IF YOU READ ONLY ONE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR NOVEL, IT MUST BE THE BALLAD OF JOHNNY MADIGAN

Head held high, I’ll admit that I devour every word and line I set my eyes on that touch on the 19th Century American War Between the States: What has become known as THE Civil War.

But if you are to read only one novel based on this world-changing tragedy and travesty, it should be The Ballad of Johnny Madigan by John Bray.

It is Gone With the Wind, The Red Badge of Courage, Andersonville, Gettysburg, Cold Mountain and a shelf full of other finely crafted novels rolled into one new powerful, painstakingly researched and fulfilling piece of historical fiction that should make even the genre itself proud.

BeWrite Books is delighted to announce its release today (Nov 16) in paperback and all ebook formats.

Here’s the back cover note:

***Johnny Madigan's journey starts with a lie – then life presents him with the reality of its most terrible truths.

The lie is told to a Union Army recruiting sergeant on the dockside when Johnny – orphaned, penniless and barely sixteen years old – blushingly claims to be eighteen to join up and march to war.

It's Johnny's first and last lie. And it almost costs him his life, time and time again. Will his next brush with death be his last?

There is no room for make-believe on the blood-soaked killing fields of the bitter battle between the states. He becomes a reluctant killer … and a mourner ... as close friends in blue and stranger-boys in gray are scythed down by the pitiless and ravenous reaper of young lives and innocent dreams.

But it is a dream that sustains Johnny: A young girl who showed kindness to him back in the slums of New York City.

As the mini balls and shells take their awful toll, as he suffers capture, as he struggles to live through the ordeal of a gruesome makeshift hospital, as he plays the deadly game of undercover work to expose a nest of enemy plotters, Johnny has two questions burning in his mind …

Can he survive? And if he can, will he return home in time to thwart his sweetheart's mother's plan for her to become a nun?

John Bray takes no prisoners in this disturbingly detailed telling of the ordeals of that cruelest of all conflicts – civil war. As the pages turn, the reader can only hope that Johnny will survive against all odds, that his endearing innocence will somehow escape being slain or maimed in the bloodbath, that he will save Deidre from life behind a convent's walls. This is a tale terrible yet tender, brutal yet beautiful.***

You can read about the book, read an extended excerpt and also read about the author’s intriguing background by going to the novel in the front page of the bookstore at BeWrite Books’ website (www.bewrite.net) or simply clicking the open book icon at the top right of this blog post.

The book was written by John Bray, edited by Hugh McCracken and proof read by the entire BB editorial team. Tony Szmuk provided cover art and external and internal design and also produced all ebook formats.

The Ballad of Johnny Madigan is available in paperback at all major and minor online bookstores or on order from your local brick-and-mortar bookshop. Ebook versions are available in the format of choice for all digital reading platforms from all online ebook retail stores. Paperback and ebook formats are also available direct from BeWrite Books at www.bewrite.net.

Sound, exciting, touching  and satisfying reading of rare quality, folks. Beautifully written by a master wordsmith. Highly recommended. Neil M

The first BeWrite Books blog reader to email me (ntmarr@bewrite.net) will receive a free paperback copy hot off the press. Three others can claim the ebook edition in the digital format of their choice. N

BALLET, PROSE, BRASS RUBBINGS, VIOLIN, OIL PAINTING, POETRY ... OH, AND TORTURE, TOO!

The strangest thing about today’s new release from BeWrite Books is that it exists at all.

Irene Thompson – author of The A-Z of Punishment and Torture – I remember from shared Fleet Street newspaper days in London over thirty-five years ago as a gentle, cat-loving, human interest writer of great skill and sensitivity, a ballet dancer of grace, with a tiny country cottage in Kent and who spent her spare time quietly in the cathedrals of England, patiently taking brass rubbings from medieval tombs.

Illustrator Catherine Edmunds I’ve known for many years as a fine, nature-inspired, landscape and portrait artist who gives violin lessons to local children and writes haunting poetry and beautiful books and short stories of whimsical fantasy.

Both are warm-hearted mothers who coaxed their children to sleep and sweet dreams with fairy tales and lullabies.

Yet together they have produced a catalogue of cruelty ... from A-Z!

But let’s look again. This is not a sensationalised and gore-splattered work to appeal to the blood-thirsty. The A-Z of Punishment and Torture documents, through sound journalistic research and with no embellishment, man’s inhumanity to man over the ages and makes its readers more aware than ever of how misguided ideas of justice and morality, even today, could (and perhaps do) reduce ‘civilised’ society to barbarity.

As always, Irene’s writing is spiked with subtle humour. As always, Cathy’s art is emotive. You could safely gift this book to your grandchild. And you probably should. The only shock and horror is that every word and every one of the twenty-six illustrations remind us of what can so easily happen when we don’t keep our dark side in check, when we sanction the unforgivable. It’s a vital lesson in book form.

Irene, who after a lifetime of international writing travel now lives with journalist husband John in a peaceful, rural, medieval village fifty miles south of London said: “You can only imagine the flurry of raised eyebrows when the title emerged, accompanied by a chorus of astonished query: ‘What's someone like YOU doing writing something like THAT!’

“The A-Z of Punishment and Torture is a far cry from anything I’ve written before. However, in other respects, it was for me simply a matter of reporting the facts, hard or otherwise which, as a journalist, I had done for decades. In the same way a surgeon regards his patient as a section of flesh to be probed and corrected, I took the tales of torture and cruelty and wrote them down without judgment or sentimentality.

“I did try to minimise the more gory parts as the object of this book is to inform rather than to shock. It’s intended to present an overview of the ways in which humans have punished each other over the centuries and as a warning that some still do. There are moments of levity to lighten the load and some splendid illustrations.”

Illustrator Cathy from England's north east said: I’m not into nastiness and gore, and neither is Irene or her book. The information is fascinating, but it doesn’t set out to terrify or sensationalise, and I was happy to bear that in mind when planning the illustrations. You’ll find nothing graphically revolting in here, but plenty to make you wonder at humanity’s inhumanity.

“‘Q for Quicklime’ was problematic, for instance. It’s not the most picturesque stubstance. Looks like lumps of chalk. I drew some in a bucket. It was either that or do something totally grotesque with people being boiled alive in the stuff, which was not the sort of thing I wanted to be drawing or that Irene wanted to see. It wasn’t until weeks later that the idea of ‘Queen’s Pleasure’ was mooted by our editor,  an additional section was written, and I was able to draw a stern looking Queen Victoria holding a bunch of keys.

“It’s now almost a year since I started on the project. Every picture has been approved, checked for errors, double-checked, the entire book proof-read an incredible number of times by everyone, pictures checked yet again, emails flown back and forth, adjustments made, and now – finally – it’s finished and I can go back to drawing Connemara ponies and curraghs.

“I’ve had a ball. I started off wondering what I was letting myself in for. I ended up thoroughly satisfied that between us – writer, illustrator, editor and publisher – we’ve produced a highly informative and fully illustrated exploration of the darker side of humanity that would make a most unusual addition to anybody’s Christmas list. Plenty of people are going to receive e-book readers this year as a gift and are going asking what they can read on their shiny new gadget that’s a bit different: The A-Z of Punishment and Torture is the answer.”

So no XXX-rated chamber of horrors, The A-Z of Punishment and Torture, but a careful chronicle, a documentary revelation of what mankind is capable of under the spell of twisted ideas of right and wrong.

And why ‘the strangest thing about today’s new release’ as though all this isn’t strange enough?

Well, there are two other firsts. This is the first time BeWrite Books has published a non-fiction book. And it is also the first time BB, Irene and Cathy have worked on a project intended for publication in ebook form only. It’s a revised, extended, re-illustrated, re-designed and re-covered version of the hardback by The Book Guild, UK (for those old-fashioned folks here who haven’t caught on to e-reading yet the hardback is available from major online stores. ISBN for hardback is 978 1 84624 203 8).

The BeWrite Books ebook edition is available at all major and minor ebook stores in all formats for everything from PC and laptop, through Kindle, Nook, Sony, Kobo et al, to iPod and even smart phones. And, of course, you can buy it direct from the BeWrite Books website on www.bewrite.net or by clicking on the open book item at the top right of this post.

Words by Irene, Illustration by Cathy, edited by Neil Marr, cover art and internal design by Tony Szmuk who also prepared the ebook in PDF, ePub and Mobi digital formats.

Author Irene Thompson’s own blog post about The A-Z of Punishment and Torture is here: http://www.irenethompsonbooks.blogspot.com From the illustrator’s POV, you can read Catherine Edmund’s blog here: http://catherineedmunds.blogspot.com/2010/11/z-illustrators-perspective.html?spref=fb 

And the critics are already reacting – the day before release!

This from the renowned Jan Goodwin, author and investigative journalist with a focus on war, conflict and human rights … Man’s Inhumanity to Man (as well as Woman, Child, and even Beast) dates back to the beginning of time, and is limited only by the perpetrator’s  depraved imagination. Tragically, as Irene Thompson documents, too many of these primitive tortures are still carried out today. From President Bush justifying waterboarding of prisoners, to the constant mutilating rapes ignored by the UN in the Congo, far too many victims still endure the unimaginable. This is humankind’s shame and a must-read.

World-famous best-selling author, James Herbert, says: Splendidly written … a gruesome but enjoyable journey through the history of pain and punishment. I was hooked from A-Z … a fascinating compendium of horror, death, torture … and not just for sado-masochists.

Best wishes. Neil Marr

The first three BB blog readers to email me will receive by return a complimentary copy of The A-Z of Punishment and Torture (Illustrated) in the ebook format of their choice. NM

LUCKY HORSESHOES FOR HARRY'S READERS

BeWrite Books today releases Horseshoes by Harry Hughes in paperback and all popular ebook formats. And these horseshoes are certainly lucky for Harry’s readers … they get five extra tales thrown in, because the new book – a long novella – includes five extended short stories.

Harry’s Horseshoes follows in the hoofprints of his hilarious (but also chilling) crime novel The Bait Shack, published by BeWrite Books last year.

You can read about Horseshoes by clicking on its cover in the bookstore section of our website at  www.bewrite.net or reach the site by clicking on the open book icon at the top right of this page. It’s available there, at all major and minor online bookshops for paperback and at ebook stores in formats to suit every electronic reading platform through PCs, laptops and netbooks, to Kindle, Nook, Kobo et al, and for iPods and smartphones. You can also order the paperback from your local brick-and-mortar bookshop.

Harry is a Viet Nam and Woodstock vet, an award winning popular song writer and a professor of psychology. Seven years of his life in New York is the subject of the National Book Critics Circle Award nominated book, Homefires; An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America, by Donald Katz (Harper Collins Press, 1992). Harry's short story, A River Too Distant (which is included as one of the tales in Horseshoes), was published, along with works by Edward Albee and Joseph Heller, in Hampton Shorts, Vol. 3, 1998. He currently lives, writes and teaches in Utah.

So why the switch from a full length novel to novella and short story format? Let’s leave it to Harry to explain:

“The novella, Horseshoes, which opens the book, did start out as a novel. But if I’ve learned anything as a writer of fiction, it’s that stories end themselves. Any attempt to stretch a piece of fiction into something longer than what it can comfortably carry usually becomes an exercise in contrivance. If I had forced the novella into a novel, the tension, humor and impact of the work would have been diluted with filler.

“So I decided to add five short stories (although they’re not really very short) to allow the novella to reach publishable book length. I do not regard these stories as fillers, but rather as slices of life from various milieus, each revealing something palpable about the human condition. Some of these stories were written before the novella was born, others after the novella was completed.”

HORSESHOES is a comic novella about an aeronautical engineer’s mid-life crisis precipitated by one too many trips to the drawing board. His irrational fugue state carries him from East Hampton to Dallas to New York City with relentless irony shredding the seat of his pants.

In SWOOP, two US Marine combat veterans concoct an outrageous plan to keep a young surfer from being shipped to Viet Nam.

In A DOLLAR TWENTY-FIVE PER MILE, a Long Island night-shift cabby eyes the beautiful day driver Althea from an immeasurable distance. One morning he drops to the back seat of her taxi. "California," he tells her.

A RIVER TOO DISTANT concerns an African-American repo man who reclaims the Honda Civic of a white southerner abruptly fired from his job at the lumberyard. But the errant car-owner and his chainsaw are ready for him.

HECTOR'S DRUNKEN BUDDHA tells the story of an aimless, underachieving Latino who rediscovers his self-worth following a nightmarish weekend of migraine headaches, prescription drug abuse and the death of two close friends.

And in FRY COOK, a North Carolinian woman named Marnee tells the story of her otherwise gentle husband’s grotesque plan for revenge and its inevitable execution, an act that is both unnerving yet strangely reasonable.

Harry added:  “Of course, works of fiction are never only fictional. The author invariably infuses bits of his or her own realities into the mix.

“Of the short stories, for instance, Swoop is closer to an actual event that occurred during the late 1960s. It qualifies as fiction merely because some of the facts have been embellished and because names of those involved have been changed. The story also reveals a dirty little secret about medical treatment of a certain class of military veterans returning from the Viet Nam War. It is my belief that readers will find Swoop to be a harrowing account on every level of human conflict imaginable.

“Naturally, I believe that you will also discover that the novella and other stories enliven your sense of humanity in the realms of drama, humor, compassion, and wit.”

Harry’s BeWrite Books editor on Horseshoes was Hugh McCracken. Cover art and external and internal design is by Tony Szmuk, who also handled the technical side of things, including the careful preparation of all ebook presentations.

Happy reading. Neil Marr

Psssst ... First BB blog reader to email me gets a free paperback, three others will get a free ebook download in the format of their choice: PDF, ePub or Mobi. Good luck. Neil -- ntmarr@bewrite.net

THE SECRET REPORT OF FRIAR OTTO -- REVEALED AT LAST!

BeWrite Books is proud to announce that The Secret Report of Friar Otto can at last be revealed ... after 750 years stamped as classified information.

And that’s a fact! Or is it? In Sam Smith’s latest novel, it’s hard to tell where fact ends and fiction takes over. Maybe it’s all medieval fact because it certainly reads that way – maybe it’s all thoroughly modern fiction because it reads that way too.

Let’s ask the author himself. Play it Sam ...

Why Friar Otto? I was living in Ilfracombe, a well-known seaside resort town in England, and one May – a birthday treat for my partner in crime/life, Steph – we took the MV Oldenburg ferry out to little Lundy Island off the Devon coast, where I spotted an arctic finch by the castle. I wrote it up in the bird-spotters log there, which is kept in the Marisco Tavern.

Politics, current and past, interests me. Especially where it concerns injustice and/or misrepresentation. I’m also attracted to characters at odds with their contemporaries, the maverick likes of Frank Harris and Edward Aveling; and from Lundy onwards to one William de Marisco.

Having exhausted Ilfracombe library’s history section and the net’s resources, with the Mariscos having owned lands in Somerset and Ireland as well as the whole of tiny Lundy’s three miles of rock, I took myself off to Bath and plunged into that old Roman town's reference library.

The superficial, the accepted shorthand history view, was that William de Marisco rebelled against his king, fled to Lundy and there led a band of pirates. But that shorthand view of his story didn’t smell right. So I dug ... and discovered treachery upon betrayal upon intrigue all laced with regal and religious machinations. William de Marisco was a man loyal to the realm, ill-used by the realm.

The Secret Report of Friar Otto is dedicated to Dr David Kelly, a UN weapons inspector who took his own life in despair after revealing to the press what he know about the non-presence of weapons of mass destruction before Britain and America invaded Iraq ... another man loyal to the realm and ill-used by the realm. Friar Otto kept his information secret, probably lived to a ripe old age, and the truth waited for 750 years to be told.

Why Friar Otto? I felt that a single voice was required.

To represent such a convoluted history from an omniscient author’s view would have required more research than I was capable of undertaking. I certainly couldn’t afford to get over to Ireland and France to look into the Montmorencis, the Marisco descendants there. Stanley Marris, a Canadian descendant of William de Marisco, was however most generous with his help.

I was aware that the Franciscans were at the time of William de Marisco’s imprisonment beginning to make inroads into England. They had already placed a man in the English court. So I struck upon the idea of a friar scribe, Otto, a naïf.

Neil asked me, Why novels and poetry? Writing’s writing to me. I can start with an idea for a poem and end up with a novel. Or vice versa. Content dictates form. And very few writers stick to one form, or to one genre. Isaac Asimov wrote detective novels, Arthur C Clarke children’s stories. To me science fiction is like any other fiction: one begins by asking oneself, ‘What would happen if ...’ Then, if one’s lucky, the book grows from there. Unforeseen plot lines develop, characters take on contradictory lives of their own, and – if all is going well – the author becomes the servant of the book.

With my one non-fiction book, Vera & Eddy’s War, I saw that I couldn’t improve on Vera and Eddy’s tales and so I simply converted them to the third person. The Care Vortex on the other hand, while I had masses of material, in order to protect the innocent I had to convert it to fiction. Whereas my working in mental health, with every day being different, often moment to moment dramatically changing, that fractured experience was best represented in poetry, in the collections To Be Like John Clare and Problems & Polemics.

Right now I’m looking at the possible motivations of a serial cat-killer. Moggycide?

Thanks, Sam.

But while we’re waiting for Moggycide, here’s a brief note about Sam’s latest, The Secret Report of Friar Otto:

A gang of renegade knights takes refuge on tiny and remote Lundy Island off the coast of Devon in medieval England.

When they are betrayed, captured and condemned, Friar Otto is sent to investigate their crimes. But, confronted by dangerous ideas, he starts to ask himself awkward questions.

His secret report is Sam Smith's reinterpretation of a 750 year-old manuscript, The Report in Confidence on the Imprisonment and Execution of William de Marisco and Sixteen of His Followers. The original text has been turned into a beautifully-crafted modern novel, utterly convincing in its evocation of the Eighth Century world and mindset.

The prisoners spend as much time goading the prudish celibate with stories about 'tupping' the ladies as they do discussing doctrinal niceties. A brilliant book that deserves a readership.

Words by Sam (of course), editorial work by Hugh McCracken, cover art, internal and external design by Tony Szmuk, who also prepared the perfect ebook version in PDF, ePub and Mobi formats.

The Secret Report of Friar Otto is available in paperback and all ebook formats for all electronic reading platforms from www.bewrite.net (or simply click on the open book icon at the top right of this post and visit the bookstore), from all major and minor online stores, and on order from your local brick-and-mortar bookshop.

Best wishes, folks. Neil

HEART WITH A DIRTY WINDSHIELD

BeWrite Books is delighted to announce today’s release of Heart with a Dirty Windshield, a sole-author collection by Howie Good, one of the most powerful voices on today’s poetry scene.

Howie is author of twenty-three poetry chapbooks, including Police and Questions (2008) from Right Hand Pointing, Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks, The Torturer’s Horse (2009) from Recycled Karma Press and Love Is a UFO (2009) from Pudding House. He has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and three times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was published last year by The Poetry Press.

This from Howie himself, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz:

I try in my poetry to challenge reader expectations in hopes of creating a space for a kind of spooky wonder. My poems seem to have scenes, characters and plot, but the relationship among these traditional components of narrative is frequently frayed and strange.

The poems proceed not by linear logic, but the fractured logic of dreams, especially bad dreams. I am less interested in telling what happened than in telling how what happened  felt. It’s for this purpose that I seek images that are concrete, elusive, accessible and mysterious all at once. Images are maps to areas of thought and feeling untraceable by other means.

I also try in my poetry to make a virtue of succinctness. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of poetry for me is that it suggests a lot with a little. Prose can be discursive, but I see poetry as the most concentrated form of literary expression. It’s the difference, if you will, between the spread of a shotgun blast and the precision of a rifle shot.

And here’s what the critics are saying about Heart with a Dirty Windshield author Howie’s work.

Howie Good’s poetry sleeps with your wife and mocks you in front of your friends. It smokes your last cigarette and hides the remote before spending your grandmother’s Social Security check on brightly menacing tattoos. Good’s poetry, the reader suspects, works for the Yakuza. Jason Cook

Howard Good turns words into a reciprocating saw that can be worked through your gut. He has internalised the existential horror of existence and turned it outward. Nathan Tyree

Howie Good’s poetry remakes reality with startling images, disquieting insights and unexpected juxtapositions. The effect is by turn surreal, disconcerting and always compelling. Juliet Wilson

Good’s poetry is concerned with the anxious, mad beauty of a perilous dream, and his poems teeter on the precipice of something steep, intimating the threat of a drop down a dangerous abyss. Sometimes wry, sometimes tender, and always urgent, Good’s body of work comprises the collective spirit of art in the 21st century. Continuing in the tradition of Breton, Good constructs a dialectic of human history and the nuances of the heart, and locates the tradition of both in the present moment with the lyric as fuel to move his engine forward. Cynthia Reeser

Congratulations to Howie and to BeWrite Books poetry editor Sam Smith on a triumph of a book. And a pat on the back for BB’s technical and design director Tony Szmuk for striking cover work, design inside and out and for preparing the paperback and ebook formats.

Heart with a Dirty Windshield is available in paperback and ebook from www.bewrite.net (or just click on the open book icon at the top right of this post) and all major and minor online bookstores and on order from your local brick-and-mortar bookshop.

The first BeWrite Books blog reader to email me gets a paperback copy with our compliments. Another three can choose the ebook version of their choice.

Best wishes. Neil M