The South Wind by Adele Ne Jame
Copublished by Manoa Books and El León Literary Arts
2011
Mānoa Books and El León Literary Arts announce the publication of The South Wind, a new book of poetry by Hawai‘i writer Adele Ne Jame. Critical praise for the book includes the following:
The South Wind blows the reader back and forth—between the living and the dead, between the Middle East and Middle Pacific, between love lost and spirit gained. Adele Ne Jame’s angels bridge the chasms, but in this haunting collection she, too, has “eyes for wings.” Like her night heron at the edge of the water, she offers us “beauty if not redemption” and guides us toward “the roar on the other side of silence.”
—Christine Hemp, author of That Fall
A soft melody breezes through these perfectly crafted poems located in New Jersey, in Hawai‘i and in Lebanon, as if to whisper khalleek hown, stay here. Ne Jame’s collection is a soulful search for place, for time, for identity, weaving meaning from memory and exalting in the discovery of home.
—Elise Salem, author of Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives
Adele Ne Jame is the author of Inheritance, Field Work, and Poems, Land & Spirit.
Recipient of a Pablo Neruda prize and a National Endowment for the Arts
fellowship for poetry, she teaches at Hawai‘i Pacific University.
Visit www.adelenejame.com and her Facebook page.
About Them by Chester Aaron
Copublished by Manoa Books and El León Literary Arts
2011
Mānoa Books and El León Literary Arts announce the publication of Chester Aaron's About Them. In this new book, Aaron returns us to the mining town and characters of his novel About Us. Donald Fanger, emeritus professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, writes:
Chester Aaron's novel-in-stories, About Us, published nearly 35 years ago, holds a unique and lasting place in the artistic annals of American boyhood. Through the account of young Benny Kahn we come to inhabit the Pennsylvania mining town of Sundown in the years leading up to World War II. Colorful and clear-eyed, unsentimental but full of feeling, the book gives us a rich and textured sense of life as it was lived there and then. Now, in About Them, an octogenarian Benny revisits what remains of that largely vanished world—to show what time and memory have done to the characters and the place, to fill in suppressed pieces of the past, and to irradiate the whole with a sense not only of what was and is, but what should be. The narrative, by turns dramatic, comic, and chilling like its predecessor, is nonetheless permeated with kindness, generosity, and love right up to the astonishing ending. How Aaron manages this without a trace of mawkishness is not the least of the truly rare delights this book offers.
Born in 1923 in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town, Chester Aaron served in World War II and later taught at Saint Mary’s College, retiring in 1997. Author of novels, stories, and memoirs, he is also known worldwide as an expert on garlic, growing more than fifty varieties on his farm in Sonoma County.
Visit www.chesteraaron.com.
Brief Nudity by Thomas Farber
Copublished by Manoa Books and El León Literary Arts
2009
Review by Alexander Mawyer
