Macromere Press

4 out of 5 stars, from Mary C. Moore:

He Who Shall Remain Shameless is an adventure that is absurd, yet fascinating. Ewald’s narrator is obsessed with finding the almost-famous and expanding their online presence. The twist? Most, if not all of these people are dead. Watch and learn as the narrator interviews the ghost of Harriet Quimby, the first female airplane pilot, and Linda Gary a voice-over actress for the cartoon She-Ra, and others, as he attempts to steer them towards what he believes is their salvation online. With the help of his trusty laptop and the talking/self-aware smartphone “Ishy”, Ewald’s narrator travels the world, drawn by the ghosts of the could-have-been-famous, as his nemesis, the strange and mysterious Meritocrat, attempts to stop him around every corner.

As bizarre as this world was, I found myself enjoying the collection of stories more and more as I read deeper and deeper. Once you understand what the heck is going on, it becomes absorbing. The best part is, all of the ghosts in Ewald’s world are real characters that you can look up and read about. Who knows, maybe their online presence is thanks to the narrator and Ishy [….]

I would recommend this to fans of absurdest literature as well as up-market fiction readers. It was quite fun!

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

Amazon Book Description:

“On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714,the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.

By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death — and to the author’s timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition.

And this, the final passage:

“But soon we shall die and all memory of these five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Tabloid Dreams

by Robert Olen Butler

Publishers Weekly Review:

“Endlessly playful, inventive and daring, Butler (They Whisper) challenges himself with each new book. He does so again in this intriguing collection of 12 short stories in which he combines the bizarre and the matter-of-fact with remarkable legerdemain. What at first seems a blatant device proves instead to be an interesting catalyst: the titles mimic lurid tabloid headlines, but Butler develops such howlers as “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” and “Woman Hit by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac” into eerie or outlandish situations that become funny and affecting stories capable of touching universal chords. Each tale has a first-person narrator, ranging from a nine-year-old boy who kills mobsters with insouciance to a jealous husband who is reincarnated as a parrot bought by his former wife. In one irreverent but poignant story, JFK, in hiding since the (unsuccessful) assassination attempt, attends the Jackie auction, where he muses on his late wife’s naked body. Although in each entry the epiphanic moment arises from a surreal situation, the format does not result in any sameness of tone, voice, plot structure or setting; the latter include an Alabama trailer park and a Manhattan book editor’s plush office. A few stories (“Doomsday Meteor Is Coming”; “Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self on Fire”) try too hard, but the collection has a strong emotional impact, especially when one reaches the last story, which echoes the first, both of which are inspired by the sinking of the Titanic.”

A City on a Hill

by Stanley Jenkins

Amazon Book Description: 

“A City on a Hill defies common categories. A series of short scorching works that plunge through history, Stanley Jenkins’ debut collection brings a wildly inventive style to America’s darkest mythologies.”

Note: May we add that Leon Czolgosz makes a lengthy appearance. Czolgosz!

Goners

by Gordon Kerr

Amazon Book Description:

“It’s human nature to want to know about the lives of famous figures, but it’s also human nature to want to know about their deaths, especially the unusual and sometimes sordid details. In smart prose with a light touch, Goners reveals the last days, hours, and moments of 50 notable and notorious figures in history such as Alexander the Great, John Belushi, Billy the Kid, Joan Crawford, Princess Diana, Charles Dickens, Cary Grant, Ernesto Che Guevara, Harry Houdini, Bruce Lee, Marie Antoinette, Pablo Picasso, Tupac Shakur, and Andy Warhol. You’d have to read 50 biographies to get all the in-depth information that author Gordon Kerr has compiled under one cover.
       “Read straight through or just dipped into, Goners is a compelling and curious ride.”

I, Fatty

by Jerry Stahl

from EW.com:

“Well, here’s an arsenic-laced taste of Tinseltown: In his furious yet forgiving autobiographically shaped novel I, Fatty, L.A. noir hipster Jerry Stahl, author of the 1995 bowels-of-H’wood junky-lit confessional ”Permanent Midnight,” assumes the identity of corpulent silent-era superstar Roscoe ”Fatty” Arbuckle (1887-1933) with all the tumultuous relief of a drunk stumbling upon salvation at an AA meeting on Sunset and Vine. And in the way that creative magic sometimes happens even when the subject is ruin, the mind meld does both men a weird world of good.”

My Name is Rachel Corrie

based on the diaries and e-mails of Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner

Amazon Book Description:

Spoon River Anthology

by Edgar Lee Masters

Book Description (from everyone’s favorite fount of knowledge, Wikipedia):

Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters’ home town. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses. The poems were originally published in the magazine Reedy’s Mirror. 

Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

Amazon Book Description:

Hatcher McCord is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He’s not the only one to suffer this fate—in fact, he’s surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the U.S. presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn’t. McCord is living with Anne Boleyn in the afterlife but their happiness is, of course, constantly derailed by her obsession with Henry VIII (and the removal of her head at rather inopportune moments). One day McCord meets Dante’s Beatrice, who believes there is a way out of Hell, and the next morning, during an exclusive on-camera interview with Satan, McCord realizes that Satan’s omniscience, which he has always credited for the perfection of Hell’s torments, may be a mirage—and Butler is off on a madcap romp about good, evil, free will, and the possibility of escape. Butler’s depiction of Hell is original, intelligent, and fiercely comic, a book Dante might have celebrated.