Bay City News
Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie
By Steve Wasserman (Berkeley)
Heyday Books, Oct. 8, 2024
Steve Wasserman, the publisher of Heyday Books and a former literary agent, publisher, Los Angeles Times Book Review editor, and passionate activist in Berkeley in the late 1960s and 1970s, shares his observations about the world in this memoir-in- essays originally published in the Nation, the American Conservative, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Wasserman knew many celebrated figures and writes about his relationships with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, and Daniel Ellsberg. He delves into pressing societal issues, such as newspapers' decline and printed books' fate.
House of Grace, House of Blood
By Denise Low (Healdsburg)
University of Arizona Press, Oct. 8, 2024
Denise Low, the former poet laureate of Kansas and a board member of Indigenous Nations Poets, wrote a memoir in 2017 about her family's hidden connection to the Delaware (Lenape), an Indigenous tribe that dispersed after they sold the island of Manhattan to the Dutch. In poems that intertwine a lyrical voice with historical texts, Low writes in House of Grace, House of Blood about a little-known massacre of 96 Lenapes by a renegade Pennsylvania militia in 1782. She explores through poetry the lingering impact of the Gnadenhutten Massacre in Ohio and how the Delaware have overcome that trauma to thrive today.
The Current Fantasy
By Charlie Haas (Oakland)
Beck and Branch Literary Studio, Oct. 15, 2024
Charlie Haas, a screenwriter whose novels are infused with humor, sets his latest in pre-World War I Germany and California. In 1914, a group of countercultural bohemians form a commune in the German woods, only to flee to San Bernardino County when war breaks out. The Lanze family moves from Berlin to sunny California to live at Sunland, as the commune is named. The commune members enjoy a brief moment of glory before violence implodes the place. But the commune members' vision of a better world never fades.
Silence
By Julia Park Tracey (Grass Valley)
Sibylline Press, Oct. 15, 2024
Julia Park Tracey, the former poet laureate of Alameda and the co-founder of Sibylline Press, which publishes work by women over 50, has penned her second historical novel based on the lives of her female relatives. Silence Marsh, a Puritan who lives in western Massachusetts in 1722, is ordered to stay silent for a year after she speaks out in anger at a town meeting about the deaths of three people she is close to. The novel follows Silence as she remains silent, yet grows closer to Daniel Greenleaf, a doctor who recently graduated from Harvard Medical School. Kirkus Reviews called Tracey "a remarkable writer" and said Silence is "a historically astute and compelling must-read."
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