Bookstore

Work by Peter Anastas

No Fortunes

by Peter Anastas

Set at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine during the winter and spring of 1959, No Fortunes tells the story of four friends on the threshold of adulthood. Though it resembles a memoir in shape and content, No Fortunes is both a novel of sentimental education and the story of a young couple driven to love each other while compelled to grow apart.     Read an excerpt.

270 pages; paperback $15.00

At the Cut

by Peter Anastas

Of his memoir of growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the 1940s, Peter Anastas writes, "In one sense I have written a memoir. But I have also attempted an archaeology of a childhood: the slow, careful, peeling back of the layers of self-deception and forgetfulness that obscure and perhaps even buffer the pain of discovering who we are and how we got to be that way. For we never truly survive our childhood, we merely spend a lifetime recovering from it."

Available from Dogtown Books  and Amazon.com
 

Broken Trip

by Peter Anastas

In this novel of Gloucester, Massachusetts in the 1990s, Peter Anastas penetrates the facade of the venerable seaport depicted in tourist brochures to reveal the lives of men and women who've been by-passed by the economic boom. Inspired by Pat Barker's novels of working-class life in the North of England, the narrative unfolds against the background of a fishing industry in crisis, a city in transition from gritty blue-collar to gentrified bedroom. The title, an indigenous expression for a failed or unprofitable fishing voyage, suggests the misfortune that besets many of the characters' lives--and the tragedy waiting for some of them. 

Photographs by Ernest Morin,  www.dbadocument.net.

Available from Glad Day Books and Amazon.com
 

Work by Schuyler Hoffman

Sacrifice

CD by Schuyler Hoffman

Recorded on compact disc with music by Richard Atwood and printed in booklet form included in the jewel box, the poems of Sacrifice range in tone from subtle to dramatic, issuing from a postmodern, post-Beat aesthetic that employs both collage and projective verse techniques. The subjects address the full range of human experience in the contemporary world: love, loss, alienation, political endo-colonization, and the postmodern Sublime.

Includes an eight-page booklet with 11 poems: A Kind of Grieving,  Borderlands, The Biological Dance, and Double Vision.

Read a poem. Order by email thru Back Shore or by regular mail at
P.O. Box 211, Gloucester MA 01931-0211

Price: $19.95, includes shipping and handling
 

The Spaces Between

The Spaces Between, published in 1979 by The Golgonooza Research Foundation in Boulder, Colorado, contains the only published earlier work of Schuyler Hoffman still in print. The poems are composed in a minimal style, evoking the rip-rap aesthetic of the early work of Gary Snyder, and influenced by Williams and Lorca.  The wildernesses of nature and love, and the complications of the modern scene are among the subjects addressed in this elegant, slim volume designed by the author.

A 14-page chapbook with 20 poems, including for Gary Snyder, the fear of riding, and against the snow she moved against.

Order by email thru Back Shore or by regular mail at
P.O. Box 211, Gloucester MA 01931-0211

Price: $10.95, includes shipping and handling

Work by Peter Tuttle

Looking for a Sign in the West

by Peter Tuttle

Looking for a Sign in the West, Back Shore's first book, is a 200-page road poem and low-rent spiritual odyssey through the American West, the author leaving old failures behind and pursuing the American Dream of a new start- the new beginning out West- and vividly describing the down-to-earth people and places he encounters in his journey.

"I liked Looking for a Sign in the West. I think it is distinctive work."

Larry McMurtry

"Recommended reading!"
                                                  Big Bridge

Available from Amazon.com.

Work by other Cape Ann Authors

An Island No More, by Ronald Gilson: An essay of the author’s experience of the fishing industry in the 1940s and 50s  as it affected the everyday life of its citizens.