Chez Robert Giron

Mark Brazaitis's award-winning novel Julia & Rodrigo which won the Gival Press Novel Award for 2012 has been released.

Author Tony D'Souza states that "In Julia & Rodrigo Mark Brazaitis takes Romeo and Juliet and wonders what becomes of impossible love when the lovers cannot simply die. Rendered in swift, elegant prose, his tale of a poor football star and the wealthy girl who loves him turns most painful after the forced parting. Anyone who has loved and lost will recognize the wounds of these doomed, gentle characters. What's most tragic, Brazaitis knows, is that in Julia's and Rodrigo's great love—like the bloody Guatemala Civil War that surrounds it—none can win, and all of it is so unnecessary."



Mark Brazaitis is the author of five books of fiction, including The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize, from the University of Notre Dame Press. He is also the author of a book of poems, The Other Language, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. A former Peace Corps Volunteer and technical trainer, he currently teaches English and is the former director of the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University.

Photo of Mark Brazaitis by Sheila Loftus.

Ask for the novel at your bookstore for visit Amazon.com or Gival Press: Julia & Rodrigo for sale at Amazon.com or
Gival Press

J. E. Robinson's debut collection of stories titled The Day Rider and Other Stories has been released.

The Day Rider & Other Stories presents characters nominally situated in one world who seek to join another, while being themselves. Many main characters 'pass'--not merely in the conventional sense, of appearing as one race and acculturating as another, nor as one sexual orientation and moving conveniently into another as affections and conventions dictate, but also in its 'unconventional' senses, of moving from mortality to immortality, or from the oppressed and disadvantaged to being the oppressor and the privileged. This collection discusses the wide sweep of 'passing' and wonders whether doing so is an anathema to humanity or inherent to humanity.


Award-winning director and playwright Melissa Maxwell states that "Eric Robinson's writing is deceptively powerful; it moves along in a quiet plodding manner, then stealthily delivers a punch. This collection of short stories is eclectic and quirky."
Photograph of J. E. Robinson by Mark Gilliland (2013).

J. E. Robinson received the 2005 Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for his essays. His novel Skip Macalester was designated a Paperback Pick by the American Booksellers Association. An ancient historian, he teaches at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy.

Ask for the book at your bookstore or visit Amazon.com or Gival Press: The Day Rider and Other Stories at Amazon.com or Gival Press

Lisa Graley's debut collection of poetry which won the 14th Annual Gival Press Poetry Award-2012 has been released.

This collection which John Wood describes as being "unlike any other poem I have read and unlike the work of any other poet I know. The richness of her language somewhat suggests Hart Crane’s voyages among the adagios of his islands. But her words are more than merely beautiful. They, to use a passage from her poem, ‘pummel / the kicking boards of our hearts,’ and they do that because they so often can be read in more than one way. She asks ‘who can hold / a blue herd of horses /unless she box / the shadow of the universe?’ Does Graley mean fight or enclose—or both? With each of my readings of this book, Lisa Graley’s Blue Horses grew richer and more powerful, which is exactly what we demand and expect of the finest poetry.”


Photo of Lisa Graley by Chelsea Ellison (2013).

Graley is a native of West Virginia and currently is an assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she teaches English and Humanities and coordinates the Interdisciplinary Humanities program. She has published stories and poems in Glimmer Train Stories, The McNeese Review, and Water~Stone Review.


Ask for the book at your local bookstore, visit Amazon.com, or contact Gival Press: Box of Blue Horses on sale at Amazon.com
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(Photo of Thomas H. McNeely by Jude Griffin.)

Gival Press is pleased to announce that Thomas H. McNeely of Cambridge, Massachusetts has won the 9th Annual Gival Press Novel Award for his novel Ghost Horse. McNeely will receive $3,000.00 and his novel will be published in 2014.

Biography:
A native of Houston, Texas, Thomas H. McNeely has received fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, the Dobie Paisano Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well from the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Epoch, and has been anthologized in Algonquin Books' Best of the South and What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. His non-fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter and The Rumpus. Ghost Horse, winner of the 2013 Gival Press Novel Award, is his first book. He teaches in the Emerson College Honors Program and the Stanford Online Writing Studio, and lives with his wife and daughter in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Synopsis of the novel:
Set among the class, racial, and social tensions of the 1970's in Houston, Texas, Ghost Horse is the story of a boy's journey to escape an abusive relationship with his father and to discover the truth about his own life. The city's social upheaval is seen not only through the secrets and shifting allegiances of the protagonist, Buddy Turner's, family, but also in his relationships with two other boys, one white, the other Latino, and in the animated movie of the book's title. Like The Fortress of Solitude, Ghost Horse tells the story of a family, a friendship, and a boy's swiftly changing awareness of himself and the world, through the lens of imagination.

Advance Praise:
Ghost Horse pulls the reader back to the not-so-sweet Seventies, a decade when America suffered a nationwide nervous breakdown. Set adrift among a broken family, tenuous loyalties, distrusted institutions, and class conflicts, middle schooler Buddy Turner retreats to a world of imagination, focusing on the one thing in his troubled environment he has control over: making a home movie with a comic-book script that expresses his underlying angst. With Ghost Horse, author Thomas H. McNeely adroitly captures the dynamics of a confused and conflicted time, when those individuals who lived through it, as with his novel’s characters, coped with the decade’s emotional, cultural, and spiritual crack-up as best they could.--Tim W. Brown, judge and author of Second Acts


Finalists:
The Eye of the Jaguar
by Michael McGuire of Jalisco, Mexico.

The Commandant of Lubizec
by Patrick Hicks of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Wade in the Water
by Nagueyalti Warren of Lithonia, Georgia.

Helen Button
by Carol Roh Spaulding of Des Moines, Iowa.

Look for these titles which have been released by Gival Press this fall.



Julia & Rodrigo by Mark Brazaitis, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award, is a moving love story set in Guatemala.

“What a stunning novel! Julia & Rodrigo is ambitious, deeply felt, exquisitely written, masterfully structured, and informed by a wide-ranging knowledge of the culture and politics of Guatemala… In many ways as tragic as Romeo and Juliet, his novel follows its own poignant, yet unsentimental story line to an inevitable, sorrowful, and yet hope-filled end. I read this novel in one sitting late into the night; I could not put it down … An instructive book for readers of all ages and a perfect accompaniment to high school and university courses on Latin America, as well as a compelling book club choice.”—Marnie Mueller, author of Green Fires, The Climate of the Country, and My Mother’s Island










Box of Blue Horses by Lisa Graley, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award is a stunning collection of poetry.



“Lisa Graley’s strange and beautiful book-length poem, Box of Blue Horses, is unlike any other poem I have read and unlike the work of any other poet I know. The richness of her language somewhat suggests Hart Crane’s voyages among the adagios of his islands. But her words are more than merely beautiful.…With each of my readings of this book, Lisa Graley’s Blue Horses grew richer and more powerful, which is exactly what we demand and expect of the finest poetry.”—John Wood, author of The Gates of the Elect Kingdom and Endurance and Suffering






The Day Rider and Other Stories by J. E. Robinson breaks the norm and presents characters nominally situated in one world who seek to join another, while being themselves. Many main characters ‘pass’—not merely in the conventional sense, of appearing as one race and acculturating as another, nor as one sexual orientation and moving conveniently into another as affections and conventions dictate, but also in its ‘unconventional’ senses, of moving from mortality to immortality, or from the oppressed and disadvantaged to being the oppressor and the privileged. This collection discusses the wide sweep of ‘passing’ and wonders whether doing so is an anathema to humanity or inherent to humanity.


Ask for these titles at your favorite bookstore or visit Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble or contact Gival Press.