“It’s rare that a scientifically verified program is actually so successful.  This book is a must read for anyone interested in helping or understanding relationships.”

—John Gottman, author of Fight Right

“Make it safe to connect. Decide don’t slide. Do your part.” These are the three keys the authors of Fighting for Your Marriage: Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Building a Lasting Love (Jossey-Bass; September 11, 2024, 978-1-3942202-9-8; Trade Paperback) have used to help millions of people live better and happier lives with their partners.   

Since 2020 there have been many changes in how we live.  One of the most fundamental differences is how both online dating and job mobility have provided opportunities to meet and fall in love with partners who come from different backgrounds, cultures, religions, and more.  This has added new dynamics to solving conflicts, and it is common for partners to fight about issues without coming to comfortable resolutions they can work on together.  Fighting For Your Marriage contains research-based strategies and tools for averting heated, destructive arguments while increasing mutual understanding and closeness,

Some of the new challenges Fighting for Your Marriage can help couples navigate are:

• Strongly divided political views: Political differences between partners can cause tension and distance. It doesn’t have to be that way. 
• Major differences in cultural backgrounds: Partners may have different holiday, food and meal customs that create stress at family gatherings and burden their relationship.
• Power and love imbalances and asymmetrical relationships: When one person is more invested in the relationship than the other, a relationship faces many threats – that can be overcome.
• Social media and digital habits: Couples learn to deal with conflicts over how much time is spent on social media or what is shared. 
• How to keep love, fun, friendship and sex alive at any age or stage in a relationship: In a world rife with international crises and economic stress, relationships suffer from the loss of renewal that comes from positive times together. 

Fighting For Your Marriage is full of examples of couples and conflicts as well as thoughtful questions for discussion and resources at the end of each chapter.  The book makes it possible for people to learn how to approach their partners and make positive changes without having to contemplate the last resort options of separation and divorce.

Fighting for Your Marriage
Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Building a Lasting Love
By Howard J. Markman, Scott M. Stanley, Galena K. Rhoades, and Janice R. Levine
Publisher: Jossey-Bass (a division of Wiley)
Publication Date: September 11, 2024
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-3942202-9-8
Original Trade
Price: $25
352 pp

 “I had barely finished reading the first sentence when a strange thing happened. I’d say the strangest thing happened, if it weren’t that even stranger things were to follow.”

In David Finkle’s mystery novel, The Great Gatsby Murder Case (Plum Bay Publishing, November 15 2024, ISBN: 979-8-9858564-5-3), Daniel Freund indeed proves to have the strangest week of his life after he acquires a curious 1953 edition of The Great Gatsby left on a neighboring stoop. A writer himself, Daniel has been collecting copies of the beloved American tale by F. Scott Fitzgerald for years. 

As he embarks on his annual re-read, however, this proves to be the most interesting read yet and his routine is turned completely upside down. In one magical moment, words begin lifting off the page and he realizes the book is speaking to him—and it’s telling him there’s been a murder that only he has the keys to solve. 

Set in present day New York City, The Great Gatsby Murder Case follows amateur sleuth Daniel Freund and his unlikely allies as he spearheads the journey to discover the truth behind the death of the previous owner of this copy of The Great Gatsby. 

When the words on the page begin to glow and a hand appears out of the pages sending Daniel secret messages, he cannot ignore the urge to discover what is going on. Prompted by The Great Gatsby itself, Daniel begins his own investigation. Accompanied by a hardheaded retired police detective and a nosy-body neighbor, he works to unfold the pieces of this supposedly solved case. He knows a murder took place, the book told him so, so why is everyone else convinced it was suicide?

Teeming with curiosity, adventure, magic, and worries about leaving the case unsolved, The Great Gatsby Murder Case is a clever and humorous piece of magical realism that explores the idea of a murder mystery in a whole new way.

“Finkle’s prose is lean and energetic, and he thankfully wastes little time attempting to establish a sense of verisimilitude.”
–Kirkus Reviews 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Finkle is a New York-based writer who concentrates on politics and the arts. He writes regularly on theater for New York Stage Review. He’s contributed to scores of publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Nation, The New Yorker, New York, Vogue, Mirabella, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychology Today, Saturday Review and American Theatre. He is on the weekly podcast, The Hour of Lateral Thinking. He is the author of People Tell Me Things, a story collection, The Man With the Overcoat, a novel, Humpty Trumpty Hit a Brick Wall: Donald J. Trump’s First Year in Verse, Great Dates With Some Late Greats, a story collection, and Keys to an Empty House, a novel.

The Great Gatsby Murder Case
By David Finkle
Plum Bay Publishing
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9858564-5-3
Original Trade Paperback
Price: $17.99 | Pages: 246

“Riveting, HIGH SPEED, CINEMATIC ADVENTURE. This ain’t your history teacher’s 16th century.”
–Hummus Aficionado – One vat is never enough

A wise man once said, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” If this is true, then it stands to reason that Captain Lanning Delaford is about to have the most meaningful day of his life.

In Neal Rabin’s newest, action-packed novel, FLAT (Ponderosa Publishing, Spring 2024, ISBN: 978-0-997046830), Lanning Delaford is torn from his typical routine in 16th Century Spain by a series of comically unfortunate events. Thrown into a swashbuckling adventure he had no intention of taking, Delaford becomes a reluctant explorer.

Set at the tail end of the Spanish Inquisition, when seafaring exploration and discovery were THE thing, FLAT follows the intrepid tales of Delaford and his makeshift crew as they embark on a journey teeming with betrayal, romance, murder, sea battles, and a healthy dose of satirical Renaissance humor. 

A part-time tennis instructor for the prince of Spain, part-time merchant seaman, Lanning lives a comfortable but financially precarious life in Andalusia. In the course of a single day, the fiscal scales tip out of his favor following a narrowly-escaped assassination attempt, a double mugging, and the loss of his loaner boat and its cargo to pirates. Now deep in the red, he has no choice but to rent another boat and make for the nearby trade port of Tangier to recover some of his losses. 

As luck would have it, passage on Lanning’s ship is in high demand, so the captain and his eclectic crew soon set sail. Accompanied by an engaging and diverse cast of characters including Ignatius Loyola, Ferdinand Magellan, (mostly) evil pirates, a mediocre Portuguese butcher, an alluring, bad-ass courtesan, and a peregrine falcon named Doug, Lanning finds that his short trip to Tangier is about to become a life-changing, epic voyage into the unknown Great Sea. 

Fraught with ruthless pirates, brutal storms, and worries about falling off the edge of the Earth, FLAT is a clever, cinematic odyssey. Neal Rabin has crafted a fast-paced piece of historical fiction that is at times both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny with a wit that readers of Douglas Adams or Christopher Moore will enjoy. 

Faced with your own personal precipice, would fear stop you at the edge, or would you dare to venture beyond it?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Neal Rabin is a UCLA graduate who worked for Club Med as a tennis and surf instructor on Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar. He stocked refrigerators, xeroxed scripts, and served as a ‘fetch’ for Time Life Films. Neal cofounded and spent fifteen years as CEO of the Santa Barbara based global software company, Miramar Systems. He continues to live in Santa Barbara with his wife, two daughters, two dogs, multiple guitars, his piano, and a flock of chickens. Neal is an instrument pilot and has an active lifestyle that includes surfing, volleyball, yoga, and tennis.