Just released!!

It's not our publication, but we feel like bragging anyway because the author, Louis Greenstein, is a long-time member of the Working Writers Group, the organization behind New Door Books.

​You may recognize the title, The Song of Life, as a play on the name of the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu holy scripture. But this is a novel. But this is also a spiritual book. But this is also a book about violence and murder. But this is primarily a book about love, friendship, and peace.

The story begins when Margaret, the chief protagonist, is sitting among the stacks in her town library. For no reason on earth, a copy of the Bhagavad Gita falls off a shelf and bonks her in the head. She leaves the library with a lump on her skull and her life changed forever.

Those who've read Greenstein's Mr. Boardwalk will recognize his goofy humor, which surprises and delights throughout the book, especially through the character of Elliott Fenwick, the world's nerdiest nerd who somehow wins every reader's heart.

Much less funny is Margaret's relationship with an abusive minister, "Pastor Gary," who takes advantage of his religious authority. The Gita's influence helps her recover from this trauma. As Janet Mason, one of the early reviewers puts it, the book "explores the underbelly of religion and the upside of spirituality."

Check it out. The Song of Life will create a lump in your throat, if not on your head.

We've been working to minimize reliance on that Giant Online Store that everyone loves to hate but everyone keeps using to buy everything from books to toilet paper. To that end, our printed books have been available for some time now on Bookshop.org, the online book depot for independent presses.

Now we're beginning to do the same for our e-books. Our page at MyMustReads.com offers our e-books through the My Must Reads e-reader platform. The e-reader app itself is a free download, and it works pretty much like other such apps, though it's not quite as sophisticated (yet) as some. We encourage everyone to try it out. The logo is a Hummingbird, which seems more natural than a swooping arrow.

The debut novel by David Hallock Sanders, BUSARA ROAD, has racked up more awards. In the American Fiction Awards competition, it was a finalist in two categories: Best New Fiction and General Fiction.

That's a total of SEVEN awards for this one book, including the Gold Medal from the Nautilus Book Awards.

It's a truly great read. Check it out here.

The first two reactions to TO REACH THE SPRING have arrived, and unlike most blurbs, these are utterly passionate and committed:

"​Nathaniel Popkin is a swordsmith. He hones words that cut deep through the lies and self-deceptions that license cruelty, revealing the brittle bones of an unjust, death-dealing culture. Everyone should read this book. It is clarifying, bracing, and ultimately transformative; truth-telling is essential for change, and change is essential." --Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising

"To Reach the Spring is a tour de force, both an incisive reckoning with the full magnitude of the climate emergency along with a visionary understanding of how and why we have come to this place. I read this book with an unruly range of emotions and states of mind including shame, unspeakable grief, existential dread, curiosity, insight, admiration for the author but finally, most of all, hope. By illuminating how our reverence for earth is intrinsically connected to our capacity to hope and to heal leading to an inexorable yearning to act, Nathaniel Popkin has offered us a way forward. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares about our future." --Gail Straub, award winning author, The Ashokan Way: Landscape’s Path Into Consciousness

Advance review copies are available now, through our Contact page and on Edelweiss in the listing for Pathway Book Service. We promise that any existential dread you feel will be more than balanced by the author's transformative truth-telling and hopeful call to action.

This fall will mark a new adventure for us. We're expanding beyond fiction and memoir to publish an impassioned book on climate change. More precisely, it's an extended essay on human complicity in the destruction of our planet.

Though it includes an abundance of scientific fact, To Reach the Spring focuses primarily on how we think about global warming, particularly the way human society manages to paralyze itself in the face of oncoming catastrophe.

Beginning with a letter to his future (potential) grandchild, Nathaniel Popkin delves into psychology, politics, and the economics of capitalism to analyze what's wrong. Then, through ethical reasoning, he outlines a possible redemption.

Long active in the environmental movement, Popkin described the present era as an "age of loss" in a 2018 essay in The New York Times. His new book is an extension and deepening of that concern. The title references a quotation from Primo Levi: "Today, here, our only purpose is to reach the spring."

To request a review copy, go to the Contact page.

For the past several months we've been pleased to have our books available through Bookshop.org, the online bookseller that dedicates part of its proceeds to independent bookstores. Recently our authors have contributed a couple of recommended reading lists to our Bookshop page:

From Louis Greenstein, "Ten Novels with Strong Female Protagonists"

From Miriam Seidel, "Powerful Sci-Fi/Fantasy by Black Women & Nonbinary Authors"

​We hope you'll take the time to check out these suggestions. Remember, anything you buy at the Bookshop site helps support independent bookstores.

It's confusing when an awards competition has lots of categories. Previously we learned that Busara Road by David Hallock Sanders was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal from the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Now we hear that the novel was also a finalist in the category of General Fiction.

That's gold in the names of two great men, both of whom we respect even though they're old dead white guys. Congratulations, David!

For those too young to remember, Eric Hoffer was a sometime longshoreman and migrant worker who wrote The True Believer (1951) and other works of social/moral philosophy. Here's how Wikipedia explains a central tenet of The True Believer: "Hoffer argues that fanatical and extremist cultural movements, whether religious, social, or national, arise when large numbers of frustrated people, believing their own individual lives to be worthless or spoiled, join a movement demanding radical change. But the real attraction for this population is an escape from the self...." Um, does that sound kind of pertinent to the current era?

The powerful story of Busara Road is set in the aftermath of a bloody national conflict, the Kenyan struggle for independence. Extreme passions, left over from the war, lie hidden just beneath the society's surface, and the naive young protagonist blunders right onto them. It's a novel not for true believers, but for those with open minds.

An advance reviewer, the distinguished novelist Jacob M. Appel, compared BUSARA ROAD to the works of Barbara Kingsolver, but little did we know that the book would share an award with one of hers.

The screenshot here is from the full list of Gold Medal winners in the Nautilus Book Awards. Congrats to our author David Hallock Sanders!

As Louisa May Alcott is reputed to have said, "Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can." Definitely we read Barbara Kingsolver, and now we'll enjoy the company of her books even more.

#fiction #novels #Africa #ReadIndie