Blog Archives
AWAKENINGS: Short Stories of Moments That Shape Us
In Awakenings, award-winning author Chuck Cascio brings together ten short stories that explore the experiences, relationships, and unexpected encounters that influence who we become. This collection of literary fiction celebrates the importance of human connection, personal growth, compassion, and the choices we make when life presents us with something we didn’t see coming. Cascio has an eye for the small details that make everyday experiences meaningful, whether it’s a conversation between friends, an afternoon on a basketball court, or a moment of understanding between family members. His characters are recognizable people with complicated emotions, familiar frustrations, and deeply personal hopes. Each story creates its own atmosphere while contributing to the collection’s central theme of discovering what truly matters. There’s a genuine warmth running through these stories, along with humor, nostalgia, and an appreciation for the unpredictable ways people influence one another.
One of the collection’s greatest strengths is its variety of characters and situations. In “The Brooklyn Wind,” a teenage boy navigating adolescence, family responsibilities, and his first romantic feelings finds himself confronting questions about courage and kindness. The story’s Brooklyn setting and references to Bob Dylan give it a distinctive sense of time and place. “Noontime Afterglow” introduces an aging rock musician facing changes in his career and personal life, while “My Sister’s Jumper” uses sibling competition on the basketball court to explore family dynamics and emotional vulnerability. Cascio also takes readers into a neighborhood Italian restaurant, a New York City pool hall, a hair salon, and the world of recreational softball. These settings feel lived-in, populated by characters whose personalities emerge through lively conversations, affectionate teasing, and occasionally sharp disagreements. The range of experiences gives this short story collection an engaging rhythm, with each new narrative offering another perspective on what it means to grow, connect, and change.
Cascio’s background as a journalist and teacher comes through in his attention to human behavior and his accessible storytelling style. His prose is conversational, and his frequent use of dialogue helps establish the voices of characters from different generations and backgrounds. The New York and Brooklyn stories are especially rich in neighborhood personality, capturing the familiar banter, loyalties, and shared histories that develop within close communities. Sports and music also play important roles throughout the book, serving as natural parts of the characters’ lives and as opportunities to explore ambition, identity, friendship, and aging. In stories such as “Another Tournament Win” and “The Girl With Special Hair,” Cascio finds emotional significance in situations that initially seem ordinary. His approach to contemporary literary fiction is grounded in recognizable human experiences, allowing readers to connect with the characters through their actions, conversations, doubts, and desires. Humor frequently accompanies more serious subjects, giving the collection a balance of lightheartedness and emotional depth.
What made Awakenings particularly appealing to me was the way its stories encourage readers to consider the people and moments that have shaped their own lives. Across the collection, Cascio explores loyalty, forgiveness, self-respect, family bonds, resilience, and the passage of time. His characters encounter circumstances that invite them to reconsider familiar assumptions, appreciate relationships, or recognize possibilities they may have overlooked. Some stories unfold with playful energy, while others carry a reflective or bittersweet tone. Together, they create a portrait of life as a series of experiences that can leave lasting impressions, even when their significance isn’t immediately apparent. Readers who enjoy character-driven literary fiction, realistic short stories, and narratives about family, friendship, and personal discovery will find plenty to appreciate here. Awakenings is a thoughtful and entertaining collection that understands how an ordinary day, an unexpected conversation, or a seemingly insignificant encounter can become part of the story we tell about ourselves.
Pages: 103 | ASIN: B0FT4XGCTR
Christmas Bizarre: Short Story Mysteries for the Holidays (Rikkhe St. Claire Hygge & Bisous Holiday Mysteries Book 1)
Veronica Cline Barton’s Christmas Bizarre brings together holiday traditions, intriguing mysteries, supernatural encounters, and heartfelt moments in a collection of five interconnected stories. The book centers on Rikkhe St. Claire, a successful interior designer with Danish and French roots, who hosts an annual Christmas storytelling gathering at her Malibu home. Surrounded by family, close friends, her boyfriend Pete, and her beloved poodle Coco, Rikkhe invites everyone to share an unusual tale from their past. There’s even a friendly competition to determine whose story is the best. It’s an inviting premise that immediately establishes the book’s warm, conversational personality. With a crackling fireplace, festive drinks, and plenty of affectionate teasing, Barton creates the feeling of spending an evening with an entertaining group of people who have some extraordinary experiences to share. Each tale has its own setting, characters, and emotional stakes, giving the collection a pleasing variety while maintaining a connection through the family’s holiday celebration.
The five stories take readers across different countries and historical periods, blending mystery, romance, and the unexplained. In “Noël à Versailles,” an eccentric French heiress with a fascination for Marie Antoinette becomes entangled in a troubling mystery involving an elaborate Advent calendar. “Lady H” transports readers to a historic Kentucky estate, where an architect discovers a haunting story connected to the property’s past. “The Ornament” follows a European river cruise and a woman’s deeply personal search for a treasured Christmas decoration. In “The Rocking Horse,” a nanny working in Sweden encounters strange occurrences in a house with a tragic history. Finally, “Moving Pictures” explores old Hollywood glamour, a forgotten film, and a love story that continues to resonate decades later. Barton gives each setting a distinctive personality, filling her scenes with architectural details, beautiful furnishings, holiday decorations, and local traditions. Her background descriptions are especially engaging, bringing everything from French estates to Scandinavian homes and Hollywood memorabilia into focus.
There’s something reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in the way Christmas Bizarre connects the supernatural with compassion, memory, and the emotional significance of Christmas. Both works use unusual encounters to explore human relationships and the lasting influence of the past. Barton approaches these ideas through several intimate stories, each emphasizing the connections people maintain across generations. Her writing also incorporates elements familiar to readers of cozy mysteries, particularly its curious characters, intriguing circumstances, and reassuring sense of community. The stories sometimes move quickly through significant events, giving them the rhythm of family legends being retold around a fireplace. That approach suits the book’s storytelling format, although some readers may wish to spend more time with certain characters and mysteries. Barton’s enthusiasm for historical settings and decorative details is evident throughout, and her affectionate treatment of her characters gives even the darker episodes an underlying warmth.
What makes Christmas Bizarre particularly appealing is its celebration of the stories families carry with them and the unexpected ways those stories connect people. Love, loss, loyalty, generosity, and second chances appear throughout the collection, often alongside eerie circumstances or puzzling discoveries. Rikkhe and her family provide a comfortable gathering place for these experiences, and their reactions help reinforce the personal significance of each tale. The book’s combination of holiday atmosphere and supernatural intrigue makes it especially suited to readers who enjoy Christmas fiction with a mysterious twist. There’s also a gentle appreciation for preserving history, whether through restoring an old home, cherishing an heirloom, or remembering someone whose life made a difference. Barton clearly enjoys bringing these experiences together, and that enthusiasm gives the collection its charm. Christmas Bizarre is an enjoyable seasonal read for anyone who appreciates a little mystery with their Christmas traditions, especially when the stories come with a touch of romance, an occasional ghost, and a generous helping of heart.
Pages: 86 | ASIN: B09HTZDT59
The Voice of Cuba
The Voice of Cuba by Amarilys Gacio Rassler is a collection of fiction, drama, poetry, and nonfiction centered on Cuba, political oppression, exile, faith, and the difficult work of building a life in a new country. Rather than treating Cuban history as something distant or abstract, Rassler brings it into family homes, prison cells, airports, classrooms, and makeshift rafts. The book moves across decades and points of view, but its emotional center stays consistent: ordinary people are trying to protect the people they love while forces larger than themselves reshape their lives.
The fiction contains some of the anthology’s most intense moments. “Seis Dedos, Six Toes” follows a young girl whose courage takes a shocking physical form, while “The Tree of Hope” portrays political prisoners struggling to preserve their dignity and faith under brutal conditions. “The Rafters” turns a family’s escape by sea into a painful story about sacrifice, and the play “From Worms to Butterflies” captures the confusion and heartbreak of a child leaving Cuba. Rassler often blends English and Spanish within the same conversation, so the language feels rooted in Cuban family life. Food, songs, religious expressions, nicknames, and familiar objects give the stories warmth even when the events become frightening.
The book reminded me of Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, especially in the way both writers connect political history to intimate family relationships. García’s novel is more layered and stylistically experimental, moving among generations whose feelings about Cuba often conflict. Rassler’s anthology is more direct and testimonial. Her characters tend to speak clearly about freedom, faith, and the damage caused by the Castro regime. That directness gives the book the feeling of oral history passed from parents and grandparents to younger generations. It’s less interested in creating distance between the reader and the subject than in making sure these experiences are remembered.
What stayed with me most was the anthology’s movement from terror and separation toward memory, love, and cultural continuity. The nonfiction pieces near the end, including the funny and affectionate courtship story “Romance in the U.S.A.” and the tender “The Shoe,” show that exile contains awkwardness, humor, romance, and ordinary family negotiations alongside grief. Rassler’s writing is at its strongest when a small object or gesture carries a much larger history: a shoe touched by a mother, a guava-filled cookie, a pearl necklace, a song, or a shared phrase in Spanish. The Voice of Cuba feels personal because it is personal. It gathers stories that might otherwise remain inside individual families and turns them into a record of endurance, faith, and Cuban-American identity.
Pages: 129
Tales From the Texas Timberlands, Volume 2
Tales from the Texas Timberlands Volume 2, by J. Andrew Rice, is a fiction anthology rooted in East Texas life, family memory, faith, work, and community. Across five stories, Rice moves from a postwar sawmill and a woman’s unexpected wrestling career to city management, football coaching, and church ministry. The book has the feel of stories passed down on a porch, where personal history, local color, and moral reflection all sit side by side.
What stood out to me most was the book’s steady affection for ordinary people doing hard things. Rice writes with a clear respect for builders, teachers, coaches, public servants, church members, and family elders. The stories are often direct, sometimes almost plainspoken, but that plainness works with the material. It gives the book an unvarnished quality. I felt like I was listening to someone who knows these towns, these arguments, these little rituals, and these long memories. The writing doesn’t rush to impress. It takes its time.
I also appreciated the way Rice lets each story carry a lesson without making the whole book feel like a lecture. That balance isn’t always easy. At times, the themes are stated openly, especially around faith, leadership, character, and perseverance, but the best moments come when those ideas rise naturally from the characters’ choices. Mattie’s strength in “Red Hammer Body Slammer,” Guy’s principles in “Sawmill,” Kent’s public service in “The City Manager,” Gary’s mentorship in “Coach,” and the narrator’s church life in “When We All Get To Heaven” all point toward the same belief: people are shaped by work, place, faith, and the stories they inherit. That idea really resonated with me.
As Southern historical fiction and a regional short story collection, Tales from the Texas Timberlands Volume 2 will appeal most to readers who enjoy character-driven stories with a strong sense of place. I would recommend it to anyone who likes reflective small-town fiction, family-centered storytelling, faith-inflected narratives, and books that treat local history as something alive rather than dusty. It’s warm, sincere, and grounded. Readers who enjoy stories about legacy, grit, and community will find a lot to appreciate here.
Pages: 171 | ASIN : B0H2DKDV3Y
Shadows of the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Mythological Creatures
Shadows of the Archipelago, by E. R. Escober, is a dark anthology that reimagines Philippine mythological creatures through tragic, emotionally heightened stories of love, terror, betrayal, and vengeance. Across tales centered on the Nuno sa Punso, Tikbalang, Manananggal, Diwata, Multo, mermaid, Batibat, and Aswang, the book treats folklore not as decorative mythology but as a living force: something old, wounded, and still watching from the edges of human life. These are monster stories, yes, but the deeper concern is often what people do to the misunderstood, the lonely, the beautiful, and the cursed.
I was struck by how insistently the book asks me to reconsider the word “monster.” Escober’s creatures are frightening, but they are rarely simple villains. The Nuno becomes a protector whose love is misread as horror; the Tikbalang’s violence grows from persecution and grief; the Batibat becomes less a random nightmare than a moral reckoning. The book’s strongest moments come when folklore and human cruelty collide, creating a kind of gothic pressure in which the supernatural is not the scariest thing in the room. I appreciated that the stories don’t merely parade legendary beings across the page. They give them sorrow, appetite, dignity, and doom.
The style is dramatic, sometimes operatic, and it leans into excess: curses crackle, grief burns, bodies transform, and love tends to arrive already shadowed by catastrophe. That intensity won’t be for every reader. But the book’s fervor also gives it its peculiar magnetism. It reads like folklore retold around a fire by someone who refuses to whisper, someone who wants each legend to feel less like an artifact and more like a warning pressed into your palm.
I would recommend Shadows of the Archipelago to readers who enjoy folklore, mythology, dark fantasy, supernatural horror, gothic tragedy, creature horror, and mythic retellings with a strong emotional core. Readers who admire the folkloric menace of Neil Gaiman or the culturally rooted darkness of Silvia Moreno-Garcia may find a similar pleasure here, though Escober’s work is more fevered and melodramatic in its delivery. This is a book for those who like their legends blood-warm, grief-soaked, and morally thorny.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0GP2QB14K
Generational Curses
Release & Be Free is an erotic anthology where desire becomes a gateway to healing, self-discovery, and freedom. Did you set out to write erotica with a spiritual dimension, or did that emerge naturally?
Great question. The answer is both. I was introduced to erotica writing by WAPUnleashed Publishing’s Facebook group years ago. I remember reading people’s stories and a comment, a woman said that they were just about sex, nothing else. And I was like, hmm. So I prayed on it and allowed God to work through me so we could create an erotic story with meaning, depth, and purpose. Which was very natural to me because all my writings have that spiritual element in them, no matter the genre I’m writing in. It’s intentional. Release & Be Free: An Enlightening Erotic Anthology was no different, the way it came out though, each story or scene was different, though, and inspired by my imagination, my life, personal experiences, and observation, all with divine assistance of course. For instance, “Mow Me Down,” I enjoy mowing lawns, and I started to connect with how lawn mowers cut grass that continuously needs to be cut, and that reminded me of generational curses, because I was going through learning and breaking some of my own at the time.
What did “liberation” mean to you when you began writing this collection?
Since Release & Be Free: An Enlightening Erotic Anthology is a collection of works written over numerous years, they all stem from my journey of wanting to be free to be me, like I was when I was in middle school before the noise, distractions, choices, and changes that growing up brought. Freeing myself from old habits, mindsets, and choices so that I could be the best Mother to my children, a good wife, focused on fulfilling my purpose without getting distracted, and loving myself in the way of support and encouragement that I’ve done for others for decades. Liberation also meant healing and forgiving, too. Ultimately, liberation meant I already have divine permission to be. Who I was. Who I am now. And who I am becoming. Daily.
The collection often treats body and spirit as inseparable. Were there specific experiences or influences that shaped that perspective?
I love this question. From my studying of the definition and etymology of spirit, along with years of living my life, helping others, and most importantly being open to higher learning from God. I’ve been shown that they are not separate. Spirit is inside of us, it is us, and one of the things that I was shown and that I teach is that the spirit is just one of our human functions, so to speak, that the body listens to, or follows, or chooses from. Our body follows the direction of our brain with our thoughts, our “heart” with our emotions (feelings), and our soul or spirit. The two need to be aligned, like one in thought, feeling, words, and spirit. When you are, your body follows, and that means less confusion, internal battles, or wars within yourself. More purposeful, intentional, and balanced living, from the head to the feet. We have our own spirit, or I should say the Creator’s spirit in us, which is why we can connect, sense, or see the spirit of others.
How has this book changed you as a writer, or what did you learn about yourself through writing it?
Release & Be Free: An Enlightening Erotic Anthology has joined the journey of me owning myself, being proud, and authentic about who I am and the work God has given me to do when it comes to intimacy. To help people remember and understand that sex is more than just sex. It is an exchange of energy; it has purpose, value, and importance. Therefore, it should be respected and talked about as such more, so that it won’t be abused anymore and used to hurt others.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website
The Cycle of the Serpent
V.W. Black’s The Cycle of the Serpent is a dark speculative anthology built around eight historical collapses, from the Ice Age steppes to Ur, Pompeii, Viking fjordlands, plague-era France, the Dust Bowl, wartime Europe, and a near-future AI tower. In each era, humanity’s cruelty, greed, or complacency summons, or releases, a corrective force through a marked “vessel,” asking whether civilization needs a monster to keep it from becoming one. The book frames its recurring infinity-loop scar as both curse and indictment, a serpent eating its tail across time.
I was impressed by how bluntly moral the book is without feeling simple. Its premise could have turned into a procession of punishments, but the stronger sections complicate the judgment: the “correction” is terrifying, often excessive, and yet the societies it visits have already made ordinary mercy feel endangered. Author V.W. Black writes catastrophe with a tactile nastiness; the cold has weight, dust has teeth, and heat becomes almost juridical. I liked that the book’s horror often arrives through systems before it arrives through spectacle: ledgers, hierarchies, raids, feasts, algorithms. The monster is only the final grammar of a sentence humanity has already been writing.
I enjoyed how fully the book commits to its intensity. The moral architecture is clear, purposeful, and severe, giving each chapter the force of a parable without flattening it into a lesson. The anthology structure turns repetition into ritual: the same scar, the same failure, the same awful question returns in different costumes, and by the final book, where the cycle mutates into technological apocalypse, the pattern feels less like a device and more like a diagnosis. I admired the book most when it let small human gestures resist the grand machinery: someone sheltering a child, preserving a tool, keeping a hearth alive. Those moments give the darkness its necessary filament of light.
I’d recommend this to readers of historical fiction, horror, apocalyptic fiction, dark fantasy, science fiction, and dystopian fiction, especially anyone drawn to stories about collapse, punishment, and the dangerous romance of judgment. It has the historical sweep and doom-laden recursion of Max Brooks by way of Clive Barker, with a harsher, more elemental appetite.
Pages: 412 | ASIN: B0GKFKKB4Q
Unleashing The Power Within: A Journey of Self-Discovery Through Poetry
Unleashing the Power Within is a short, heartfelt collection of inspirational poems that moves through self-worth, recovery, faith, gratitude, nature, and personal renewal. Lisa McCarthy writes as someone who has suffered, endured, and come out the other side determined to speak encouragement over both herself and her reader. The book’s emotional arc gathers force as recurring ideas echo across the collection: breaking free from harm, setting boundaries, trusting intuition, reclaiming one’s voice, and finally rooting identity in God. What gives it shape beyond affirmation is the sense that these poems arise from lived experience, especially when the book turns personal in pieces like “My Freedom Day” and “From Silence to Self-Acceptance,” where liberation stops being an abstract slogan and starts to feel earned.
McCarthy isn’t trying to be sly or ironic, and that lack of distance gives the collection a disarming openness. When she writes about blooming “beneath the ashes and dirt,” or compares healing to pushing toward light, the imagery is simple, but it lands because she means it. I felt that again in the poems about the natural world, especially the red cedar trees, the Gulf of Mexico beach, the lavender fields, and those bright little “Golden Finches in the Rain.” Those poems briefly loosen the book’s grip on exhortation and let it breathe. They offer a quieter kind of restoration, and I found myself wishing there were even more of them, because McCarthy’s voice is often at its most vivid when she pauses long enough to really look.
McCarthy returns to the language of empowerment, destiny, courage, and self-belief. I respected the clarity of the ideas. This is a book deeply invested in healthy boundaries, in refusing negativity, in choosing gratitude, and in seeing survival not just as escape but as transformation. Even when the phrasing is familiar, the conviction behind it feels real, and that reality matters.
I read Unleashing the Power Within less as a formally ambitious poetry collection than as a personal testament shaped into verse, and on those terms it has genuine warmth and purpose. It’s a book about speaking kindly to the bruised parts of the self until they begin to believe they deserve light. I would recommend it to readers who want accessible, faith-tinged, emotionally direct poetry about healing, resilience, and beginning again. For someone coming through loss, self-doubt, or a hard season of change, this book could feel like a companionable hand on the shoulder.
Pages: 96 | ASIN : B0DBVC33S5
