Category: Fiction

Found Objects by Peter Gelfan

Posted on by CMPR

FOUNDOBJECTS JPEG

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

“Sexy, slyly funny, and highly readable”
—Fran Dorf, author of Flight and Saving Elijah

The ménage a trois has been portrayed in literature most famously in the David Garnett novel Aspects of Love, which also became a highly-touted Broadway musical.  In a new novel FOUND OBJECTS (Nortia Press, ISBN: 978-0-9848359-6-6; $15.95; Original Trade Paperback; dist. by Consortium; June 2013) by editor and author Peter Gelfan, a charitable offering of a place to stay for a woman and her two children creates a unique and sometimes troubled union that calls into question the definitions of family, morality, and values.

What man would not want Aldo Zoria’s life? A nice house in Vermont; a successful photography career; two women, Erica and Marie, who share his bed; and two children for whom he is not directly responsible. But when Marie’s children begin to attend school, and when her husband Jonathan arrives on their doorstep unexpectedly, the dynamic changes completely. Their idyllic relationship becomes suspicious to the town and it isn’t clear whether Jonah is accepting of their arrangement or if he’s come to reclaim his wife.  Will Marie leave Erica and Aldo with an empty nest? Or will Jonah take up permanent residence and turn their group into a quartet?

FOUND OBJECTS is a literary novel with complex themes, finely drawn characters and elegant prose. Enthusiastic early readers have chimed in, calling it “gripping,” “surprising, even shocking,” and “unputdownable.” Gelfan’s style and focus on his characters allows the story to unfold in an intimate way. The quiet conversations over brandy discussing politics, literature, and sex, and the self-examination each of the characters endures makes FOUND OBJECTS real for contemporary readers. Surely Gelfan’s novel, with its unique and sophisticated theme, will inspire many after-dinner conversations and book group discussions.

Peter Gelfan is a writer and a freelance book editor.  He lives in New York City, where he is working on his next novel.

Nortia Press is a boutique publisher based in Orange County, California. We focus on literary fiction and nonfiction with a global affairs bent, now under our Nortia Current imprint. Our catalog is handpicked and nurtured from inception to provide readers, booksellers and libraries with a select list of timely and engaging titles.

 

Love’s Attraction by David Cleveland

Posted on by CMPR

LACoverArt

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Michael Collins, the protagonist in David Adams Cleveland’s latest novel, LOVE’S ATTRACTION (Winsted Press: July 2013; $24.95), has been obsessed with Thoreau and Concord since he read Walden as a young teenager growing up in nearby blue-collar Lowell.  His obsession led him to a scholarship at Concord’s prestigious Emerson Academy and his mother a waitressing job at the Concord Inn.  Later it brought him back to Concord in search—not just for the lost love of his schooldays, but for clues to the life of his great-great-grandfather, one James Collins, the itinerant Irish laborer who had a shanty along the tracks of the Fitchburg railway, from whom Thoreau bought the planks to build his shack at Walden Pond.  Michael is haunted by Thoreau’s poignant description of the destitute James Collins and his wife disappearing down the road with all their worldly possessions carried on their backs.

From literary Concord to the backwater canals of Venice, LOVE’S ATTRACTION takes readers on a tantalizing and thought-provoking journey as Michael Collins, a Washington political fixer facing an impending bribery scandal, is suddenly confronted with a past he never knew and a legacy of heartbreak and deception from which he failed to escape.

LOVE’S ATTRACTION is a mysterious, romantic novel that explores universal themes of identity: how memory, talent and intemperate desires—embodied in art as well as in our genes—are passed down through families to influence our hidden selves. The novel speaks to the role of metamorphosis in our lives and how the transforming elixir of love’s attraction makes us most fully human.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Adams Cleveland is a novelist and art historian.  His first novel, With a Gemlike Flame, drew wide praise for its evocation of Venice and the hunt for a lost masterpiece by Raphael.  His most recent art history book, A History of American Tonalism, won the Silver Medal in Art History in the Book of the Year Awards, 2010; and Outstanding Academic Title 2011 from the American Library Association; it was the bestselling American art history book in 2011 and 2012.  He and his wife live in New York where he works as an art advisor with his son, Carter Cleveland, founder of Artsy.net, the new internet site making all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an internet connection.