Welcome Our New Pulpwood Authors!
The widely anticipated debut novel by Julia Brewer Daily is a glimpse into the lives of women forced by society to gift their newborns to strangers. Although this novel is a fictional account, it mirrors many of the adoption stories of its era.
When three young unwed women meet at a maternity home hospital in New Orleans in 1965, they are expected to relinquish their babies and return home as if nothing transpired. Twenty-five years later, they are brought back together by blackmail and their secrets threatened with exposure—all the way to the White House.
Told from the three women’s perspectives in alternating chapters, we are mesmerized by the societal pressures on women in the 1960s who find themselves pregnant without marriage.
by Author Julia Brewer Daily
Click here to visit her website
I Jonathan, A Charleston Tale of the Rebellion
A young stranger from Boston is marooned in Charleston just as the Civil War begins. His relationships with working men and women, slaves, merchants, planters, spies, inventors, soldiers, sweethearts and musicians tell the story of a dynamic culture undergoing its greatest challenge.
“I wanted to tell a personal story built on the framework of history,” says author George WB Scott, “and the real story is Charleston’s challenges and experience in the war. The book is pro-South, but not pro-Confederate. It’s anti-war and anti-slavery. I wanted to go beyond stock characters and themes. I hope this encourages readers to reflect on a people who lived through a fundamental change of their society.”
Jonathan’s adventures include witnessing the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the last great Charleston horse race, the Great Charleston Fire of 1861, the Battle of Secessionville and visits to the North Carolina mountain homes of wealthy Low Country planters. He even has an encounter with a Voodoo conjure man. He makes a run through the Federal Blockade and visits the raucous boomtowns of Nassau and Wilmington. The author describes battles of ironclads and monitors, and the Battle of Battery Wagner (made famous in the movie “Glory”). Jonathan’s story documents the hopes and struggles of a young man coming of age in a strange land in times of war and change.
The book has no graphic sex scenes and contains some middling graphic battlefield scenes, nothing extreme.
By Author George WB Scott
Click here to visit his website
Stealing Childhood — a shaman detective novel
Human trafficking kingpins, a shamanic sect, and a reluctant FBI team merge to stop Dan and Jason Johnston from doing their best shamanic work. Dan and Jason Johnston are called to work with the FBI on a human trafficking assignment, targeted at Native American teens. Agent Rafsky, who doesn’t know why Dan and his son were called in on the case, and is skeptical of their skills, has her own way of handling things and would rather be left alone to do her job. A, long-ago friend of Dan’s, is also involved, but now appears very suspicious. The whole operation is delicate and could result in failure as well as the deaths of some of the girls. Complications escalate once Dan realizes that other Shamans are involved. As the novel pitches Dan and Jason against dangers found while in altered states of consciousness, they also have to deal with skepticism and physical roadblocks from the FBI. Everything comes to a head when the FBI uses Jason to infiltrate the trafficking operation and gets found out. That’s when Dan gets physically involved himself, putting him, Jason, and his friend in danger.
by Author Terry Persun
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John and Mary Margaret
John and Mary Margaret is a rare insider’s look into the white privilege bubble of a young girl growing up in Jackson, Mississippi and participating in sorority life on the Ole Miss campus in the late 1960s. But it’s also a candid portrayal of a young Black boy from Memphis who follows his dream to study law at the predominantly white university. What happens when their shared love for literature blossoms into an ill-fated romance? Spanning five decades of historical civil rights events in Mississippi and Memphis, John and Mary Margaret’s story will challenge the status quo and give us another opportunity to examine our history and our hearts.
by Author Susan Cushman
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Trouble in Paradise
Key West is paradise–unless you’re the dead woman in the Toucan Suite. The Hemingway cats, Megs & Bartholomew, who wander the grounds of the B&B, think Liberty Anderson was a spy. But spying on whom? And why? Trouble, the black cat detective who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes right down to the Cumberbatch deep voice and the superior attitude, must decipher their cryptic communications and piece together a motive for murder.
by Author Rebecca Barrett
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Who, Me? Fog Bows, Fraud, and Aphrodite (A Macavity & Me Mystery #2)
A heated argument on a nearby boat followed by a loud splash . . .
Who, Me? Fog Bows, Fraud and Aphrodite is a mystery set in an urban boating community in Seattle. Bryn Baczek lives on a sailboat in a small marina with her cat, Macavity, and a series of short-lived goldfish. When a neighbor she doesn’t like becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation, she reluctantly seeks evidence to prove him innocent. She ends up being threatened by the victim’s abusive boyfriend, betrayed by a close friend, and can’t resist using subterfuge to enter a secured building to search the victim’s office. Although Bryn shares what she learns with a charming detective whose manicured mustache she finds off-putting, she is one step ahead of the police in identifying the murderer . . . a step that puts her in a dangerous face-to-face confrontation.
by Author Charlotte Stuart
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The Wanting Women of Huet Pointe
In Huet Pointe, ambition is as dangerous as the brackish water that surrounds the sliver of land. But, the women of this antebellum hamlet yearn for more than society insists they be-devout, feminine, and content with living according to cultural norms. So, what\’s a girl to do? She could employ poison, perhaps a bit of adultery, and drowning in alligator-infested waters is always a choice-whatever it takes to achieve her goal. A novel-in-stories, BAYOU CRESTING: THE WANTING WOMEN OF HUET POINTE, tells the stories of ten women brought together by proximity, forever entangled by the actions they take.
by Author Jodie Cain Smith
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Just To Be Fair
From the author:
I served as the high school principal in the small town in Lockhart, Texas during most of the 1980’s. Believing my school was a safe place, I never went to work worried that a deranged adolescent might bring a rifle to campus to murder other students or a teacher. The shocking mass murders at Columbine High School a few years later proved how naive I was.
I intended for Just To Be Fair to be a story of a shooter in a high school, including both the lead up and the aftermath, as well as an up-close portrayal of the chaos and fear the day the shooter opens fire. There were two be two main characters, the school principal and the character would be become the school shooter. Things changed during the writing. The finished Just To Be Fair tells of Izzy and Amy’s teenage romance, set in the context of rural poverty, in a time and place where being different at school is risky. JTBF paints a vivid image of how relationships in the culture of a high school can easily turn septic, sucking everyone around into a whirlpool of ugliness. Is there a school shooting? Yes.
by Author Philip McBride
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Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops
Allison Hong isn’t a typical fifteen-year-old Taiwanese girl. Unwilling to bend to the conditioning of her Chinese culture, which demands that women submit to men’s will, she disobeys her father’s demand to stay in their faith tradition, Buddhism, and instead joins the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Six years later, she drops out of college to serve a mission—a decision for which her father disowns her.
After serving her mission in Taiwan, Allison marries her Chinese-speaking American boyfriend, Cameron Chastain. But just over a year later, Allison returns home to their Texas apartment and is shocked to discover that Cameron has taken all their money, moved out, and filed for divorce. Desperate for love and acceptance, Allison moves to Utah and enlists in an unforgiving dating war of her own making, pitting her against the bachelorettes at Brigham Young University. It doesn’t take long before she realizes the rules she’s made up don’t make sense—and winning isn’t what she thought it would be.
An award-winning memoir, NINETY-NINE FIRE HOOPS is for anyone who has struggled with gender inequality, racism, and immigrant injustice. Ultimately, it’s about a strong woman of color determined to create her own path.
by Author Allison Hong Merrill
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Purple Lotus
Tara moves to the American South three years after her arranged marriage to tech executive Sanjay. Ignored and lonely, Tara finds herself regressing back to childhood memories that have scarred her for life. When she was eight, her parents had left her behind with her aging grandparents and a schizophrenic uncle in Mangalore, while taking her baby brother with them to make a new life for the family in Dubai.
Tara’s memories of abandonment and isolation mirror her present life of loneliness and escalating abuse at the hands of her husband. She accepts the help of kind-hearted American strangers to fight Sanjay, only to be pressured by her patriarchal family to make peace with her circumstances. Then, in a moment of truth, she discovers the importance of self-worth—a revelation that gives her the courage to break free, gently rebuild her life, and even risk being shunned by her community when she marries her childhood love, Cyrus Saldanha.
Life with Cyrus is beautiful until old fears come knocking. Ultimately, Tara must face these fears to save her relationship with Cyrus—and to confront the victim-shaming society she was raised within.
by Author Veena Rao
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Pause
Dear Diary,
Shall we pause to take stock?
Female (liberated, at least from fraught marriage). Age 52, height 5’5”, weight 120, bone density excellent, minimal cellulite, maximal hot flashes. One and ¾ breasts.
Months since sex: 27
Lindsey Friedland, former river-rafting guide and avid outdoorswoman, has hit the worst stretch of water she’s ever faced: divorce from an abuser, breast cancer, menopause symptoms that her friends seem to have paddled serenely by. And she’s lost sight of her dream of becoming an environmental journalist.
Lindsey needs to get her spark back.
Dear Diary, Disastrous blind dates so far: The walking cologne bottle. The “really want a gal to give me babies” guy. The pushy past-life reintegration facilitator.
Will Lindsey make it past the rocky shoals of family upheavals, job crises, sexism, and ageism… not to mention toxic love traps? Does “happily ever after” now mean settling for occasional (but hot!) sex with Mr. Maybe? Can she reclaim her journalism dream?
Dear Diary, I’m tired of being tragic. I’m sending off my article about the bulldozers versus the baby owls.
***
“Sara Stamey does for fiction what Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert did for memoir—Pause gives a voice to women who are too often invisible in contemporary books. The unforgettable Lindsey Friedland weaves together humor and passion against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest’s natural beauty, using her unique voice to deliver a must-read novel about friendship, love, and killer hot flashes.”
– USA Today Bestselling author Mindy Klasky
“Stamey’s book is incredibly hard to put down. Her characters are real people you come to care about. Most highly recommended.”
– Readers’ Favorite review, 5-star rating.
by Author Sara Stamey
Click here to visit her website
The Literary Catcast Podcast
The Literary Catcast is dedicated to the preservation of vintage books and writings with cats as main characters, bringing their awareness into the modern form of a podcast.
Phebe Phillips is also the author of the book, Why Me? Positive Verse for Loss and Sadness.
by Author & Podcaster Phebe Phillips
Click here to visit her website
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- New Author Members – November 2024 - December 1, 2024
- Welcome to the November 2024 Cover Issue of the Pulpwood Newsletter! - November 2, 2024
- New Author Members – October 2024 - October 31, 2024
- Welcome to the October 2024 Cover Issue of the Pulpwood Newsletter! - October 1, 2024
- Welcome to the September 2024 Cover Issue of the Pulpwood Newsletter! - September 1, 2024
- New Author Members – August 2024 - August 19, 2024
- Welcome to the August 2024 Cover Issue of the Pulpwood Newsletter! - August 5, 2024
- New Author Members – July 2024 - July 30, 2024
- Welcome to the July 2024 Cover Issue of the Pulpwood Newsletter! - July 1, 2024