Food with Attitude
Cooking the Cuban-Rican Way
By Chef Papi Pérez
Join celebrated Chef Papi Pérez on a unique culinary journey where exotic flavors and health-conscious food go hand-in-hand. Cuban-Rican is a fusion of two distinct Caribbean cooking styles, and in the capable hands of Chef Pérez recipes contained in this book come alive as explosions of flavor and spice.
Drawn on his own experience of foodstuffs passed down from his ancestral home in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, Chef Pérez shares his secrets for creating whole menus and truly exciting and accessible food in this dynamic and colorful cookbook. There are zesty appetizers, savory side dishes, aromatic salads, hearty main courses, and delectable desserts that bear the stamp of a master craftsman in the kitchen. “I love what I do, and I believe in what I do,” says Chef Pérez. Readers are in for a treat as they delve into such classics as sazon papas, vegan arroz gondules, Cajun hummus, award-winning Angel sweet potato pie, and the inimitable Havana Hot Plate, a creative comida of steak, garlicky yucca, and red beans and rice.
This vibrant and imaginative cookbook has a delicacy for every palate and creed, from mac ‘n cheese to wheatgrass spicy rum cake, from garlic mashed potatoes to the Pérez original peanut butter and jelly smoothie, “my kids love it,” says the epicurean maestro.
The emphasis here is on recipes that are easily prepared, healthy in composition, and incredibly tasty. The dishes herein reflect the worldview of their creator. “This is what Food with Attitude is all about,” says Chef Pérez. “It’s about taking a lot of traditional recipes and making them better. So let’s take those leftovers and turn them into a gourmet dish!”
Born in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, CHEF PAPI PÉREZ bears the distinction of being one of the only certified Kosher chefs in Chicago. He has worked as a chef for many eateries throughout Chicago, and he owned his own restaurant in the Pilsen neighborhood called Café Aorta. He has been an award-winning pie maker, menu consultant, and innovator in the kitchen for the past 25 years. Having personally cooked for a large percentage of President Obama’s White House staff, Chef Pérez is considered a world authority on Caribbean cooking. -- see http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Chef-Papi-Perez-Fan-Page/241196621426
Cloth 200 pages $27.95 ISBN 978-1-936679-00-3 August 2011 7 ½ x 9 ¼ Cooking
"Joseph G. Peterson’s Inside the Whale is a part tall tale, part tragedy, part symbolist epic. His Jim O’Connor, the disastrous hero of this work, is a whorl of grief, reckless charm and surly poetic ambition. But as fascinating as it is to watch the antiheroic O’Connor churn through misadventures, oracular bursts of poetry and failed loves, perhaps Inside the Whale’s most moving passages are about Chicago, captured in Peterson’s beautiful coda to this boisterous yarn. From first word to last, this is a book infused with spirit, heart and awe."
—Gregory Lawless author of I Thought I Was New Here
Inside the Whale
A Novel in Verse
By Joseph G. Peterson
Chicago’s own Joe Peterson is back with a strikingly original novel that is at once both mythic and fanciful. It is a narrative poem that recounts the life of Irishman Jim O’Connor, a tragic figure who was born with a preternatural gift for poetry, that brought him early fame, but he is also an alcoholic who had his first blackout drunk at 12 years of age. The stanzas of the novel recount Jim’s tragic exploits as he leaves a wake of dark destruction in his midst. The ghost of his ex-girlfriend Anne, killed in a car crash on a slick, snowy road with Jim driving after an acute drinking binge, haunt Jim to the end of his days. And in a seedy tavern on Chicago’s south-side he writes an ode to her:
would it surprise you flaxen anne if i said
you sing to me a siren call
i hear you singing like the muse
today we’re starting out but
who knows where this will take us
will it take us across the decades
or will it merely take us across town
to a motel perhaps or perhaps to another bar
Inside the Whale is a novel that, in the spirit of Beowulf, imagines a bardic drone chanting the mnemonics of rhythm and rhyme to entertain, lyre in hand, a group of ruffians gathered around a keg of beer and the red-hot coals of a dying fire.
JOSEPH G. PETERSON is the author of Beautiful Piece, a critically acclaimed novel. His new novel, Wanted: Elevator Man, will be published by Switchgrass Books in Fall 2011. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two children, where he works for a large academic publisher. See: www.josephgpeterson.com
ISBN 978-1-936679-01-0 – Paperback - $16 – 225 pages – 5 x 8 – Fiction/Poetry – May 2011
Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales
by Harry Mark Petrakis
Advance praise for Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales:
“The book compares favorably to the work of such short-story writers as Sholem Aleichem and Anton Chekhov.”
- Mavis Manus, Hellenic Journal
“I am reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s naturalistic accounts of coal miners in England, but even more of Thomas Hart Benton’s paintings of small-town life in the American Midwest with ordinary people “enlarged” through the brightness of color—matched in Petrakis’s case by a meticulousness of description, dialogue, and narration that renders these unknowns not just knowable but memorable."
- Peter Bien, professor of English emeritus at Dartmouth College; translator of Kazantzakis's, The Last Temptation of Christ
Cavafy’s Stone and Other Village Tales is the twenty-third book by master storyteller and award-winning novelist Harry Mark Petrakis. In its play of voices reminiscent of the Winesburg, Ohio of Sherwood Anderson, this sequence of tales from a Greek village is at once tragic, moving, and poetic. The linked stories in which the inhabitants of the village of Fanaron in central Greece spin their tangled tales of love, hate, vengeance and despair create a microcosm of the world.
The storytelling craft of Harry Mark Petrakis, praised by writers such as Elie Wiesel, Kurt Vonnegut and Isaac Bashevis Singer, is poignantly and skillfully evidenced in these tales taking place in a land where three of the world’s four great tragedians once wrote their plays.
HARRY MARK PETRAKIS is the author of twenty-three books, short-stories, and essays, and has been nominated twice for the National Book Award. He was the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair in Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University (1992). In 2004, the American College of Greece in Athens presented him with an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree. He lives with his wife in Northwest Indiana. -- http://www.harrymarkpetrakis.com/bio.html
ISBN 978-0-9789676-5-9 – Hardcover – 5 ½ x 8 ½
$24.95 – 234 pages – Fiction – April 2011
The Girl Who Applied Everywhere
by John J. Binder
Applying to college is a rite of passage experienced by thousands of high school students every year. For Sarah Jennings, a senior at fictional Oak Stream High School in suburban Chicago who wants to attend a top university, the task is a daunting one. She comes up with the highly unorthodox idea of applying to 101 colleges around the country, including her safety school, University of Illinois. Readers will find themselves rooting for Sarah and her two classmate helpers, Carrie Wilson and Rob Taylor, as she struggles to submit all her applications by the end of December deadline.
The pressure of getting into a prestigious school can be incredibly intense in a suburban environment. Worried about his own chances, Rob decides on a new, bizarre strategy. Embracing his Native American heritage, he changes his name from Rob Taylor to Running Elk Taylor; he then reapplies to the schools he has already applied to by submitting identical materials while listing his ethnicity as Native American. Rob ends up getting into many colleges that might have otherwise rejected him. While Carrie, Sarah’s other friend, contends with undue pressure from her mother who went to MIT, and who sees her going there as a fulfillment of a multi-generational legacy. There is no question in Carrie’s mother’s mind where she will go. But Carrie has other ideas.
In the strange world of college admissions it becomes clear that acceptance decisions are based on all kinds of things beyond the applicant’s academic ability. Because she is famous due to media coverage of her application odyssey, Sarah gets admitted by most of the schools she applied to. Then comes the really hard part, where to go? And herein lies the moral to this spirited and entertaining novel.
JOHN J. BINDER is a faculty member and former administrator at a university in the Chicago area. His previous book, The Chicago Outfit, deals with rackets other than higher education. He wrote this book partly to help put his children through college.
ISBN 978-1-936679-02-7 – Hardcover - 5 ½ x 8 ½
$19.95 – 160 pages – Fiction/Young Adult - April 2011
Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food
by Gene Logsdon
"Pope Mary and the Church of Almighty Good Food is a wicked satire of religion and small-town oddballs."
- Barbara McIntyre, Akron Beacon Journal
Vinal County, Ohio is a place where corn is king and soybeans are a distant cousin. The spires of regal Catholic churches rise out of the farm landscape and are living manifestations to the faith of God-fearing farm families who contributed to the collection plate every Sunday for generations. Little changes as seasons’ progress, until one day the higher-ups in Rome decide to shut down these churches and make way for some good old-fashioned 21st century style efficiency. A mini-revolution occurs in the churchyard of St Philodendra’s; the lock on the venerable church door is shattered, leaving it swinging in the wind, and the sanctuary open to all. A cast of zany characters populate this romp, from Mary Barnette who dubs herself Pope, to the horse-riding, sheep-tending priest Fr. Ray, to a greedy parish priest who tries to cash in on the ethanol boom, to a group of Catholic royalists calling themselves the Defenders of the Door.
The original contrary farmer himself ruminates on the nature of religion and belief in this barnstormer of a book. Razor sharp satire, flawless characterization, telling dialogue, and formidable comic situations make this third novel by veteran farm and nature writer Logsdon a must-read.
Gene Logsdon lives and raises sheep in north central Ohio with his wife, Carol. He is the author of 26 books, including The Lords of Folly (published by Wicker Park Press), The Mother of All Arts, You Can Go Home Again, The Contrary Farmer, The Pond Lovers, and All Flesh is Grass.
ISBN 978-0-9789676-4-2 – Hardcover – 6 x 9
$24.95 – 200 pages – Fiction – April 2011
The Book of Raymond
A Journey from Prison to Praise and Poetry
by Raymond Richard
Raymond Richard tells it like it is in a powerful collection of poems that are electrifying, terrifying, and awe-inspiring. Richard has been to the big house, lived in poverty on the streets of Chicago, and took to crime and drugs to survive. Here is poetry that literally crackles off the page. Richard is the real deal. He has put his life back together against almost insurmountable odds. He’s back to tell his story in poems that are honest, heart-breaking, violent, and tender. This book is a thoroughly unique look at how religious experience can transform lives for the better.
The Ghetto
...for I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof; mischief also and sorrow are in the midst of it. Wickedness is in the midst thereof; deceit and guile depart not from her streets. Psalms 55: 9b-11
Growing up in the ghetto
Broke dreams was all I seen,
From athletes, entertainers, lawyers, doctors and teachers,
All becoming fiends,
Still hear the families scream
As their loved ones lie dead
With a hole in their head,
On the streets another life gone,
This can’t go on.
Police and paramedics arrive on the scene
Too late to do anything,
Nobody is talking,
Don’t want to get involved
Senseless murders go unsolved
Black on black crime
Or gang violence is what its called.
The media report its government support
Its “case closed” that’s the way they want it.
Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior
Never intended for us to live this way,
Satan led us astray.
Strung out mother’s
Locked up fathers,
A child is born with no one to guide them,
So they turn to the gangs,
The gangs become their family,
Only because parents didn’t live up to their responsibilities.
No one was there to teach them the facts of life,
Violence has become a way of life.
RAYMOND RICHARD lives in Chicago and he has devoted his life to helping men and women put their lives back together after incarceration. He has founded Returning Citizens, a nonprofit organization that empowers former prisoners through job training, literature, and the power of the spoken word.
ISBN 978-0-9789676-7-3 – Paperback – 5 ½ x 8 ½
$15.95 – 68 pages – Poetry/Religion – Now Available
Here, There Are No Sarahs
A Woman’s Courageous Fight against the Nazis and Her Bittersweet Fulfillment of the American Dream
by Sonia Shainwald Orbuch and Fred Rosenbaum
“Here, There Are No Sarahs is especially salient because it deals with little known phenomena of Jews who fought back and explores the difficult role of women in the resistance … uncommonly frank.”
- Michael Berenbaum, Founding Director, United States Holocaust Museum
From a frail teen hiding in German-occupied Poland to a fighter in the forests with the Soviet Partisans…
Stripped of her name, 18 year-old Sonia Shainwald went to war without basic training, without equipment, without food, or any of the essentials necessary to fight the Germans. Urging her family and neighbors to leave a wretched hiding place during the liquidation of their ghetto, she and her parents and uncle spent a brutal winter in the forest. There she joined the Fyodorov partisans and resisted Nazi oppression. After the liberation, her family spent three years in a Displaced Persons camp near Frankfurt, and eventually reached America.
SONIA SHAINWALD ORBUCH was born and raised in Lubomi, Poland. In 1945, she married Holocaust survivor Isaak Orbuch and the couple had two children. She currently lives in the Bay Area and is active in numerous Jewish organizations in New York and California.
ISBN: 978-0-9789676-8-0 – Paperback - $17.95
5 ½ X 8 ½ - 276 pages – Illustrated - Judaica/World War II/Autobiogtaphy – February 2011
Also Available
Taking Risks
A Jewish Youth in the Soviet Partisans and His Unlikely Life in California
by Joseph Pell and Fred Rosenbaum
ISBN 978-0-9789676-9-7 – Paperback - $15.95
5 ½ x 8 ½ - 228 pages – Illustrated - Judaica/World War II
Out on a Ledge
Enduring the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Beyond
by Eva Libitzky and Fred Rosenbaum
“Eva Libitzky’s personal story … opens a valuable window with frank discussions of the traumas and stresses of suffering and survival.”
- Robert Moses Shapiro, Professor of Judaic Studies, Brooklyn College
An account of one woman’s uncommon resourcefulness and perseverance, this book uncovers some of the secrets of Jewish suffering and survival in the twentieth century. Related in her plainspoken voice, it will be of consider¬able interest to scholars and the general public.
This book owes much to a trove of documents on the Holocaust, 150 million pages that were recently digitized and made accessible to researchers by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Fred Rosenbaum was among a team of twelve scholars assembled by the USHMM to examine the archive in summer, 2009. It revealed a great deal of information about Eva Libitzky, and her times. Original documents, including transport lists, medical records, and identity cards are reproduced in the appendix of this volume.
EVA LIBITSKY was born in Lodz, Poland, where she was confined by the Nazis for over four years in Europe’s most impenetrable and longest-lasting ghetto. She was later tortured at Auschwitz-Birkenau, enslaved in the Oederan munitions factory, and quarantined in There¬sienstadt during a typhus epidemic. In 1946, she married Martin Libitzky in a DP camp near Munich. The Libitzkys immigrated to America in 1949. They live in Florida where Eva speaks to groups about her wartime experiences.
FRED ROSENBAUM is the author of numerous books in Jewish history, his most recent book is Cosmopolitans: A Social and Intellectual History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area.
ISBN 978-0-9789676-3-5 – Paperback - $16.95
5 ½ x 8 ½ - 276 pages – Illustrated - Judaica/World War II/Autobiography Available
The Uncanny Valley
Waxworks Photographs of Eleftheria Lialios
by Eleftheria Lialios
Introduction by Dan Georgakis
Text and Notes by Hatto Fischer
Poetry by Vincent Berquez
“ART is a lie that makes us realize TRUTH.”
– Pablo Picasso
The very nature of representation is on graphic display in these outrageous color photographs by veteran multimedia artist Eleftheria Lialios. The color photographs in this book were taken in various wax museums from Cyprus, Greece, London, Paris, and Berlin. They were taken with a regular film 35 mm camera, and were shot “on the fly.” As part of a tour group traveling through a wax museum, Lialios was one of the crowd and did not have time to compose a photograph or implement special lighting. She took the photograph, and later worked with her assembled images.
The wax figures that populate this book form a facsimile of humanity, a representation of life, graphically displayed. The cult of celebrity and the reflexive recognition of historical figures compiled in this book add to its overall unreality, or surreality. Lialios is an artist with an agenda to make readers look inward at themselves as raw observers, she asks us implicitly, what is the quality of our own gaze? What preconceived ideas do we bring along with us?
What is especially uncanny about this book is its ability to entertain, inform, and shock readers all at the same time. As a functional work of art, this collection of photographs challenges more than our expectations and goes right to the heart of what it means to be human, and even post-human.
Eleftheria Lialios is an international artist: -- she’s a filmmaker, a photographer, and is experienced in making photographic transparencies and using them in installations. Appropriately, Lialios’ first name means “freedom” in Greek, which is what many of her friends call her. From immigrant scholar to political artist, Lialios made her art world debut in the late 1970s and has gained notoriety ever since. Born in 1956 in Ioannina, Greece, her family, Greek refugees from Albania, migrated to Canada and then to the United States, where Lialios completed her undergraduate degree at Wayne State University. Early in her career, she won numerous awards and grants, including the prestigious Fulbright Scholar grant in 1986. From 1988 – 2010 she was Associate Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently resides in Paris.
ISBN 978-0-9789676-6-6 – Paperback - $35.00
10 x 10 - 120 pages – Photography (color) - September 2011
ISBN 978-0-888160-75-8 – Cloth (laminated) - $65.00
10 x 10 - 120 pages – Photography (color) - September 2011
Carbon- Free and Nuclear- Free
A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, Updated Edition IEER PRESS
by Arjun Makhijani
“Argun has produced a study which fulfills my greatest hopes – an urgent action plan to move Earth in a dignified way out of intensive care.”
- Helen Caldicott, M.D., President, Nuclear Policy Research Institute
This important book shows how energy needs can be met by alternative sources: -- wind, solar, biomass, microalgae, and geothermal are all part of a comprehensive solution. In a world confronting global climate change and other critical issues, the U.S. must assume a leadership role in moving towards a zero-C02 emissions energy economy. This book is a blueprint for bringing America closer to energy independence and environmental safety.
ARGUN MAKHIJANI is an engineer and President of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).
ISBN 978-0-9645168-2-3 – Paperback – 5 ½ x 8 ½
$17.95 – 265 pages – Science/Environmental Studies – February 2011
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