From the critically acclaimed author of An Irish Immigrant Story, One Man’s Mission and Three Steps to the Making of an Assassin, comes a new story of commitment, dedication, strength and perseverance.
The United States came out of World War II the most respected and admired country in the world.
That status was earned by the courage, commitment, and integrity of American families. American Valor is the story of one such family.
American Valor is on sale now at fine independent bookstores everywhere and online retailers.
About the Author
One of America’s promising new authors Jack Cashman’s fourth novel tells a story of an American families commitment to the ideals that have made their country the envy of the world.
Jack lives in Hampden Maine with his wife Betty near their sons Derek and Danny; their daughters-in-law Michele and Karen and their granddaughters, Katie, Sarah, Jackie, Carolyn and Brianna.
Can a group of elderly drag queens save a 1950s nightclub from being taken over by the mob?
It’s 1956 and television is stealing Alice’s nightclub audience. Known as Al to everyone in the club scene, she has to try to prevent the mob from taking over her crippled club and turning it into a strip joint.
Her one solace: Juliana, the woman who haunts her memories and fuels her dreams of a brighter future. But the last time Al saw her was the day Juliana’s husband caught them in bed together.
On the brink of losing her love and her livelihood, Al makes a bold decision. She arranges an extravagant production starring aging female impersonators, even though funding the show means going into debt.
Will the show succeed in saving her club and helping her find her way back to Juliana? Or will Al’s big risk result in losing everything? Although the book is the fifth in the series it can read as a standalone.
DO YOU KNOW DOROTHY? is the fifth book in the Juliana series of historical LGBT fiction, but you can also enjoy it as a standalone novel.
Other Books in the The Juliana Series:
Juliana
The Juliana Series, Book One
She went looking for fame, and found her true self, instead.
Olympus Nights on the Square
The Juliana Series, Book Two
What if your love was illegal? What would you do?
Paris, Adrift
The Juliana Series, Book Three
She wanted a safe harbor for their love. But rough waters could destroy any hope of starting over…
Heaven is to Your Left
The Juliana Series, Book Four
How far would you go to save the person you loved?
Max sat up straight on the couch as I entered the living room. “My god, what happened to you?”
“Don’t you like it?” I adjusted my blue and white striped skinny tie, shook my shoulders so my blue suit jacket and held out one foot to show off the black cowboy boots. I pulled the jacket open and grabbed the belt on my black jeans. “And look!” I stuck my hips out. “A fly!”
“Cover yourself!” He shielded his eyes with his hand. “You didn’t wear that in public!”
“Yeah! Well, I took a cab home.”
“You could’ve been killed walking around with that on your head. What is it? Halloween?”
“I’m a butch!” I turned my back to him. “See? This is a DA. That means duck’s ass for you old fogies.”
“Does it come off? We can’t have you at the club looking like that.”
“I can set it with those darn curlers and get it back to my boring page boy.”
“I better not see you at the club wearing anything remotely similar.”
“Of course not, but on my off hours…”
“You can’t take chances like you did tonight.”
“I know.”
“Getting arrested is the best that could happen to you.”
“I know.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“I went shopping.”
“What store would sell you clothes like that? They’re for men.”
“I went as a man.”
“What?”
“I was so scared they’d figure it out and show me the door.” I sat on the coffee table.
“Sit on the couch like a lady.”
I plopped onto the couch without worrying about which way my legs went. “I walked right into Macy’s and…’
“Macy’s! Oh, my god.”
“My friends, Freddie-Faye and Lady Day taught me.
“Who’s Lady Day?”
“A female impersonator I know.”
“You should not be with someone like that. Someone who doesn’t even know what their sex is. She’s, he’s mentally disturbed.”
“She is not. She’s real nice. She has a nephew who sometimes stays over. She leant me his dungarees. Then she gave me this hair style. I went to the men’s department with my friend. I bought my own Men’s clothes. I was scared the salesman would figure it out, but he just called me ‘sir’ and showed me things and let me go into the fitting room.
“Watch me comb it.” I jumped up. “Butches have to comb their hair different from everybody else.” I reached into my back pocket and slid out my new comb. I jutted my chin out and slapped the comb against the palm of my hand. “You’re sposed to do that first.”
“Why?” Max asked.
“Pay attention.”
He wrapped his hands around his knees. “Listening.”
“Watch. You hafta hold your comb between your first two fingers like this. Then you flick your first three fingers through the front of your hair and, uh…” I stared at my two fingers holding the comb and the one extra finger sticking out by itself.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m sposed to make a curl come over my forehead. It seems it’d be easier to do with just my fingers, but then what do I do with the comb? Oh, well, there’s a whole ritual to combing your hair when you’re a butch. Like there’s the show combing. Stop grinning like you’re not taking me serious. Butch’s comb their hair in public to defy the rules that get thrown at women. Butches are independent. When they look in a mirror…” I stepped over Max’s white rug and saw myself in the mirror. “They tilt their heads like this and then to the other side like this. That’s to show they know they look good, and everybody wants them. I swear I’m gonna be one, Max!” I grandly threw my comb on the rug.
“Get that comb off my clean white rug!
I picked it up.
About the Author
Vanda wrote her first novel in eighth grade, with encouragement from her teacher, Mr. James Evers, who said, “My children will read your words.” She went on to win an Edward Albee Fellowship among other awards for playwriting. One of her plays, VILE AFFECTIONS, was a finalist for the National Lambda Literary Award. She is now writing a series about LGBT history. The characters are fictional, but the history is fact. The books have all received awards in some form. The third in the series, Paris, Adrift was a Category First Place winner in Chanticlear’s Goethe Award for Late Historical Fiction. This same book was also a finalist in the Lesfic Bard Awards.
In a powerful human saga, Andy teeters on the chasm of survivor’s guilt, desperate to find equilibrium in his life. Deep down, he wants to live but doesn’t know how. Poisoned Jungle is an intimate glimpse into one veteran’s struggle for meaning after experiencing the despair of war.
Poisoned Jungle speaks to the long psychological tentacles war has on the lives it touches, and the difficulty of breaking free of them. Realizing changes have occurred deep within, Vietnam War medic Andy Parks must reconcile his new reality to establish a life worth living-not an easy task. How will Andy Parks ever dispel the images he brought home with him? He can’t live with them-or outrun them. Even in sleep he finds no rest.
“The napalmed children peered at him, uncomprehending, not understanding what happened, and asked him to fix their burns, alleviate their pain. He tried to explain- such a terrible mistake. No words came out of his mouth.”
About the Author
Author, beekeeper, entrepreneur, and Vietnam combat medic.
A young WWI veteran searches for his French Impressionist father through encounters with Claude Monet and some of that movement’s key figures.
About the Author
Joe Byrd’s BS in Journalism and MA in Communications degrees inspired him to become a pioneer in electronic publishing. As a McGraw-Hill editor, he developed one of the first computer publishing systems. In the rapidly developing PC software industry, he co-authored one of his two books using PC desktop publishing software, the first for a major publishing house. He developed the first technical support website in the software industry. In his fifty-year career, he published magazines, wrote research reports, and developed conferences in the US and Europe for the digital photography industry. He launched one of the first digital photography dot coms. This is his first novel.
A young WWI veteran searches for his French Impressionist father through encounters with Claude Monet and some of that movement’s key figures.
Excerpt
Oscar Bonhomme’s palms sweated as he crept from the warm kitchen filled with the spice-laden aroma of frying sausage mixed with the smell of aromatic, dark coffee into Monet’s yellow dining room.
He’d used what little money he had to purchase new work clothes for his first day on the job. He twisted his still-stiff brown woolen cap between his sweating fingers as he glanced at his reflection in the picture glass to see if his pale skin betrayed his months in the military hospital. Did his slight frame and frail stature look well enough for rigorous gardening work? No one would believe he was once tanned, muscular, and robust. Did his prematurely greying hair and the red circles around his eyes reveal the trials he had endured at the front? Although thirty-four, he felt and looked much older.
Oscar summoned his courage pulled from somewhere deep inside himself as he had done when climbing out of the trenches and facing the enemy. “Bonjour, Monsieur Monet.”
No movement. The newspaper Monet held did not lower. The first salvo had fallen short.
He fired off another. “Bonjour, Monsieur Monet.”
Still no response. Second salvo, off-target.
Perhaps Monet was hard of hearing. Oscar added more powder and fired the third shot as he shouted, “Bonjour, Monsieur Monet.”
The paper lowered to reveal piercing black eyes and a long white beard stained yellow with nicotine. Monet resembled the newspaper photos Oscar had seen of him—short, stocky, and with an intense gaze that seemed to miss nothing around him. His hands with translucent skin and heavily veined looked muscular and tanned, as befitted a painter who worked mostly outdoors.
Monet stared at Oscar as if trying to remember who was this invader of his dining room and disturber of his early morning coffee. He wore an English herringbone wool suit buttoned at the neck, with just an inch of white ruffled shirt cuffs showing at the sleeves.
At last, he spoke. “Who are you?”
He sounded irritated.
Oscar drew in his breath and squared his shoulders to make himself look the part before responding with, “I’m your new gardener, Monsieur.”
Monet frowned. “I don’t remember you. Who hired you? Why should I hire a gardener in the middle of the winter?”
Oscar stammered as he gathered enough breath to reply. “You… You did, Monsieur. Yesterday. At least, that’s what I was told.”
He gripped his newspaper tighter, shook his head, and frowned. “So, what are you doing in here? This isn’t the garden.”
“Madame Blanche asked me to meet you here before dawn to carry your paintings for you.”
“Humph!”
And with that, Monet raised the paper again, which left Oscar standing in the doorway, not knowing whether to stay or go.
Oscar stood twisting and untwisting his cap and wondering. Will he dismiss me, fall asleep, or will we start our day together? Could this cranky old man be his father? Probably not. But he might know him.
Since it was his first day on this new job, he remained to see what would happen next.
After one, two, three, four, five minutes with no response, he looked around the room. Yellow was the theme color. Even the chairs and light fixtures were Provence yellow, as his mother called it. Monet seemed obsessed with the color yellow and eating by the looks of the dining room with its multiple sets of dishes and an abundance of silverware.
The odd prints that hung on the walls disturbed him. They were most unusual and not yellow. He saw dozens of them depicting an assortment of Japanese people in native costumes through scenes of Japan. They reminded him of photos his Japanese friends in San Francisco had shown him. The prints featured plants and animals that he didn’t recognize.
Oscar scratched his head and thought, why would one of the world’s most famous Impressionist painters have these Japanese prints on his walls instead of his art or that of his colleagues?
Lying in the hospital, he had dreamed of what he would do when he was released. He never imagined he would work in one of the most famous gardens in France. This job was the start of his new life; he was excited and frightened to be here.
Curiosity was getting the better of him as he walked around the long table, examining the prints. Each one seemed more colorful and stranger than the one before, and someone had labeled every one with the artist’s name. He made a note to ask Monsieur Monet about the prints. They must have been significant to him if they were hanging in his dining room. Undoubtedly, he would have dictated the decoration of this space, the essential room for entertaining.
Finally, Monet’s hand emerged to crush out his cigarette in his overflowing ashtray. He lowered his paper, rose from his chair, and shuffled to the door.
“Are you coming?” he threw over his shoulder.
Caught off-guard while still staring at the prints, Oscar felt he was a puppy following its master and hurried through the door after him, down the steps to the garden, past the cart, and into the darkened studio.
“Put these in the cart and follow me.”
About The Author
Joe Byrd’s BS in Journalism and MA in Communications degrees inspired him to become a pioneer in electronic publishing. As a McGraw-Hill editor, he developed one of the first computer publishing systems. In the rapidly developing PC software industry, he co-authored one of his two books using PC desktop publishing software, the first for a major publishing house. He developed the first technical support website in the software industry. In his fifty-year career, he published magazines, wrote research reports, and developed conferences in the US and Europe for the digital photography industry. He launched one of the first digital photography dot coms. This is his first novel.
Readers will discover the fine line between friends and enemies when a Confederate cavalry officer finds out that the woman he promised his dying brother he would defend, is the spy he swore to his men he would destroy. This epic Southern fiction novel chronicles the journeys of these two tenacious foes as their lives cross by the fates of war and their destinies become entwined forever.
Author Jessica James uniquely blends elements of romantic and historical fiction in this deeply personal and poignant tale that, according to one reviewer, “transcends the pages to settle in the very marrow of the reader’s bones.”
About the Author
Jessica James is an award-winning author of patriotic suspense, historical fiction, and heartwarming Southern small town fiction. She is a four-time winner of the John Esten Cooke Award for Fiction, and has won more than a dozen other literary awards including a Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America. James’ novels have been used in schools and are available in hundreds of libraries including Harvard and the U.S. Naval Academy. She resides in Gettysburg, Pa., and has a passion for old dwellings and first edition books.
Readers will discover the fine line between friends and enemies when a Confederate cavalry officer finds out that the woman he promised his dying brother he would defend, is the spy he swore to his men he would destroy. This epic Southern fiction novel chronicles the journeys of these two tenacious foes as their lives cross by the fates of war and their destinies become entwined forever.
Author Jessica James uniquely blends elements of romantic and historical fiction in this deeply personal and poignant tale that, according to one reviewer, “transcends the pages to settle in the very marrow of the reader’s bones.”
Excerpt
Duty Bound Prologue
From out of a mist-filled meadow the horse and rider appeared, looking more like shadowy figures of the spectral world than anything of flesh and blood. Indeed the vision they created looked like one from hell, as lightning flashed in brilliant bolts of blazing fury, illuminating the mist around them in an eerie shroud of light.
The charger, black as night and massive in size, could well have been from Satan’s own stable, so swiftly and silently did he move through the swirling vapor. Galloping with neck outstretched and tail sailing behind like a banner, the daunting steed flew across the field like a soaring dragon, steam bursting from his nostrils at every stride. The mystifying appearance he projected was matched only by the unearthly image upon his back, who appeared to relish the cross-country race with the wind and the challenge of outrunning the pelting rain sweeping up the valley behind them.
Reaching a canopy of trees just as the first drops of rain began to fall, the horse slowed to a walk by some unseen command, then stopped completely and reared as the rider gave a long, sweeping wave to an unseen foe.
Within the span of a heartbeat they both vanished from sight, the fog and falling rain masking the direction of their escape.
About the Author
Jessica James is an award-winning author of patriotic suspense, historical fiction, and heartwarming Southern small town fiction. She is a four-time winner of the John Esten Cooke Award for Fiction, and has won more than a dozen other literary awards including a Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America. James’ novels have been used in schools and are available in hundreds of libraries including Harvard and the U.S. Naval Academy. She resides in Gettysburg, Pa., and has a passion for old dwellings and first edition books.
