Books – Turtle Point Press

More Rules for Aging

Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging was a major national bestseller when it burst onto the scene as “the humorous, thinking man’s self-help book” (Newsday) twenty-five years ago. Now, Roger is back with bang. More Rules for Aging contains nearly twice as many rules, so is twice as instructive and twice as funny. As with the original, the laughs engendered are laughs at oneself: “Nobody is thinking about you yet,” “Run when they say, ‘We must do this again,’” et al. The key to enjoying this book is a willingness to turn every commonly held supposition on its head. A rule such as “Don’t use common sense” is useful if one realizes how little people prize common sense. “Screw it up royally” speaks to the indispensable value of making mistakes.

Roger very much hopes that you will buy this book, for yourself and for your many friends, so that he may live the luxurious life to which he has yet to be accustomed. Of course, that would require that you think about Roger, and not about yourself. Thus Roger violates his own rule. He is already thinking about you.

Ten Clear Days

When Eric Beck Rubin’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, requests medical assistance in dying, it divides her family. Over ten increasingly tense days, we come to know her story and its final outcome.

On a Tuesday night in August 2018, eighty-three-year-old Mary Beck is rushed by ambulance to the hospital. She wakes up to the news that her surgery was a success and her recovery is underway–but she doesn’t want to hear it. She had been preparing for her end. And with newly enacted legislation, she can demand it.

Before a decision can be made on whether to grant her request, a member of the non-medical hospital staff, “Au.” is brought in to record the unfolding events. But what begins as an arm’s-length report during ten mandated days that Mary awaits her fate, soon turns into a sweeping examination of a life.

From her upbringing in pre-war Hungary and survival of the war, to the start of her new life in North America, Mary, along with her family and friends, tells the story of this complicated, forceful, fiercely loved person at every stage of her extraordinary life. A life she now fights to end on her own terms.

Lazarus: The Intended Writings and the Promise of Forever

This hybrid biography of the enigmatic historical figure extends narrative convention to consider the story behind Lazarus’s silent life and what we may draw from it.

Lazarus, the odd ball. The odd man out. With his sisters as buoys. Who was he? The man whom Jesus called back to life. What did he think of death? Lazarus, the recessive. Lazarus, who survived a time of persecution by the Pharisees and the Roman government. Lazarus, who went about his business in his father’s house. A father with whom he had clashed. And managed in a withdrawn manner to steer his ship across waters Jesus could walk upon, and Lazarus could only sink into. Lazarus, who was disappointed not to be chosen as one of the disciples. Yet he prevailed in his own off-chute way as he walked awkwardly in Bethany, just two miles from Jerusalem.

Lazarus was a modern man who had purpose and substance yet found himself ineffectual to some extent. Diane Glancy’s Lazarus is conjecture of what this troubled figure could have said, thought, and written. It is biography interrupted by first-person fragments from his sisters, Mary and Martha, along with the meta-nonfiction of the author’s travels, statements, and intentions. Lazarus the book looks at the difficulty of living a responsible life.

How Daddy Lost His Ear

Four generations of an extended mixed-race family live with the problems we’ve all heard about, yet thrive amidst hardship, turning the myth of the Old West on its head.

Prize-winning story writer Sallie Bingham’s latest group of tales reverse commonly held assumptions about the American West. The Hispanic, Native, and white members of this rough and tumble family pivot around an outrageously funny and fallible rodeo rider known as Cowboy. They live with alcohol and drug addiction, dependency on a fraying welfare system, poverty, violence, and deep-held loyalties. Unlikely learning and unlikely sources of wisdom abound. “During those long winter nights when Dad took off for Sheridan–no liquor allowed on the rez but Sheridan is only about twenty miles west,” Fat Annie tells the boy known as Sure Enough some truths about women that will guide him for the rest of his life. Running away on horseback from the imposition of ashes at his Jesuit boarding school, eleven-year-old Jimmy James finds “this little lady priest” in the town park. She makes the cross with ashes on his horse’s head, then turns to him, and he feels the cross “burn into him worse than any brand.” A bizarre accident in “How Daddy Lost His Ear” results in an equally bizarre wedding. And one of the many “white ladies” who appear briefly and disappear fast finally gets Cowboy to tell the truth.

These men, women, and kids don’t just endure. They thrive in their own peculiar style, turning seemingly tragic outcomes into sources of madcap humor, and nourishing indelible family ties. This is the West as it was and is, a complex web of traditions and surprising, even shocking, ways of finding triumph.

Hard Margins

A Bureau of Indian Affairs agent in a remote Wyoming reservation reckons with the clash of cultures, his own failings, and the attempted destruction of a people.

Five teenagers take a joyride through the barren landscape of a small Wyoming reservation. Only four survive. It’s 1958, and the death triggers years of pent-up tensions between the town of Suncreek and the members of the Towuk tribe. The locals barely subsist in a tenuous small-town existence; the Towuk are still mourning the loss of their long-gone way of life. The white residents of Suncreek deeply resent what they see as the Towuk tribe’s windfall–oil deposits that have turned the desolate reservation into something of sudden value. But the tribe struggles with its newfound money, which has brought them a modicum of wealth for which they have been swindled and abused.

The town’s sheriff threatens to make an example of the teenage driver, Nelson Antelope. Tim Hubbard of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a troubled Korean War vet, acts to thwart that effort and protect the boy. Shut out by the tribe, Hubbard finds guidance in the archived reports from an earlier agent named Dorrance. A protégé of Horace Greeley and his Utopianism, Dorrance was recruited to make farmers out of a horse-borne nomadic tribe–and thus force hard boundaries on how and where they could exist. The dual tales of Hubbard and Dorrance chronicle these conflicted stewards and the devastating toll their reluctant mission takes on a culture not their own.

Morally complex and fully relevant to today’s issues of freedom and land occupation, Hard Margins is about captive people and their desire to escape their fates, and the captors who desire just as fervently to escape theirs.

Aporia

Have a talk with a ghost or a duck or contest the destroyers of the land, listen to the roos and slow worms, marvel and question and rage and love the language with John Kinsella’s Aporia.

Aporia is a collection searching for logic where logic is hard to find or maybe can’t be found. From the death of the poet’s father, to considering the complex, troubled, and often distressing relationship between humans and non-human life, and through a sense of ghosts being materially present even when we doubt their existence, we undertake a journey in which reality and creative conception are in tension. This tension is embodied in the figure of the poet Hölderlin, and also through moments in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, ongoing obsessions for Kinsella which he constantly circles back to, reconsiders, and departs from. Whether conversing with ghosts or the living, with animals or plants, these are poems concerned with transformative relationships with and within the “natural world.” Kangaroos, echidnas, ducks, owls, deer, slow worms, and many other creatures from around the world inhabit these pages, finding their own way through to autonomy and self-declaration as the poet argues with himself over the dynamics of life and death.

Time and Chance

“[W]itness the sharp, wry play of a dazzling mind.”–COLE SWENSEN, author of And And And

Majestic, playful, brainy, heart-wrenching, Katharine Coles’s tenth collection of poems at once celebrates and elegizes: her teachers and parents–both dead at ninety–who still issue advice (some good, some not) from beyond the grave; the creatures who pass through her canyon quarter-acre; the moon as it rises and sets; even her Levi’s shrink-to-fits, when she realizes she’ll never wear out another pair. The poems “guide us with their empathy, sometimes yoked with a wry irony, around the physics of interactions.” [John Kinsella] More than anything, this is a book about presence: haunted by the past yet firmly rooted in the also-haunting now, Coles keeps spinning, finding herself in words, in her body, in time.

The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin

Leading poet and activist John Kinsella brings together a
major international collection of contemporary and historical poetry that speaks
to the rights and welfare of animals.

The Uncollected Animals is a unique anthology of poetry
based around all non-human animal life, with the welfare and rights of animals
at the forefront. The anthology includes over forty commissioned poems, and
other poems provided by poets specifically for the anthology. These are set
against an historical context of animal-referencing poems that range in time
from ancient Greece to the 21st century. Kinsella’s introduction offers
insights into the eternal relationship of poetry to animals, and the creative
arrangement of the poems yields startling contrasts and alliances that will
draw readers into a powerful relationship with the work.

The book includes 165 poems representing some sixteen
countries and many different cultures. Together, this collective utterance
respects and conserves a great variety of perspectives. Writing in a full range
of styles, the diverse voices found inside include poets from Aristophanes,
Blake, Coleridge, Du Fu, Melville, and Wordsworth to Anne Carson, CA Conrad,
Kimiko Hahn, Paul Laurence Dunbar, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Rita
Dove, and Marianne Moore, to important young voices, to performer/lyricists
such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. At all times, animals, their rights, and
their welfare are at the fore, be they invertebrates, bird, mammal, reptile,
amphibian, or fish.

In a time of human-induced mass extinctions and rapid
human-induced climate change, this subject could not be more vital and
necessary for all of us to consider, embrace, and act on with empathy.

Odd Birds & Fat Cats (An Urban Bestiary)

Ravens in Berlin . . . Parakeets in Brooklyn . . . Chickens in Tel Aviv . . . Spiders in Cognac. City creatures spark the imagination and intellect in words and art by this father-daughter team.

Odd Birds & Fat Cats (An Urban Bestiary) is an illustrated collection of brief observations on city creatures. Inspired by the tradition of the medieval bestiary, bestiarum vocabulum, a 12th-century bestselling genre that chronicled animals and beings both real and fantastical, the book features pithy impressions of birds and animals that delight, confound, and edify, written by Peter Wortsman, coupled with detailed naturalist artwork by his daughter, Aurélie Bernard Wortsman.

Featured creatures include:

Pigeons: “When, finally, it takes flight . . . this asphalt-colored bird is like a piece of the pavement which by some fluke of gravity broke loose and is foolishly falling upward by mistake.”
Seagulls: “Fallen splinters of eternity, they hang overhead with the equanimity and mild disdain of angels in a medieval altarpiece, and unlike pigeons, refuse any direct contact with man.”
Ants: “Micro-managers in three-piece bodies, ants parody human antics to a tee. Or is it the other way around?”
Dust mites: “Every time you scratch yourself or comb your hair, you are feeding the tiny intruders with the detritus of self.”

With four-color images throughout, printed in a beautiful hardbound edition, this one-of-a-kind volume will please the discerning animal lover, traveler, art lover, iconoclast, and literati on your gift list—and, of course, also you!

My Curious Years with Charles Henri Ford: The Autobiography of Indra B. Tamang

A young Nepalese man’s globe-spanning relationship with an American surrealist over three decades changes the course of his life, his fortune, and his sense of family and home.

In 1973, poet, photographer, collage artist, and sculptor Charles Henri Ford, often called the father of American surrealism, convinced a young Nepalese waiter at his hotel in Kathmandu to come work as his all-purpose helper. Nineteen-year-old Indra Tamang, who spoke minimal English, was soon enjoying an education and a life he could not have imagined. He quickly graduated from cooking and running errands to attending social engagements with Charles, to accompanying the artist on his international travels, eventually becoming his collaborator, and more of a son than an employee.

Charles was a magnet for creative people, and during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, Indra found himself at the center of seemingly every fantastic little universe in New York, Paris, Crete, and Kathmandu, often as a quiet observer taking photographs and making mental notes. There was Studio 54, Andy Warhol’s Factory, the teas that Charles would host at the Dakota, attended by regulars such as Tennessee Williams, Quentin Crisp, Patti Smith and Henry Geldzahler; there were special dinners at the United Nations; visits to Mary McCarthy and Leonor Fini; and chats in the elevator with neighbors like John and Yoko and Lauren Bacall. Charles gave Indra a second upbringing, one that Indra absorbed with tremendous curiosity and enthusiasm. In turn, Indra brought Charles into his family’s village in Nepal, introducing him to a world that not many Westerners were privileged to see, especially then. Indra managed to shuttle between these two vastly different worlds, marrying and having children in Nepal, though not revealing this to Charles for quite some years.

In 2010, Indra Tamang became the object of global fascination after inheriting two apartments from Charles’s sister, the actress Ruth Ford. The story in the Wall Street Journal described a Nepalese “butler” who “grew up in a mud hut” and ended up owning property in one of New York’s most famous buildings. The attention that followed inspired Indra to write this richer and more accurate account of his life. Illustrated with nearly fifty photographs and ephemera from the private collections of Charles and Indra, gathered together for the first time and including some never before shown, readers will discover that nothing about Indra’s “curious years” with Charles and his constellation of friends was ever ordinary or predictable in any way.