Mark Lyons continues posting images of personal "shrines" in connection with his new book of stories, Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines. Check the Facebook page for the moving story behind this one.

The book is available at Amazon and elsewhere. According to the latest Amazon review, "When you start reading one of these [stories] you not only enter a very different world, you also become somewhat of a different person."

Two news items today:

Mark Lyons continues posting photos of shrines in connection with his book Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines. Today's post shows a pair of binoculars. What makes them a shrine? Go to the Facebook page to find out.

Sam Gridley, the author of the novel The Shame of What We Are, has a new story out in Red Savina Review. It's called "Whispering," and he bills it as the Most Depressing Story of the Year Not Involving Ebola or Terrorists. Brave readers may want to risk it.

Here's a video of Mark Lyons reading from one of the stories in Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines. If you haven't yet read the book, you'll want to after hearing this.

"Day Ten of 31 Days of Shrines," write Mark Lyons: "1951 Pontiac Bonneville hubcap, part of a shrine of hundreds of hubcaps from wreckage of people who died on the highway."

Mark's book launch for Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines is tonight, October 10, 7:00, at Big Blue Marble Bookstore, in Philadelphia's Mt. Airy neighborhood. More author appearances are coming up soon, such as October 17, 7:00 p.m., at the Book Garden in Frenchtown, NJ, where other short story writers are invited to share their work.

Meanwhile, Mark continues to collect photographs of personal shrines; see this entry for info.

The call for photos of personal "shrines" continues, and the latest post invites us to think of pigeons as a metaphor. For what? City sanitation problems? Annoying neighbors? No, pigeons symbolize life itself! You mean you didn't know that?

Mark Lyons, who is curating the collection of shrine pictures, writes this:

In fact, pigeons play a major role in one of the poignant stories in Brief Eulogies. Click either image above for the book's Facebook page. Click here for the bookstore's site. Or click here for the book's page on Amazon. And do send Mark your pictures. Our previous post explains what and how to send.

As part of the launch celebration for Mark Lyons's Brief Eulogies at Roadside Shrines, the author and our friends at Wild River Books are inviting people to submit photos of personal shrines. The best will be posted online by Wild River Review. Here's the explanation:

"These shrines might be a book that changed our life. Or a photograph. A bottle of wine. A special coat. A handprint left in wet cement. A spice. Or a song. These shrines may be left alongside roads, on telephone poles, on our bookshelves or mantles, in our wallets or purses. We invite you to stop a moment, photograph a shrine that is a celebration, and send it to us."

The image here, copied from the book's Facebook page, is one such shrine. Incredible, isn't it?

You can email your pictures to Mark Lyons using this address: marklyons1242 AT gmail dot com.

A couple of the stories in this extraordinary collection have previously appeared in the magazine; go here for links. As novelist Lynn Hoffman writes in an Amazon review, "Like good poems, these stories all have great music and a sense of surprise: no formula here, just a dazzlingly well-focussed eye on what it means to be human and a buddha-like insistence on facing suffering and overcoming it."