June 30, 2013: Silver Birch Press Author Philippa Mayall at Skylight Books, L.A.

Silver Birch Press is honored to celebrate the release of PHOENIX, a memoir by Phillipa Mayall, with a reading and book signing by the author at Los Angeles’s acclaimed Skylight Books on June 30, 2013. We invite our Southern California readers (and authors!) to join Silver Birch Press and Philippa Mayall for this event. 

WHERE: Skylight Books

LOCATION: 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90027

WEBSITE: skylightbooks.com

PHONE: 323-660-1175

EVENT INFORMATION: Philippa Mayall Reading

WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013

TIME: 5 p.m.

 

Philippa Mayall at Skylight Books, L.A., June 30, 2013

Silver Birch Press is honored to celebrate the release of PHOENIX, a memoir by Phillipa Mayall, with a reading and book signing by the author at Los Angeles’s acclaimed Skylight Books on June 30, 2013. We invite our Southern California readers (and authors!) to join Silver Birch Press and Philippa Mayall for this event. 

WHERE: Skylight Books

LOCATION: 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90027

WEBSITE: skylightbooks.com

PHONE: 323-660-1175

EVENT INFORMATION: Philippa Mayall Reading

WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013

TIME: 5 p.m.

AUTOGRAPHED COPIES: If you’d like to order an autographed copy of PHOENIX by Philippa Mayall, please send an email to silver@silverbirchpress.com and we’ll reserve a book for you at Skylight.

John Rechy Reviews PHOENIX by Philippa Mayall

“This powerful memoir immediately establishes itself as the work of a highly talented young writer. In a voice that is strong, unsparing, never judgmental, Mayall traces her years-long journey as a young woman to find escape out of the entrapping mean streets of Los Angeles, a separated world invisible to all but its denizens. She does this with unflinching honesty and authenticity. She knows what it’s like to wake up into the harsh sunlight in a Venice Beach parking lot, cramped in an old car with other outcasts. She conveys the urgency for chemical surcease that leads her into dangerous streets, dark alleys; surcease no matter if bought by a sordid paid encounter. A punishing dawn at times finds her still searching for that illusive escape.

Through all this, Mayall is able to find poignancy and humor. She finds it in the drug recovery meetings she haunts in search of vagrant camaraderie. She finds it—and introduces the reader to a cast of memorable fellow exiles–in a rigidly ruled rehabilitation institution.

This is a memorable book — beautifully and even lyrically written. At times it is melancholy, at times hopeful, at times shocking, but it is always moving. At times it is even exuberant with the sense of a life lived determined to survive.” JOHN RECHY. author of CITY OF NIGHT and THE MIRACULOUS DAY OF AMALIA GOMEZ

PHOENIX, a memoir by Philippa Mayall, is available at Amazon.com.

New Release: PHOENIX, a memoir by Philippa Mayall

Silver Birch Press is pleased to announce the release of PHOENIX, a memoir by Philippa Mayall — a book that renowned writer John Rechy, author of CITY OF NIGHT, has called “Memorable…powerful…and beautifully written.”

BOOK DESCRIPTION: PHOENIX begins on a tragic night in Manchester, United Kingdom, when a house fire destroys the author’s life as she knows it. Philippa (Flip) flees the scene, devoured by guilt — and later leaps into a synthetic existence of mind-altering drugs and alcohol. Her desperate urge to escape takes her six thousand miles from home to Los Angeles. But Flip discovers her feelings came with her, and soothes them with even more potent drugs offered by a new friend. She ends up homeless, living in a car with two other people and two cats, and a new flame is ignited within her. After a violent confrontation with her friends, Flip is forced to enter a drug rehab so she isn’t sleeping on the streets. This is the beginning of her real and most courageous escape.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Philippa Mayall was born into her own gritty northern drama in Manchester, United Kingdom, in 1973. Her penchant for writing was discovered by her mother at an early age. She kept switching the lights on to write down nuggets of sentences and phrases she thought of in the night and didn’t want to forget. This made her very unpopular with her brother who shared the room (they remain good friends today). She moved to Los Angeles in 2000 and her time in America is enormously influential on her writing, as are her roots in Manchester. After realizing her real dream of wanting to write about her experiences, she moved back to England, where she studied for a Masters in Creative Writing at Kingston University. PHOENIX is her first book. In the future, she hopes to write more. Philippa currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

PHOENIX is available at Amazon.com.

Chronicles, Vol. One, Memoir by Bob Dylan and Artists from Minnesota

CHRONICLES, Volume One (Excerpt)

Memoir by Bob Dylan

“[In 1961] I didn’t follow baseball that much but I did know that Roger Maris who was with the Yankees was in the process of breaking Babe Ruth’s home-run record…Maris was from Hibbing, Minnesota…On some level I guess I took pride in being from the same town. There were other Minnesotans, too, that I felt akin to. Charles Lindberg, the first aviator to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in the ‘20s. He was from Little Falls. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a descendant of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and who himself wrote The Great Gatsby, was from St. Paul…Sinclair Lewis had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first American to do so. Lewis had written Elmer Gantry and was the master of absolute realism, had invented it. He was from Sauk Center, Minnesota. And then there was Eddie Cochran, one of the early rock-and-roll geniuses who was from Albert Lee, Minnesota. Native sons—adventurers, prophets, writers, and musicians. They were all from the North Country. Each one followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed. Each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one of them or all of them put together.”

Note: This quote from the final pages of Chronicles, Volume One, by Bob Dylan called to mind other favorite artists from Minnesota, though Dylan wouldn’t have been aware of them in 1961. A nod to filmmakers Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Fargo) and Terry Gilliam (Brazil), author Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), cartoonist Charles M. Schultz (Peanuts), and musician Prince.

Published in 2004, Chronicles, Volume One, by Bob Dylan has met with critical and reader acclaim — and was one of five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dylan is currently working on Chronicles, Volume Two.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Essays by David Sedaris

“She’s afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I’ll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family’s started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they’re sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line “You have to swear you’ll never repeat this.” I always promise, but it’s generally understood that my word means nothing.”  Excerpt from Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim by DAVID SEDARIS

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Published in 2004, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris includes 22 of the author’s autobiographical essays, many that originally appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and Esquire.

Silver Birch Press will mail a free hardcover copy of the book (U.S. only due to postage rates) to the first person who leaves a comment about this post.

Henry Miller, Anais Nin & Barbara Kraft

I recently spoke with Barbara Kraft (pictured at right at Alias Books in Los Angeles) about her memoir  Anais Nin: The Last Days — peppering her with questions about the iconic Nin. Kraft mentioned that after Nin’s death in 1977, she was invited to meet Henry Miller — then in his 80s and living in Pacific Palisades (located to the west of Los Angeles).

Miller and Nin had had a storied relationship in Paris during the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, “Although Miller had little or no money that first year in Paris [1930],  things began to change with the meeting of Anais Nin who…would go on to pay his entire way through the 1930s…Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of The Tropic of Cancer in 1934.”

It was amazing that Barbara Kraft had befriended not one, but two literary giants during their final years. Her memoir tells Nin’s story with depth of feeling and telling detail. Now Kraft is considering writing about her experiences with Miller — including her front-row seat at his frequent dinner parties for artistic and literary figures during the late 1970s and delivering some of the over 1500 letters Miller wrote to his “twilight muse” Brenda Venus. To this, I gave a decided, “Yes! Yes! Yes.” I want to read that book!

Anais Nin: The Last Days is available as an ebook on Kindle and a range of additional formats. Find it on Amazon.com here.

Anais Nin: The Last Days by Barbara Kraft

A few days ago, I visited Alias Books East, in L.A’.s Atwater Village, and was privileged to hear Barbara Kraft read from her memoir Anais Nin: The Last Days. Set in the 1970s, Kraft’s book pulls back the veil on the ethereal and mysterious Nin during her final years when she lived in L.A.’s Silverlake area with Rupert Pole.

Through a series of fortunate events, Kraft became Nin’s writing student in 1974, and during the next few years visited the renowned diarist once a week for mentoring, instruction, and fellowship. Over time, Kraft became Nin’s closes confidante, learning intimate details of her mentor’s history and relationships.In 1975, Nin was diagnosed with cancer and spent the next two years fighting the disease — with Kraft often at her side, both in Silverlake and at hospitals.

During the reading, as I sat with approximately 20 people listening to Kraft read her account of Nin’s cancer fight, her words were so vivid and moving  that we were all there, living the experience with her once again. Kraft’s writing is brilliant — both lucid and lyrical — bringing to life one of the most elusive and influential figures in 20th Century literature.  Highly recommended!

Anais Nin: The Last Days is currently available exclusively as an ebook. Find it on Amazon.com here for just $5.38!