Fiction Titles
Velocity
Lucy Brick, a college student, starts noticing delivery drivers on motorbikes zooming all over Manhattan. They look alike and act weird. They use chopsticks to “charge” themselves. They even ignore traffic warnings. Some of Lucy’s friends have joined the drivers. They invite Lucy to sign up, too. Her friends tell her it’s the best time in their lives. Being a dliv gives them lots of energy. Better, it makes them more popular than their wildest dreams. It’s very tempting!
But Lucy begins to wonder what has really happened to these drivers. How can they have such abilities? Could joining them be fun—or dangerous? Lucy is going to find out.
Velocity is the first in the series The Activ8r Adventures, where AI enhancements to human beings give them amazing powers… but at what cost?
The Experiment Cannot Be Unbound
Rebecca’s novel excerpt is now published in The Experiment Cannot Be Bound, an art book published by Unbound Editions, edited by Peter Campion.
Featuring more than 70 pathbreaking authors, The Experiment Will Not Be Bound highlights celebrated and new voices that, as editor Peter Campion says, share “a particular combination of openness and intention, curiosity and assertion.” Indeed, the authors included in this anthology “venture out onto the skinny branches of their own sensibilities,” in Campion’s words.
This book, though, is not just an anthology of some inspired experimental writing but an experimental anthology in form. Being unbound — physically and philosophically — allows the pieces included here to live in any order, to find the fit that works best for any reader, to be read randomly, sequentially, or thematically. With a foreword and extraordinary book photography by Catherine Gass, The Experiment Will Not Be Bound is, to a degree, an homage to William H. Gass and his bold, experimental vision for his masterpiece, The Tunnel.
Excerpt – Maryam
It’s early morning at Watergate Bay, and high tide, judging by how little space we have next to the cliffs. The nine-hundred-ninety-eight other women have set up their tents as close to the rocks as they can. They’ve woven their hair into tight buns at the nape of their necks, and they’re doing a sort of whimsical gymnastics, circling their arms and swinging them up and back. Frau Elena stands in the center like an orchestra conductor, demanding that each woman sing her scales. She’s dividing them all into soprano and alto, then further subdividing them based on their native languages. I’m the only one who’s gone out of the circle and have started washing my feet in the ice-cold water. I’ve claimed it’s good for my circulation, that my feet ache from the journey. I’ve told them I’m not used to the food here, that I miss fish.
And Frau Elena, tight-lipped and sharp-voiced, nodded and said that was all right.
Frankly Feminist
Another novel excerpt is available from Brandeis University Press, in the Lilith anthology Frankly Feminist.
A groundbreaking Jewish feminist short story collection.
Short story collections focusing on Jewish writers have—no surprise—typically given women authors short shrift. This new volume represents the best Jewish feminist fiction published in Lilith Magazine, and does what no other collection has done before in its geographic scope, its inclusion of twenty-first-century stories, and its Jewish feminist focus.
This collection showcases a wide range of stories offering variegated cultures and contexts and points of view: Persian Jews; a Biblical matriarch; an Ethiopian mother in modern Israel; suburban American teens; Eastern European academics; a sexual questioner; a Jew by choice; a new immigrant escaping her Lower East Side sweatshop; a Black Jewish marcher for justice; in Vichy France, a toddler’s mother hiding out; and more.
Organized by theme, the stories in this book emphasize a breadth of content, and our hope is that in reading you’ll appreciate the liveliness of the burgeoning self-awareness brought to life in each tale, and the occasional funny, call-your-friend-and-tell-her-about-it moment. Skip around, encounter an author whose other work you may know, be enticed by a title, or an opening line. We hope you’ll find both pleasure and enlightenment—and sometimes revelation—within these pages.
Excerpt – The Fronds of Knives
Manon Peren swallowed hard. The taste of stale bread filled her mouth, an ache that reminded her of flowers and the smell of baking bread in a Montmartre bakery in the spring. Fifteen years old, she dreamed of foamy milk and pastries, with neither to enjoy. Over the scent of bougainvillea from the open window, the air reeked of burnt toast from her attempts to make a birthday cake by melting preserved cheese over bits of bread. Back in Paris, she’d have set the elaborate triple burners on high. But this apartment—tucked away beside the Promenade des Anglais, near the Cours Saleya in the old town—only had a single burner, and no salt or olives, or anything for spice. Reeking of strangers and homesickness, the place felt like a foreign landscape, constructed from someone else’s clothes, dusty furniture, and well-used pots and pans.
Short Stories
Discover Rebecca’s short stories by following the links to read them online, or download.
The Fronds Of Knives
In Lilith Magazine, tells the story of a Jewish girl in Nice, France, during the Second World War who took a great risk to pose for the artist Henry Matisse.
Face Value
In Jerry Jazz Musician, about a brilliant musician who may also be mentally ill.
To the Man with the Synthesized Voice
In Hobart, written from the perspective of a speech-language pathologist.
Lily, from the Society of Absolute Music
In Vol 1. Brooklyn, about a group of female musicians who gather in 1900 at the Paris World Fair.
The Women of Absolute Music Build Their Society
In Litro Magazine, about female musicians developing a utopian society.
Swimmer
In Michigan Quarterly Review, written from the perspective of a man diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or ALS.
Poetry
Discover Rebecca’s poems in books and online.
The Book of Leavening
The Book of Leavening, a collection composed primarily of free verse poems and ghazals, frequently uses juxtaposition, collage, and associative leaps to create a sense of lushness and musicality.
The poems, with a focus on the natural world and the rituals of marriage, motherhood, and loss, center around the self-growth and evolution of a narrator as she comes to terms with an expanded sense of the other and herself.
These poems are published or upcoming in Poetry Northwest, Kenyon Review, Poets.org, and Contemporary Verse 2, among numerous other journals.
The Wreck of Birds
Rebecca Givens Rolland embraces an assimilation of internal feeling and thought with circumstances of the natural world and the conflicts and triumphs of our human endeavors. Here, we discover a language that seeks to at once replicate and transcend experiences of loss and disaster, and together with the poet ”we hope that such bold fates will not forget us.”
Winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire First Book Award
The May Sarton New Hampshire Prize is named for May Sarton, the renowned novelist, memoirist, poet, and feminist (1912-1995) who lived for many years in Nelson, New Hampshire, not far from Peterborough, home of William L. Bauhan Publishing.
To celebrate the 2012 centennial of Sarton’s birth, Bauhan Publishing inaugurated the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.
Poetry Samples
Discover samples of Rebecca’s poetry on the following websites:
