[Available for purchase now on this site.  Also available through our distributor, Itasca Books, our preferred US outlet Powell's Bookstore, our preferred UK bookstore Blackwell's and also available, we are told in France.]

Announcing publication of Golden Gate and Other Stories by the justly celebrated Clarence Major.  As Luis Alberto Urrea says, “Clarence Major is the voice of our country singing sweet and bitter and loud.”

The book is a gathering of thirteen unpublished stories of aspiration, thriving and authentic lives set in California’s Bay Area. A few examples: A frustrated married woman searching for happiness online and at conferences. A reporter from San Francisco goes to Rome to interview the widow of a world-famous deceased American novelist. A young woman goes on a date with a young man just to teach him a lesson. In a San Francisco boarding house, a man is the bane of everyone’s existence. Two children are disappointed when their mother marries while they are away visiting their father. A dilettante throws parties everybody loves. A communist from France becomes paranoid when the man she is dating might be spying on her.

CLARENCE MAJOR’s two previous collections of short stories are Fun & Games and Chicago Heat; his novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection, My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal and many other awards. He was elected to The Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of California at Davis.

Delightful new short fictions by the inimitable Parker Tettleton. OR is a travelogue of language via relationships—a state of endless conjunctions & several abbreviations. It’s also a meditation on the idea of home & a crooked bookend of sorts to This Is A City.

A novel, in flash fiction style, Pipette starts with a woman on a train returning from the ballet, to her dogs, her partner.

Trouble at home escalates. The country is on edge. She tries to escape a threatening situation.  Then comes a pandemic; our protagonist hangs out with her dogs, manages remote teaching.

With leitmotifs of skiing, dogs, trains, waterways, birds, nature, spiritual guides, triathlons, she writes, she teaches, she swims/bikes/runs. The novel dips into her past—trauma, relationships, activities, working in the lab—which pendulums, then finally propels forward.

Pipette was include in IndiReader’s list of Best Reviewed Books, October, 2022.  Also see the very nice review by David Reyes for The Book Commentary  and an interview with Lisa Haselton.

Distributed by Itasca Books.

We’re happy to publish in our pocket series, bearing an imaginative and stylish cover by Faruk Ulay, all six Marco and Marian stories, written at the beginning of the new century by “distinguished elder statesman [Norman] Lock (Kirkus Reviews)”  As in Norman’s A History of the Imagination and Love Among the Particles, Dutch Stories is a commingling of Postmodern wit and playfulness, enchantment and disenchantment, rendered in the author’s virtuoso style.

Search under Norman Lock to see his other Ravenna Titles: Escher’s Journal, The King of Sweden, Two Plays for Radio (one copy left), Trio, Notes to ‘The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for March Knauf’s Universe, Triple No. 4, In the Time of Rat (a narrative poem), The Long Rowing Unto Morning (now out of print), Impossible Objects (now out of print), Under the Balconies of the Moon (pamphlet)

Leaving New York City behind, Karina, the narrator/protagonist, moves to a condominium in a small town in South Florida where she hopes to lead a quiet, idyllic existence of reading and writing. A pioneer in her mind, she is at first content to ride her bike, swim in the ocean, and dialogue with the birds, as well as with the friendly Hispanic laborers digging up the sidewalks in this newly developed neighborhood.  Keller writes all this in an open style of paragraphs much like stanzas of poetry—giving us more oxygen and the room to think.

Soon, though, she’s embroiled with her neighbors, one of whom professes that “I have to love you because you’re Jewish, my Lord and Savior was Jewish.”  Karina’s dream of “wandering lonely as a cloud” cannot remain exclusive of more direct and involved connections, though she ultimately need not embrace them.  She has carried herself down the eastern coast, carried all that is within her—all she has taken in from life and referenced or quoted writers not limited here to Walser, Aleichem, Markson, Borges [“Reality is under no obligation to be interesting”], Melville, the film “Kaspar Hauser” and a writer simply called “R.”  She carries all that in 2008 to the condo’s Meet & Greet.

The ensuing, messy reality—though under no obligation—does prove interesting and vividly relevant today.  Is there happy resolution to tumult?  Does a changed peacefulness emerge?  Here Keller quotes Kaspar Hauser on hearing music for the first time: “The music feels strong in my heart.  I feel so unexpectedly old.”  She parts from us with these lines:  “I, too, felt unexpectedly old, and I thought, this is what language does, this is why we live.”

While entertaining on many levels, this strong collection of short prose reaches deep below the reader’s consciousness, poking at the mysteries there with a lighter touch than would seem possible for the quickening it causes.  The pieces are perfectly matched by original art by Revital Lessick.

Note:  If non-US customers cannot purchase this book from their relevant Amazon system, inquire at editor@ravennapress.com for shipping information to your country.  Amazon deeply discounts shipping in general, so the reality of shipping costs from the US can be surprising–but we will invoice and ship to those who cannot otherwise obtain the book.

A used copy of this original 2006 publication of three fictions by Mario Bellatin:  ”Chinese Checkers,” “Hero Dogs” and “My Skin Luminous,” English versions by Cooper Renner with an introduction by Ken Sparling.

“Kim Chinquee is an American original” reports Ben Bradlee, Jr.  This is her fifth collection of flash fictions from Ravenna, and a true delight.

Read the interview with Kim Chinquee and Peter Ramos at Heavy Feather Review as well as their review by Naya Clark.  Also read Rachel Rueckert’s observations in The Literary Review

Also see the interview by Christina Deputa on Medium and, in Tupelo Quarterly, the interview with Kristina Marie Darling.

This Is A City is a memoir we’re still living. It’s love, it’s a marriage, it’s a cross-country move & then back again. It’s cities within small towns within & more within. It’s us, it’s ours, it’s mine, it’s yours.