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If Only
If Only, by Manmohan Sadana, is a wide-ranging collection of stories, poems, dramatic scenes, and reflective pieces that move through love, faith, memory, grief, service, and human dignity. The book feels like a gathering place for many Indian voices and landscapes: Punjab’s mustard fields, Delhi homes and streets, Madurai’s temple life, Kolkata’s Durga Puja, Partition memories, Sikh traditions, Buddhist reflection, and everyday people trying to live with kindness. It’s built less around one plot and more around a shared emotional current, where each piece asks the reader to look a little more closely at compassion.
One of the strongest threads in the book is its attention to people who are often made to feel invisible. “Born under the same Silence” opens with Zainab and Meher, two hijra characters who meet in a world that wounds them but also slowly makes room for hope. When Meher tells a tea vendor, “The way is wide enough for all of us,” the line becomes more than a reply. It captures the book’s larger belief that dignity doesn’t need permission. That same spirit carries into stories about disability, speech, blindness, old age, poverty, and loneliness, where the characters aren’t treated as symbols so much as people who want to be seen clearly.
Sadana’s writing is deeply drawn to tenderness in ordinary life. In “Every Day I Meet You for the First Time,” love becomes an act of daily renewal as Aarav keeps meeting Maya after she forgets him each morning. In “Loving Son,” a beagle named Prince becomes the most devoted child in a house marked by absence. In “The Stuttering Heart,” patience becomes romance. These pieces work because they understand love as attention, repetition, and care. One line from the book puts this beautifully: “Hope is not tied to breath.” That idea keeps returning, whether the story is about soldiers, parents, lovers, teachers, servants, or strangers.
The collection also has a strong spiritual pulse. Sadana writes about Bulleh Shah, Sikh symbols, Buddha, Vishnu’s avatars, the months of the year, and the moral imagination behind Indian traditions. These sections don’t just explain belief systems; they place them beside lived experience. The book’s spirituality is practical and human, rooted in service, humility, forgiveness, and respect. Even when the writing becomes poetic or devotional, it keeps circling back to how people treat one another. In that sense, faith here isn’t distant or abstract. It’s found in a shared roof, a returned wallet, a held hand, a patient listener, or a person who refuses to abandon someone in pain.
What makes If Only memorable is its emotional range. It can move from a battlefield trench to a wedding night, from a five-hundred-rupee note’s journey to a Partition survivor’s household, from mythic reflection to a simple conversation between two people learning trust. The book is sincere, expansive, and openly compassionate. It invites readers to slow down and notice the quiet forms of courage that often go unnamed. More than anything, If Only is a book about human connection: how it survives loss, how it grows through patience, and how it becomes a kind of prayer when people choose kindness first.
Pages: 210 | ASIN : B0GTJS4LVN
Who We Choose to Be
Who We Choose to Be is a candid and searching memoir about love, grief, family, memory, and the long, complicated road into sobriety. Author Gillian Silverthorn moves through her life in three emotional currents: the tangled loves of youth and marriage, the ache of losing her parents and the family home, and the hard-won clarity that comes after deciding, at sixty, to stop drinking. What stayed with me most was how the book keeps circling back to the same tender question: how do we become honest with ourselves after years of surviving by pleasing others, hiding pain, or softening life’s sharp edges with alcohol?
Silverthorn has a lovely instinct for small, bruising details: the pink hair dye left in the bathtub after Emma visits, the hot homemade bread in her mother’s kitchen, the worms kept in pockets, the old house down the lane that becomes both sanctuary and trap. Those moments made the book feel lived in rather than explained. I also admired the way she lets contradiction breathe. Her mother is controlling and loving. The family home is magical and dangerous. Drink is comfort, performance, escape, and prison. That complexity gives the memoir its unique feel. The shift between second person in the early section and first person later can feel a little uneven at times, but I understood what it was reaching for. It gives the opening a haunted, dissociated feeling, as though the author is watching her younger self from across a room.
What moved me most was the honesty around sobriety, not as a neat transformation but as a raw re-entry into feeling. The scene where she wakes after asking her husband for help has real force, because there’s relief there, but also shame, trembling, stubbornness, and fear. I believed her when she wrote about the loneliness of not drinking around old friends, especially the friend who urges her to sniff the wine bottle and laughs about finishing it. That kind of moment is painfully recognizable, not because everyone has the same relationship with alcohol, but because everyone knows what it feels like when a shared ritual suddenly stops belonging to you. I also appreciated that the book doesn’t pretend sobriety makes life gentle. She loses her long-running business, says goodbye to her dog JiJi, and still doesn’t drink. Those passages gave the ideas weight. The book argues, quietly but firmly, that freedom isn’t always ecstatic. Sometimes it’s just fruit and sparkling water at a hotel celebration in Paphos, followed by an early morning run and the shock of seeing color return to the world.
Who We Choose to Be is open-hearted, sincere, and full of hard-earned light. Silverthorn’s reflections on alcohol, aging, family duty, and self-respect landed with me because they weren’t polished into tidy lessons. They felt found, sometimes painfully, through living. This is a warm, reflective memoir for readers who like intimate life writing, especially anyone drawn to stories about sobriety, complicated mothers, grief, midlife reinvention, and the strange courage it takes to choose peace over performance.
Pages: 90 | ISBN : 978-1915762412
Love Is Just Love
Of Teeth & Claws follows a queer man who, after being outed and estranged, returns to his Southern hometown only to find it being stalked by a brutal creature tied to old secrets, witchcraft, and the boy who was his first love. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I believe we’ve all experienced our first love, that person who awakens something inside us that we didn’t realize was even there. Most often, it starts with laughter, playful banter, and teasing. But as we grow closer, we begin to share pieces of ourselves with this person, pieces that, at that young age, we’re not sure fit in life’s puzzle. For straight youth, these connections are fostered and encouraged by society. They are told in every fairy tale, sung in every love song, and shown in a plethora of films. For those of us in the LGBTQ+ community, it’s a frightening feeling, a panic that can be isolating and terrifying. I wanted to explore that. I wanted to take that beautiful possibility, box it into society’s flavor of “normalcy,” and wrap it in dark, unforeseen challenges. In essence, I just wanted a love story.
Jasper Mill feels steeped in history, secrecy, and tension. What inspired the setting, and how important was Southern culture in shaping the tone of the story?
When I began focusing on the LGBTQ+ experience in horror, I felt it was essential to write what I knew, and that meant exploring Tennessee. It’s challenging for anyone in our community to be truly accepted, and that is especially true in the South, where tradition and faith are often weaponized. In my lifetime, I’ve met many in the community who have chosen to leave for new homes in regions where LGBTQ+ people find a more welcoming atmosphere. But I don’t necessarily believe leaving is the answer. I believe we are better served to keep our homes, because it is our right to have them. I thought that if I could take these love stories, these relationships, and make them rise from a place of horror and mystery, it may help some people understand that love is just love. No more, no less.
The novel explores how shame travels through families and communities. What drew you to that theme?
Certainly, it would have to be my own experience. And, sadly, it is not unique in any sense, especially in the 80s and 90s when I was raised. I was the youngest of eight children, consisting of seven boys and one girl. Two of my older brothers were Baptist Deacons in the church. Shame follows you in a legacy such as this. But I think that is one of the positives of growing older. You become a bit wiser. And you also stop caring so much about what others think. I wanted the reader to know that shame is nothing more than a winter coat. Really, you can take it off at any time.
Do you think horror is uniquely suited to exploring queer identity and experience?
Yes! I do! And that is a great question. Not only do I think it is uniquely suited, but I also don’t think it is explored nearly as much as it should be. There can be so much terror and turmoil with the LGBTQ+ journey, and that is speaking to the internal struggles that many of us face while on that road. These themes parlay eloquently into horror, because it’s not just the monster lurking in the trees that you need to fear; it’s the monsters who hide as friends and family. Even the monsters that lurk in the mind.
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Then again, this could be a Mystery novel. As Alex drives north of I-75, back to the mountains of Jasper Mill, Tennessee, he doesn’t realize that he is escaping the sanctimonious shackles of his mother only to hurl himself into a boiling cauldron of murder, conspiracy, and black magic decades in the making. And those involved could be the ones he holds most dear.
This could even be a Horror novel. Because at the center of this intrigue lives a creature, a monster made of teeth and claws. It hunts in the moonlight at the bidding of a mysterious mistress who seeks revenge on those who wronged her so many years ago. And soon, just days from now, it will hunt for Alex.
Or…maybe this is a Love story. Alex has known love; he’s almost sure of it. Love of his eccentric grandmother, Belle, and her free-spirited friends, Justine and Gracie, the women who helped raise him. And what about David Stone? Could David still be there in the mountains of Jasper Mill, waiting to love, to rekindle, to forgive? Because David is always there. Like the blue of the sky.
Yes…this is a love story.
Because we deserve it.
Maintaining My Personal Voice
Moondust is a collection of poems whose themes range from reflections on nature and childhood memory to grief, love, and mental anguish. Why was this an important collection for you to share with readers?
Moondust is a journey through emotions and experiences that are often hard to put into words. It’s a way for me to explore and process my own feelings while hopefully offering comfort and insight to others. In my nature poems, I often find beauty in the simplest moments—like witnessing the dawn sky or observing the birds in my garden—and I want to preserve those vivid snapshots.
Why did Moondust feel like the right title for this body of work?
“Moondust” symbolizes the beauty and inherent fragility of life’s transient moments. It reflects a sense of wonder at the natural world and how its sights and sounds, and the people within it, can stir profound emotions within us.
Childhood and family memory appear with both warmth and ache throughout the book. Was revisiting those spaces emotionally difficult during the writing process?
No. I look back on my childhood fondly. Each space holds a story that shaped who I am today, and while there were challenges, the overall experience was filled with love. It was more of a celebration than a struggle, and I was grateful for the opportunity to honor that part of my life through my writing.
Are there themes or forms you’re eager to explore in future collections?
I continually grow as a writer, exploring new styles while maintaining my personal voice. Free verse gives me the freedom to express myself without the constraints of rhyme. I also enjoy writing haiku because I love capturing a single beautiful moment in a brief, impactful snapshot.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Website | Amazon
Her deep appreciation for the natural world shines through, revealing its unique quirks and challenges through lyrical expression.
With her distinctive voice, Steele explores emotions, relationships, and personal truths.
Each poem is a powerful piece of artful storytelling, appealing to anyone seeking connection and insight.
Moondust: A Collection of Poems
In Moondust, author Kahlani B. Steele gathers a wide-ranging collection of poems that move from nature’s intimate theatre to childhood memory, grief, love, mental anguish, self-reflection, and finally the strange tenderness of people and places. The book begins with trees, birds, weather, moonlight, and water, then slowly turns inward, letting the natural world become a language for loneliness, desire, inheritance, and survival. I felt the collection’s emotional center most strongly in pieces like “Photograph of Pop,” “Trigger,” “The House of Me,” and “Mabel,” where ordinary images, a fishing line, a daisy, a cracked body-as-house, a lipstick mark on a child’s cheek, carry more ache than any grand declaration could.
Steele notices the world with a patient, almost devotional eye: the old tackle box, the mud on gumboots, the willy wagtail singing before rain, the park bench left alone after the stars depart. The poems are often at their best when they trust those concrete details to do the emotional work. There’s a warmth in the childhood poems that stayed with me, especially the quiet companionship with Pop, because the restraint makes the love feel authentic. I also liked how the book keeps returning to nature without making nature merely pretty. It consoles, yes, but it also bites, drenches, burns, withholds, and witnesses.
Steele’s writing is lush, and sometimes the collection occasionally leans into ornate metaphor. Still, I found that excess part of the book’s sincerity. These poems don’t pretend to be cool or detached. They ache openly. The ideas are familiar in the deepest human sense: grief, memory, heartbreak, aging, disconnection, the need to return to something elemental, but Steele gives them a distinctly tactile shape. Pain becomes frostbite, the body becomes a damaged house, memory becomes a locked room, and loneliness sits like a bench under thinning light.
I finished Moondust feeling that I’d been walking beside someone who pays close attention because attention itself is a form of care. It’s an earnest, textured, emotionally generous collection. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy accessible contemporary poetry with a reflective heart, especially those drawn to nature writing, family memory, grief, and poems that speak plainly but still reach for beauty.
Pages: 110 | ASIN : B0GRHSKLK3
Raising Awareness
Jackdaw Affliction follows Billy from a rough-edged 1980s English childhood into adulthood, where grief, love, and the advancing grip of ataxia turn survival, dignity, and endurance into the heart of the story. What drew you to tell Billy’s story across such a long emotional and physical arc?
My desire in writing this novel was to keep things real and plausible. I have lived experience of Ataxia and strong connections with peers across a wide range of disabilities. To stay truthful to what many folk experience, it was necessary to have an arc where Billy loses everything. Or at least perceives he loses everything.
The beginning of the novel – Youth – is about the growth and making of the man. The second half of the novel is about diminishing abilities and the effects on the mind. The frightening thing about ataxia and all degenerative conditions is that they slowly chip away at you until there is nothing left. Often, the mental health side of this is not explicitly discussed. I wanted to change that.
How did you balance the intimacy of Billy’s voice with the wider family-saga feel of the novel?
I wrote this book with the aim of raising awareness of a rare condition. But also, I wanted to give readers an insight into the mind of someone who slowly loses all that made them who they are. Mental health is a real and delicate thing. It is for me, and it is for many people with debilitating conditions.
The book was always about Billy’s story. Always predominantly his narration. After my first draft, it became apparent that I needed more structure and readability. This is when the vignettes from his family members came in. Both to tell the story from other perspectives, but also to offer some unquestionable truth and reliability to the manuscript. The family was always a vital cog in Billy’s wider story, even when they were no longer present in his life.
Music feels like a quiet current running through the book. What role did it play for you while writing?
Music helps set the theme, feel, and time stamp this story. Almost by chance, I had found myself listening to certain tracks whilst writing and developing the book. Each track helped me set the scenes and characters to a specific point in time. Whilst not a historical novel, it is set over 35 years, so being accurate on the recent past was a necessity.
Also, if you pay really close attention to each song in the book, you can almost see a story told by the track listings.
As important as music is, it was also important to have an absence of music during Billy’s darker times. For this reason, almost all of part 4 is devoid of music.
When writing Billy’s experience of ataxia, how did you approach portraying disability, humiliation, and endurance without slipping into sentimentality?
The aim from the outset was to portray a plausible, real character. Inspiration porn was not the goal. By this I mean it was important that all characters made mistakes, had flaws, and had mischievous thoughts, rather than paint them as some kind of saint or martyr. Hopefully, the book balances vulnerability with agency. The idea was not to have characters as symbols or lessons, but to present flawed, authentic human beings. As mentioned, it was great to draw on my experiences and those of my peers to keep the story feeling as genuine as possible.
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From bike rides through the suburbs of 1980s Hampshire to the claustrophobic grind of adulthood, Billy Cooper’s life is shaped by loss, fractured family ties, and the creeping onset of a degenerative disease. As his body betrays him and grief corrodes what remains, Billy turns inward—into recollections that blur, narratives that contradict, and personas that may never have existed.
Jackdaw Affliction is a descent into memory’s labyrinth, where trauma, illness, and longing distort the line between truth and invention. Told with brutal honesty, warped humour and hallucinatory edge, S. G. Hyde’s novel explores what it means to live when the ground of reality keeps shifting beneath your feet.
At once harrowing and tender, it is a story of survival through imagination, self-deception, and the desperate human need to stitch meaning out of chaos. A haunting meditation on identity, illness, and loss, sprinkled with dark comedy, this is fiction at its most unsettling and raw.
Tough But Loving
The mc : THE MEDITATIVE CONTEMPLATIONZ is a collection of aphorisms, prose-poems, meditations, and monologues focused on themes such as spirituality, adversity, love, and wisdom. Do you think of your work as closer to poetry, philosophy, or spoken word?
Not to sound facetious, but I look at my work as one entity with many different facets & perspectives.
As an admirer of the late great martial artist & philosopher Bruce Lee, I like to think of my works, be it literary or musical, as a fluidity that is adaptable, flexible & powerful given the artistic objective.
As someone who has many different disciplines, including Dance, Songwriting, Poetry, Acting, Performance, Composition, Production & of course Literary book creation, I tend to incorporate all of these elements within my projects.
For this particular book, the mc :THE MEDITATIVE CONTEMPLATIONZ I was Profoundly influenced by Marcus Aurelius’ book Meditations, which leaned heavily towards stoicism.
The actual title of my book, the mc, heartens to my passion for performing, recording & writing original rap music. The term ‘mc’ in the Hip Hop realm is an acronym for master of ceremonies. Meaning the rap artist embodies all of the elements which make him or her stand out & be a respected individual, including: voice inflection, flow, cadence, storytelling, lyricism, & microphone presence.
Again, I am one who incorporates every aspect & element of my other disciplines to create a cohesive narrative in my creative projects. Having no particular set style or genre allows me & the reader the freedom to feel the work from numerous angles & viewpoints simultaneously.
The comparison between fighters and artists is powerful. What draws you to that parallel?
I began to notice this comparison as someone who is a fan of boxing & a practitioner of the creative arts. The rejections I have faced while pursuing my creative endeavors can be extremely painful, similar to what a boxer may feel in a professional fight with a formidable opponent.
While the boxer has to endure physical blows, the artist feels mental blows to their egos & self esteem with every rejection of their art they have experienced and will receive.
I noticed this startling parallel while listening to the wisdom of the great fighter Mike Tyson, whose Talent for combat was genius & legendary. I connected with the pain he felt & immediately took notes in comparison to myself as an artist speaking for other artists who may feel similar.
The Fighter & The Artist both have to endure these moments of pain, fatigue & frustration to overcome their biggest & most difficult opponent, and that is themselves.
How do you balance intensity with tenderness in your writing?
Great question.
As someone who writes poetry & songs, I tend to view the softer side of my poetry creation as the mother, showing empathy, compassion, gentleness & docility.
The songwriting aspect is the father, as I see it, a bit louder (as it often involves music), tough but loving, encouraging but also aware that he has to teach his son or daughter about the sometimes harsh ways of the world.
These are the 2 dimensions in which I create my music & books.
This Ying & Yang philosophy helps me to create a more balanced picture for my readers as well as the listeners of my musical creations.
What kind of reader did you imagine engaging with this book?
I imagined the open-minded reader who enjoys delving into their higher selves. Who sees no limitations on what art should convey, nor is overly concerned with the niceties of art that is deemed comfortable.
I’ve always felt it’s not the job of the artist to make the person feel comfortable but to merely “feel.” It is this feeling that will Inspire future generations to continue & expound upon the precepts left by their artistic predecessors.
In short,
The mc was written for readers who are interested in art that has the potential to embrace the flames of eternity through bravery, which is eternal.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Artist/Songwriter/Producer/Writer/Actor and Dancer zO-AlonzO Gross is a hybrid of Philosophy, Prose, Poetry, Classic Literature, Parables, Art & Rap lyricism.
This Stunningly Unique book delves into such topics such as Spirituality, Adversity, Wisdom, Blackness, Death & Legacy all told with vivid Artwork from some of the World’s most formidable visual artists such as Pat Turner, Della Marie Perry, Ahannie_Nikoke & Hubert Daniluk. One will get the sense that this is something not to merely read, but to experience and feel as well as return to time and time again.
Nicknamed “Neo-Shakespeare” for his penchant of combining Classical Literature with Rap Aesthetics zO proves his range is diverse and ever far reaching as he delves into the realm of philosophy, prose & parables with a fresh insight Inspired by the Great thinkers of the written word pulling from a diverse array of Artists Friedrich Nietsche, Voltaire, Marcus Aurelius, Ayn Rand, Carl Jung, Audrey Lorde, e.e Cummings, William Shakespeare, Gil-Scott-Heron, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Woody Allen, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Langston Hughes, Kendrick Lamar, J.Cole, Nas, Tupac Shakur, Kahili Gibran, Rumi, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Robert Greene, Michael Eric Dyson & the words of Jesus Christ. An open mind with a willingness to look into the heart of the Universe is all that is needed to begin to grasp the concepts presented within this volume which will read different with every exploration.You are cordially and with Love Invited.Experience. Feel. Discover. the mc (Meditative ContemplationZ) by zO-AlonzO Gross.
The mc : THE MEDITATIVE CONTEMPLATIONZ
The Meditative ContemplationZ feels less like a conventional book than a staged interior performance, a gathering of aphorisms, prose-poems, meditations, and lyrical monologues arranged around spirituality, adversity, love, wisdom, death, Blackness, and legacy. What held me all the way through was the sense that zO-AlonzO Gross isn’t trying to build a neat argument so much as a lived atmosphere. He moves from compressed lines like “time leaveZ stretch marks” to longer pieces that open into memory, social critique, and testimony, as in the barber shop vignette “They call me speak easy,” with its grief over gentrification and lost Black community, or the recurring insistence that art, suffering, faith, and self-knowledge are bound together. The book’s visual dimension matters too. The paintings and photographs don’t feel ornamental. They reinforce the sense that this is a collaborative, almost theatrical object, one that wants to be seen as much as read.
Gross writes with a seriousness that can be hard to pull off, and here it works because the conviction is real. When he says the artist has to love the work past indifference, bad turnout, family doubt, and years of invisible labor, I believed him. The same goes for the passage comparing fighters and artists, where the body blows of one life meet the psychic blows of the other. That idea could’ve landed as a slogan in weaker hands, but here it has bruises on it. I also liked how often the book risks tenderness without getting soft. A line about love arriving as “a cold bottle of water next to her bed at 3 am” is so simple, so unshowy, and because of that it lingers. Even the spiritual passages, which lean grand and incantatory, have a searching quality rather than a smug one. The book keeps returning to the thought that to know God, or truth, or purpose, you have to strip away performance and get closer to the self beneath it.
This is a book whose force comes with rough edges, and I mean that as praise. The diction can be florid, the capitalization and stylization relentless, and some pieces hit with more depth than others. There were moments when the aphoristic mode flattened complexity into a pronouncement. But even then, the voice felt urgent, personal, and proudly self-fashioned. The sections on Blackness especially gave the book another register, sharper and more satirical, turning wit toward racism, stereotype, and the humiliating absurdities of public life. Those pieces widened the book’s emotional field. They reminded me that Gross is not only meditating in private but answering the world, sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with a line sharpened like a blade. The artwork and photographs throughout fit the pieces beautifully, and they add a thoughtful, provocative visual layer that deepens the book’s reflective mood.
I found The Meditative ContemplationZ uneven in the way many deeply personal books are, but also vivid, memorable, and unmistakably alive. I came away feeling I’d spent time inside a singular mind, one that believes art should console, provoke, testify, and leave a mark. I’d recommend it most to readers who like poetry-inflected nonfiction, spoken-word energy on the page, and books that care more about voice, spirit, and emotional truth than formal restraint. It’s a book for people who don’t mind a little intensity if the feeling behind it is earned, and here, more often than not, it is.
Pages: 140 | ISBN : 978-1088058848
