propose to defend Dr. Wood and to attack her many and fraudulent enemies.
The first of the series was called "Dr. Judy Wood and the Future of the Earth, Part I,"
and the second, not unexpectedly, "Dr. Judy Wood and the Future of the Earth, Part II."You can easily imagine what the title of the third will be. It will be available to readers as soon as its author can arrange for that occurrence.
Larsen has spoken out before now in defense of Dr. Wood and her scientific work, as well as in opposition to the fraudulent, Orwellian ranks of her enemies and pseudo-detractors.
He in fact wrote a Foreword to Dr. Wood's book. Those interested can read it here, along with Dr. Wood's own remarkable, captivating, and important Preface to her own book.
Larsen also wrote a book review of Where Did the Towers Go and, additionally, "Serpent Songs in America" and "Delusional America and 9/11."
For more commentary on and analysis of the psychological, cultural, artistic, and political infantilization and destructiveness that are--and already have been--visited on a nation that is so twisted and blind as to allow itself to be "guided" by a massive lie, see The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking at a Time of Grave Peril--Studies in the Cover-up of 9/11.
For the moment, Yorick is available only in a print edition but will soon be available also in Kindle and Nook editions.
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COMING SOON
NEW TITLES |
THE BOOK OF TRANSPARENCIES, 
new poetry from Gregory Marszal,
author of I AM NOT DEAD (2010)
And A CROW'S DREAM, poetry from Douglas Valentine
The Lion Waits for His Books |
IN THE MEANWHILE. . .
A NOTE:
Working without assets, endowment, or reserves, The Oliver Arts & Open Press aims to publish works of high merit and significance that are ignored or suppressed by mainstream publishing. If you care about this cause and are able or would like to help with it, we at Oliver would be enormously grateful, as would the authors whose work we seek to celebrate and make known.
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