Blog Archives
Connections, Purpose, and Belonging
New Days weaves ten unforgettable stories of love, loss, ambition, and resilience, revealing how a city continually transforms while the human longing for connection remains timeless. Why did you choose a short story collection rather than a single continuous narrative to tell the city’s story?
These stories have been brewing in the back of my mind over the last few years, as I slowly approached my 20th year of living in New York City. I had considered fleshing out one or two of them into their own novels, but it became clear that the truest way to pay tribute to New York’s unique history, impressive diversity, constant transient change, and ever-evolving culture was to celebrate a variety of moments across the distinctions of particular eras. Despite each chapter taking place in a particular historical corner of New York’s legacy, they do offer commonality of experiences people often find while living in this complex metropolis. Many New Yorkers can relate to the emotional themes imbued in each chapter, whether that’s the idea of first coming here and the familiar home and family we leave behind, our initial arrival and assimilation into a new world, the challenging search for a new identity as we try to set roots here, the blending of perspectives when we share our lives with people from completely differing backgrounds, or the social bonds we try to hold dear as the environment around us perpetually transforms. While working on my longer novels, New Days was always something I came back to from time to time to add another chapter or experience. A unique form of journaling my life here through allegory and historical reflection. I felt that the short story collection format was the truest way to say that all of these reflections had their distinct value, rather than focusing on a single one to expand above the others.
Why do you believe the search for belonging remains such a powerful theme across different generations and historical circumstances?
Humans are social creatures, and we’re always measuring our existence across connections, purpose, and belonging. But New York is an exceptionally special place in that regard, because compared to other cities whose identities are tied to heritage, tradition, or particular industries, New York’s brand has always been about reinvention of self, fresh start opportunities, and carving out a path for new dreams. We mostly all came here from somewhere else. The population ebbs and flows, perpetually supplemented by waves of new arrivals. We have to fit into the city’s pace and progress, but also add our own elements as new ingredients to the overall soup. That dynamic churns our need to belong, to understand ourselves, to seek meaning in our routines and forward momentum. It’s what makes New York so distinct, challenging, and glorious at the same time. Even if we left somewhere else in dissatisfaction, we still have to figure out what that means for our lives in the new frontier we chose.
What inspired the inclusion of black-and-white illustrations, and how do you see them contributing to the reading experience?
The images were an extension of those common themes across such starkly different historical eras. I could have opted for something colorful, or a distinct style that reflected each time period. But the black-and-white consistency and familiar design echoed those recurring experiences that make the New York story so innately understood by anyone who’s spent time here.
Do you envision exploring additional periods of New York’s history or developing similar collections centered on other places?
To be honest, the more I researched different times in this city’s development, the more I realized I probably could have written several more chapters. Or kept this project going indefinitely. But the combination of wanting to finish my larger novel projects and also accepting that all authors eventually have to pick an end point to their work for fear of getting lost in the ceaseless editing process helped me keep it to a neat 10 chapters spanning the entirety of New York’s heritage. As for writing something similar about a different city… that would feel dishonest to me. I know New York. I’ll let someone who knows Rome, Tokyo, or São Paulo write about their corner of the world.
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Between those two mornings: a Lenape leader trades a forest for his people’s survival, a revolutionary soldier is kept alive by his friend’s humor, a boy in Five Points carries two histories but belongs to neither, a man invents a device that could save lives but finds no one willing to spend four dollars to buy it, a con artist’s son mistakes strict instruction for love, a pair of spies spend an afternoon lying to their governments to keep a stranger breathing, a protestor tries to bond with the officer driving her to an uncertain fate, and dear friends stroll a riverbank on the day the sky changed.
Ten stories. Ten echoes of New York, and the magic that survives every century of change.
My Heritage, My Pride
My Heritage, My Pride by Manmohan Sadana is a thoughtful and personal collection of spiritual poetry, cultural essays, historical reflections, and short fiction celebrating India’s extraordinary religious and literary heritage. Drawing from Hindu mythology, Sikh history, Sufi mysticism, and centuries of philosophical thought, Sadana explores the beliefs and traditions that have shaped generations. The book moves comfortably between ancient scriptures and contemporary life, examining how timeless teachings can still guide our understanding of leadership, relationships, compassion, and personal responsibility. Its combination of Indian spiritual literature, mythology, and cultural heritage makes for an engaging exploration of faith and identity. Throughout the collection, Sadana’s admiration for his cultural roots is unmistakable, and his enthusiasm encourages readers to consider how inherited wisdom continues to influence everyday decisions. There’s a genuine sense of affection running through these pages, giving the book the warmth of someone sharing stories and ideas that have held special meaning throughout his life.
Essays about Guru Nanak’s companion Bhai Mardana, the mystical poetry of Bulleh Shah, and the spiritual traditions of Kashmir offer fascinating perspectives on devotion, equality, and religious harmony. His discussion of Christian carols, Sikh Shabad Kirtan, and Sufi ghazals is particularly interesting, showing how music creates emotional connections across different faiths. Hindu mythology also occupies a central place, with explorations of Lord Rama, Lord Jagannath, Goddess Siddhidatri, and the philosophical significance of Shiva’s Tandav. Sadana often connects these traditions to modern concerns, including ethical leadership, environmental responsibility, and social justice. His reflections on lessons from the Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita in corporate settings are an especially distinctive touch. These connections give the book a practical dimension, inviting readers to recognize the continuing relevance of ancient Indian philosophy in today’s world.
Sadana’s spiritual poetry frequently uses vivid natural imagery, rhythmic language, and an almost prayerful sense of wonder. Pieces such as “Baba Buddha,” “The 13th Spiral,” and “When the Preserver Walked Through Time” revisit familiar spiritual and mythological figures through questions of courage, duty, mortality, and moral choice. His portrayals of characters from the Mahabharata, including Duryodhan, Yuyutsu, Urvi, and Hidimbi, encourage readers to consider different emotional and ethical perspectives within these enduring narratives. The collection also includes intimate writing about family, love, and belonging. “Welcome Rachel Bani” is especially tender, celebrating a newborn child while reflecting on the inheritance of traditions across generations and continents. Meanwhile, the story “Sargi” brings cultural customs into the intimate world of marriage and companionship. Sadana’s style is expressive and earnest, sometimes richly embellished, with recurring images of light, rivers, flowers, and sacred music creating a recognizable poetic voice.
What makes My Heritage, My Pride memorable is its consistent belief that cultural heritage becomes meaningful through the values people carry into their lives. Across its spiritual essays, historical discussions, mythology-inspired poetry, and contemporary storytelling, Sadana returns to compassion, humility, integrity, and the importance of respecting different religious traditions. His treatment of Sikhism, Hindu philosophy, and Sufi spirituality reveals a sincere interest in the common human desire for understanding and connection. Readers interested in Indian mythology books, South Asian cultural history, spiritual poetry collections, and religious philosophy will find plenty to appreciate here. The book’s wide-ranging structure also makes it suitable for reading a chapter at a time, allowing individual subjects and reflections to settle before moving to the next. Above all, Sadana’s collection feels like an invitation to celebrate where we come from, reflect on what our traditions teach us, and discover how the wisdom of earlier generations can remain a living part of the present.
Pages: 256 | ASIN : B0HJJL9YKT
Echoes
Matthias Meinhardt’s Echoes is a collection of eleven historical fiction stories arranged across roughly twelve thousand years, beginning with a prehistoric community in Southwest Asia and ending amid Cold War espionage in 1961 Athens. Between those points, the book moves through ancient Ur and Rome, medieval Damascus, Reformation-era Lübeck, revolutionary and industrial Paris, prewar Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and Auschwitz. The changing settings give the collection considerable range, but its deeper continuity comes from the moral situations its characters encounter. Priests, artisans, soldiers, printers, executioners, inventors, artists, guards, prisoners, and spies all find themselves working within structures larger than themselves. The stories repeatedly examine how those structures acquire authority, how ordinary people sustain them, and what happens when personal conscience begins to conflict with accepted duty.
The collection establishes its central concerns early. In “The First Stones,” belief becomes a means of creating communal identity out of grief, culminating in Edo’s observation that “we don’t believe stories because they’re true. We believe them because they hold us together.” That idea reverberates throughout the book in increasingly complex forms. Written law gives Ur order while institutionalizing inequality. Rome builds an empire through discipline, assimilation, and fear. Religious conviction turns military necessity into holy war in Damascus. Revolutionary ideals in France harden into a system that sends former believers to the guillotine. Meinhardt is particularly interested in the moment when a useful structure becomes self-perpetuating, and when its participants discover that following its rules no longer relieves them of responsibility. Because each story approaches that tension from another century and another social role, the chronological structure creates a cumulative argument about the persistence of human behavior beneath changing institutions.
Meinhardt’s prose favors clarity, momentum, and sharply defined scenes. Characters often articulate the central ethical problem directly, giving several stories the quality of historical parables while keeping them grounded in personal consequences. “The Printer” is especially effective in this respect. Hans Keller regards himself as a craftsman who merely reproduces the ideas that pass through his shop, until antisemitic violence forces him to confront his role in spreading them. The story distills that realization into three words: “Words have weight.” Variations on that recognition shape “The Executioner,” “The Inventor,” and the harrowing “The Death Machine,” in which professional duty and moral agency become increasingly difficult to separate. The collection also makes room for a different register in “The Movie Star,” whose comic collision between Hollywood glamour and German Expressionism brings warmth and creative energy to the book while still placing its characters inside a culture approaching political catastrophe.
Echoes is a book about historical change viewed through individual participation. Its recurring professions matter because they turn large abstractions such as religion, law, empire, revolution, technology, propaganda, art, genocide, and geopolitics into acts performed by particular people. The later stories give the earlier ones additional resonance: mechanical efficiency moves from the optimism of the 1889 Exposition to the industrial organization of Auschwitz, while the Cold War finale shows governments once again subordinating moral history to strategic usefulness. The appendix reinforces the collection’s method by separating its fictional characters from the historical circumstances that shaped their worlds. Across its wide chronology, Echoes presents civilization as an accumulation of inventions, institutions, beliefs, and stories whose meaning depends on the people who inherit and use them. That perspective gives the collection its coherence and makes its title especially apt: centuries change, systems evolve, but the moral questions continue to echo.
Pages: 128| ASIN :B0H12NLLKM
Windows
Skye Elliott’s Windows is an erotic novel built around a simple but surprisingly flexible idea: a lonely woman begins looking through her neighbors’ windows at night and discovers the private sexual lives hidden inside an otherwise ordinary community. The narrator’s voyeurism grows out of grief. Years earlier, she lost the man she considered the love of her life after a fifteen-year affair, and she describes watching other people as part of the way she begins reconnecting with feelings she has shut away. “Peeking just became a harmless hobby of sorts,” she says early on, but the book gradually makes that hobby much more personal. The novel is organized into thirty-eight short “Windows,” followed by six anthology pieces, so it reads almost like a collection of intimate encounters tied together by one observer and her changing relationship with sex, loneliness, and desire.
The voyeurism gives Windows its structure, but the narrator’s emotional life gives it its real center. She doesn’t simply watch couples because she finds sex exciting. She’s fascinated by intimacy, especially the trust, tenderness, companionship, and sense of belonging that she sees alongside the physical acts. Again and again, darkness becomes a place where people can admit desires they’re embarrassed to express in daylight. That idea is especially important for the narrator, who worries about her body, about disappointing a partner, and about exposing too much of herself emotionally. At one point she admits that she feels safer in darkness because there she can become whatever fantasy her lover wants, while daylight makes her feel exposed. Those recurring images of windows, darkness, open curtains, and hidden rooms give the book a surprisingly consistent emotional vocabulary.
The book moves through heterosexual and same-sex encounters, multiple partners, masturbation, role-playing, bondage, dominance and submission, spanking, flogging, toys, and other forms of sexual experimentation. What connects most of those scenes is the narrator’s fascination with people giving themselves permission to want things. She frequently concentrates on trust and the exchange of control, especially as she becomes increasingly curious about BDSM and begins imagining herself as a submissive. Eventually, that curiosity stops being something she only observes. A man whose bedroom she has watched discovers her outside his window, invites her inside, establishes a safe word, and introduces her to the experience she has spent so much of the book wondering about. That development gives the later chapters a sense of movement because the watcher finally becomes a participant.
Elliott’s style is repetitive, but that repetition also reveals what occupies the narrator’s mind. Certain sensations, phrases, gestures, and images return constantly: whispered voices, open windows, moonlight, hard breathing, bodies glistening with perspiration, people falling asleep in each other’s arms. Sex often leads back to cuddling, sleep, reassurance, or conversation, which makes the narrator’s deeper longing increasingly clear. One of the book’s strongest sections is actually among its least sexually focused. In Window 38, she watches a long-term couple who can’t live together comfort each other after the woman’s mother dies. The narrator leaves with “a profound sense of loss” and reflects on her own empty bed. Moments like that deepen the book because they show that what she envies most isn’t simply sexual freedom. It’s the experience of having someone who feels like home.
Windows feels like an erotic diary about a woman slowly returning to a part of herself she thought she had buried. The narrator begins as someone who believes observation is enough, but watching other people gradually forces her to examine her own loneliness, fantasies, fear of vulnerability, and desire to be wanted. After finally stepping inside one of the rooms she has been watching from outside, she says, “I was feeling beautiful and desired.” That sentence captures the book better than any of its more elaborate sexual descriptions. Windows is explicit, curious, repetitive, confessional, and deeply interested in the connection between sexuality and emotional security. Beneath all the bedrooms and open curtains, it’s a story about someone trying to move from watching life happen to other people toward allowing herself to participate in it again.
Pages: 136 | ASIN : B0GMY8T5CY
Seeing Sunny Again
Seeing Sunny Again and Other Short Stories is a collection of seventeen stories that moves through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, often returning to working-class Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and the surrounding region. Paul Clayton writes about ordinary people caught in moments that quietly alter how they see themselves. A boy confronts death for the first time, a family struggles with an autistic child in an era with little understanding or support, young men stumble through desire and shame, and elderly characters look back on choices that still feel unfinished. The stories are grounded in recognizable experiences, but they’re also interested in the strange turns memory takes and the private meanings people attach to events long after they’re over.
Clayton’s strongest skill is his ability to make the past feel physically present. His neighborhoods have hot pavement, crowded row houses, beer in frosted mugs, humming record players, cigarette smoke, boardwalk lights, and food piled onto paper plates. These details give the collection warmth without smoothing away the fear, prejudice, violence, loneliness, and confusion within that world. Several stories use a recurring narrator named Carl, which creates the feeling of listening to someone sort through a lifetime of memories. Even when the events are painful, the voice remains candid and approachable, with flashes of humor arriving at unexpected moments.
Many of the stories turn on a character realizing that another person’s inner life is more complicated than it first appeared. Clayton is especially good at portraying childhood guilt and adolescent embarrassment, emotions that can seem irrational from the outside but feel enormous to the person experiencing them. “After You’ve Gone” captures the bewildering mixture of grief, fear, and involuntary laughter at a funeral, while “The Trick” follows a teenage boy through attraction, panic, cruelty, and immediate remorse. Historical events also enter personal lives in striking ways, as in “Something Coming” and the Vietnam-shadowed title story. The endings tend to linger on a revealing image or gesture rather than spelling out a lesson, giving the reader room to sit with what happened.
I’d recommend this book most to readers who enjoy character-driven short fiction, vivid period settings, and stories about the emotional residue of growing up. It’ll be particularly meaningful to people interested in mid-century American life, complicated families, imperfect friendships, and the way aging reshapes old memories. Clayton’s conversational storytelling makes the collection easy to enter, while its recurring questions about guilt, compassion, regret, and second chances give it weight. Published as a first edition in 2026, it reads like a long personal album whose pictures become more revealing the longer you look at them.
Pages: 187 | ASIN : B0H61T2TZ3
The Last Casualty
Mark Connelly’s The Last Casualty is a collection of fifteen short stories that circles a single, persistent question: what happens to violence once the moment of impact has passed? The title story sets the tone immediately, following a historian who turns a real grenade into a writing prop, only to discover just how thin the line is between symbol and weapon. From there, the collection ranges widely in setting and register, from Cold War air shows to a NATO officers’ lunch in a converted synagogue, from a wartime concert played in the ruins of Kiev to a satirical nightmare in which every secret in the world becomes public overnight. What holds these disparate pieces together is Connelly’s interest in the residue of conflict, the objects, memories, and habits that outlast the events that produced them.
Connelly writes with a journalist’s eye for concrete detail and a novelist’s patience for accumulation. In “Ground Zero,” a son sorting through his childhood bedroom turns a 1964 World’s Fair paperweight into an unforgettable emblem of continuity and loss, noting that it “had outlived my father and would probably outlive me.” That instinct for the small object that carries outsized weight recurs throughout the book, whether it’s a headless rabbit in a suburban flower bed or a sword with a dead man’s fingerprints still on the hilt. The prose is unadorned but precise, and Connelly trusts his images to do the emotional work.
The strongest stories in the collection are the ones willing to sit with moral ambiguity. “Father Mike,” a prison conversation between a convicted drunk driver and a defrocked priest, is the book’s most unsettling entry, forcing an uncomfortable comparison between a single catastrophic accident and years of calculated abuse. “The Tweet” and “The First Stone” turn toward contemporary anxieties, cancel culture and digital surveillance, with a satirical edge that occasionally tips into excess but rarely loses its footing. Connelly is less interested in judgment than in exposure, laying out the mechanisms by which people justify, rationalize, and survive what they’ve done or witnessed.
The Last Casualty is a mature, unsentimental meditation on how history, personal and geopolitical, keeps producing casualties long after the official record has closed the books. The stories don’t share characters or a single timeline, but they rhyme with each other in theme and tone, building a cumulative portrait of a world where the past never fully disperses. Readers drawn to character-driven literary fiction with a historical and often dark undercurrent will find this a rewarding, if sobering, collection.
Pages: 62 | ASIN : B0GGRDHH5D
False Realities
A Grand Façade is a compelling collection of personal essays, short stories, and an extended memoir centered on music. Why was this an important book for you to write?
I suppose posterity would be a partial answer, but I’ve had many people suggest that I write about our experience pursuing our band. I then realized that other essays I’ve written about my life before and after those pivotal events helped to put it (and me) in context. Finally, I felt I could add some short stories I was most proud of, each which explored what became the overarching theme of the collection—the illusions or false realities we may believe or pursue, and those we think we are or pretend to be.
Were there moments where your memories surprised you as you wrote them down?
Not so much surprised, but rather clarified or further decoded who I was at the time, and why I reacted certain ways. The memoir certainly dives deep into my insecurities, but traveling back to that time in my head made me realize more clearly what drove some of my anxieties. I think, if anything, the one thing that surprised me the most was how condensed that period of our lives actually was. It was an amazing realization that one of the most significant and dramatic parts of my life—from quitting our careers and selling our house to the day to our last performance—was less than three years.
Looking back, do you think success means something different now than it did during those years of performing and recording?
I think the very concept of success is, perhaps, the biggest façade of all. Those who have never taken a big risk or pursued a dream consider me a successful writer simply for doing it. I look at any author who can make it a career and I call that successful. They probably look at mass-market authors and see that as true success. There are probably mass market authors looking at a Pulitzer prize-winning author and seeing that as true success. We equate success with happiness or fulfillment, but success has no clear metric. When we pursued our band, I had been fixated on an illusion I called “success.” After writing this, I realize that what matters has very little to do with any preconceived notion of success, and everything to do with lived experience. In that respect, I’ve grown to understand that I have been successful in filling my life with worthwhile pursuits. That said, one also has to resolve and accept the disappointment that will most often come with that.
If readers take away just one idea from A Grand Façade, what would you hope it is?
Don’t pursue the dream, pursue the experience, and embrace each moment while you live it.
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A Grand Façade: Stories of Truth and Fiction
James L. Peters’s A Grand Façade is a wide-ranging collection of personal essays, short stories, and an extended musical memoir. Peters brings the pieces together through a recurring interest in the fronts people build around their ambitions, fears, relationships, and failures. The nonfiction moves from childhood rebellion and family memories to cancer, grief, creativity, travel, and mortality, while the fiction gives those same concerns more symbolic and unsettling forms. The centerpiece is the lengthy title memoir, which follows Peters, his wife Melanie, and his friend Tim through years of writing, recording, performing, and trying to turn a deeply personal band into something sustainable. The book’s introduction openly frames the collection as an attempt to use both fact and invention to reach emotional truth, and that idea gives the varied material a clear center.
Peters is at his best when he’s examining his younger self with equal parts fondness, embarrassment, and honesty. Essays about stealing school silverware, giving a friend the cold shoulder over a teenage party, or misunderstanding his father’s disapproval are funny at first, then gradually reveal regret, compassion, or a changed perspective. That same self-scrutiny makes the musical memoir engaging even for readers who’ve never played in a band. It’s full of shabby studios, awkward gigs, creative breakthroughs, bruised egos, financial strain, and friendships tested by competing ideas of success. Peters doesn’t turn the adventure into a simple victory or cautionary tale. He treats it as a worthwhile, damaging, exhilarating choice that helped shape his marriage, career, art, and understanding of himself.
The short fiction broadens the collection’s emotional range. “Dirty Vowels” uses an overheard couple’s noisy sex life to expose the frustrations inside another marriage, while “Rabbits in the Mouths of Wolves” turns mysterious bags of garbage into a tense parable about status, fairness, and social conformity. “Twinkle” approaches cosmic catastrophe through an intimate human relationship, and “The Muse on Your Back” captures the loneliness, addiction, and manufactured persona surrounding a rising musician. Some of the older stories show their age through heavier exposition or symbolism, and the memoir’s extensive chronology occasionally slows the pace. Still, Peters’s directness and wry humor keep the book personable. He’s willing to be the fool, the wounded son, the difficult bandmate, and the frightened patient, which gives the collection warmth without sanding away its harsher edges.
I’d recommend A Grand Façade most strongly to readers who enjoy memoirs about ordinary Midwestern lives, creative ambition, aging, family, and the complicated afterlife of youthful dreams. Musicians and other artists who’ve spent years pursuing recognition will especially appreciate its account of the work, compromise, friendship, and stubborn hope behind an independent creative life. It’ll also suit readers who like collections that move between candid autobiography and speculative or literary fiction while returning to a shared set of questions. Peters’s central insight is persuasive: a failed dream can still produce a meaningful life, and looking honestly at the façade may reveal something more valuable than the success once imagined.
