Hard to believe that another year is almost over. A lot has happened personally and on the national and global stage which I could go into but it is better mentally heading into one of the most stressful seasons of the year by focusing on the positive. ReQueered Tales has published quite a few books in the last few months and that makes me very happy.
ReQueered Tales has been super busy in the last few weeks! Work has been done on getting out Ice Blues and Third Man Out both by Richard Strachey, the combo title of Deadly Lies/Stolen Moments by John Preston, Winter Eyes and Buried on a Sunday by Lev Raphael, and A Bard on Hercular, the epic science fiction conclusion to the City on a Star trilogy by Felice Picano!
For a part time job, I work at Argos Books in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is a used book and comic book store. Today I had a customer come up and ask me if we had Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This is a book we are constantly asked for by young people just discovering literature outside of young adult novels, along with 1984, Animal Farm, A Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and Slaughterhouse Five. The customer today slaughtered the name Kerouac.
English professor, Nick Hoffman is still unsettled following events of the past spring, and now he has to contend with a new department chair, Dr. Napoleon Padovani. The chair is a prima donna who has managed to upset and alienate every professor and adjunct in the department and all of them are dumping it Nick.
We can thank the bawdy Geoffrey Chaucer and the not-so-bawdy tradition of courtly love for our modern celebration of Valentine’s Day--when couples become the focus of attention. As for St. Valentine himself, church historians have martyrs named Valens, Valentin, or Valentinin but the favorite attribution is that of a Christian priest, Valentine. In the third century AD, he performed marriages for soldiers, all of whom were forbidden to marry by Rome.
