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Watermark Press
| Watermark Press is dedicated to printing first rate literary originality, we simply can't settle for anything but the best. Browse the titles below and see what you think. All titles are available for purchase, also, just send an e-mail to Watermark Press |
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Leaving Las Vegas
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Cows are Freaky When They
Look at You
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Watermark Guide to Fishing
in Kansas
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The Wichita Mysteries -
Three Complete Novels
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Annie Chambers by Lenore Carroll quality paperback Annie Chambers is a woman alone in late nineteenth century America. As a widow, she is without the protection that a family could give her against the natural exploitation of her profession, save that which she can invent for herself. What Annie has is a natural shrewdness and talent, a deep and loving heart, and an incredible sense of solidarity with women like herself who have no place to go. This deeply moving novel tells Annie's story: her struggle to earn a living in an ignoble profession, her secret love for a man of respectable position that endures for a lifetime, and her compassion and friendship for the women of her station. The real-life Annie Chambers was Kansas City's most famous Madam, a woman who at the height of her success catered to the richest and most powerful men of her day. While outwardly the story of a woman in the life, Lenore Carroll's book is in reality the chronicle of a driven woman, whose inner life revealed deep spiritual growth.
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Grede of Milwaukee by Craig Miner hardcover Wm. J. Grede was one of a great American breed. As an industrialist, Grede built one of the largest independent foundry operations in the country. But he was, simultaneously, a supreme business strategist, an entrepreneur with a strongly intellectual cast, and a forthright spokesman for the upsurge in conservative American thought. Craig Miner, whose reputation as a business historian is growing with each new work he produces, has created a deep study of Grede's life and the development of his philosophy. Grede associated himself with some genuine extremists in his time, but he remained, nonetheless, an articulate, thoughtful, and honest man with a keen eye for the practical, and a redeeming sense of humor.
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Crossing Borders by Thomas E. Kennedy quality paperback This intriguing novel is about the plight of public relations man Jack Sugrue who, in his own words, has "lost the power of indifference". Jack's indifference has taken the form of his unquestioning and unexamined life - the daily ride on the train to work, the sour marriage, the children he professes to love, but who pass before his eyes like ghosts. One day something clicks inside Jack and he crosses a border, a psychic and moral boundary that has kept him inside his proper limit and he finds himself plunged into a slow-motion nightmare of "socially unacceptable behavior". Beyond the violence, lies a novel of singular grace and daring existential power as it traces one man's migration across the landscape of life's necessities. Thomas Kennedy has a rare gift. His words have an almost "see-through" incandescence, yet retain a kind of haunting gentleness. In Jack Sugrue we see a man whose tenderness is just a whisper removed from his own ability to find it.
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Modern Physics and Other Tales by Purnell Christian hardcover A failed sculptor creates his final masterpiece, a hanging mobile that stuns and amazes his patron, and the reader. A quiet middle class guy puttering in the garage finds himself, in an unguarded existential moment, transformed into a savage murderer. An unemployed punk kills the neighbor's dog, but the dog refuses to die. A Vietnam vet recreates the war in his basement, a divorced real estate salesman meets a violent end at the Quick Trip, a slice show in the board room of a huge corporation turns amazingly truthful.... In the final analysis, this startling literary debut pushes the best of Bukowski to the limit and passes, finally, into a haunting, seamy and funny world that is recognizable as America at the end of the century. These tales by Purnell Christian hearken back to old-fashioned story telling, and crash forward into a form that is scary and funny and dangerous.
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A Constant Lover by Paul Rosenblatt hardcover Paul Rosenblatt's magical second novel is both a unique tour de force of complex artistic themes and a forthrightly ribald fantasy worthy of Boccaccio. Against the richly textured background of modern Florence, Rosenblatt places his Brooklyn-born hero, F. Scott Hoch (who shares a birthday with Fitzgerald), a man in the "middle of his journey", on the run from his humdrum life as chief of Maestro Maintenance Co., a self-confessed "man with a golf cap and a balloon, hopeless of finding hope in life, of ever watching television again". This bright and enchanting novel has the qualities of a summer night's dream, an amazing web of literary allusion and earthly insight. Rosenblatt has found his voice - inspired, complex and literary, with always a touch of the visceral.
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The Sun in Capricorn by Paul Rosenblatt hardcover Set amid the exotic rhythms and political turmoil of Brazil in the 1970's, this elegant novel is a compelling blend of thriller, murder mystery, and love story. Rosenblatt's unlikely hero is an American Professor of Literature named Jonathan who teaches poetry and fiction to students in Rio. In a single unguarded instant Jonathan is catapulted into a widening gyre of danger and intrigue when he is photographed with Brazil's most infamous urban guerrilla. Through a series of tension-ridden scenes, the guerrilla becomes Jonathan's doppleganger. Rosenblatt's prose vibrates with the pulse of Brazil, its scintillating music and its blatantly hedonistic people, all with an undercurrent of violence. As these forces whirl about Professor Jonathan, he undertakes an evaluation of his life, of his love for his wife and children, and of his commitment to literature. In an age of literary cynicism, The Sun in Capricorn is a brave and positive novel.
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Wedlock by Mark Spencer quality paperback In Wedlock, a high school baseball star returns to his hometown after failing in the minor leagues. This schizophrenic loser proceeds to haunt his ex-wife in a tale that is wracked by pettiness and terror. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Lon, a number of marriages are illuminated in the low light of Spencer's peculiar angst. Samson, the second major novella in this collection, follows the tumbles and tribulations of a small-time professional wrestler who finds himself in the stranglehold of his own bigamous life, his two households, and his eccentric relationships. Spencer's world is the American underclass. He writes with start simplicity in the tradition of Lee K. Abbot and Raymond Carver - and the effect crackles with tension.
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Fragments & Fictions by William Peden hardcover William Peden has lived the literary life, distinguished author, critic, contributor to the old Saturday Review, founder of the University of Missouri Press, and beloved teacher. If there is a Blarney Stone in writing, Peden has kissed it. Fragments & Fictions is like a written "photo album" of Peden's long journey from his student days in Virginia to his many travels throughout the United States and Mexico. In this series of fragments, William Peden transforms his many years of experience into immediate and transcendent moments - the saloons of St. Louis, a pearly dawn outside Taos at the grave of D.H. Lawrence, a man with the Lord's Prayer engraved on his gold tooth - until each moment becomes a mirror for the entire history of the writer's literature and life.
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Another Line by James Heller Levinson quality paperback The ribald protagonist of James Levinson's novel is David J. Hoffman, a traveling fabric salesman. He's lost his major Line. Can his mind be far behind? Hoffman has three cars out in L.A. - but which one should he sell? He has numerous girlfriends, liaisons, encounters - but which one can he rely on for solace? People have started lying to him (or is David just beginning to realize what has been happening all along?) and even his ex-wife and his children are magnifying his burden. And so the salesman careens on his bicoastal funhouse ride from one fantasy to another, ricocheting from sex to money to power on his tortured plunge through New York and Los Angeles. What emerges is a modern death of a salesman tale studded with philosophical asides and kaleidoscopic frenzies.
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First Born of an Ass by William Joyce quality paperback "First Born of an Ass is alternately profound and funny, clinical and poetic, and altogether creating its own mythology. Few novels have appeared in recent years that are as fresh and inventive. It is also a book, which in its sense of freedom will irritate the more inhibited of the book-buying public. But this is how it should be" --Norman Mailer
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Recorder of Births & Deaths by William Joyce quality paperback In this volume of unique stories, Joyce plows the same field as his first book - the rubble of the American Dream, and uncovers tales of magic, realism and yearning. From his hilarious account of a love affair between members of the "senior set" (Mrs. Bowles Lover) to the frankly mystical account of how his grandfather was chewed up piece by piece in a steel mill (My Grandfather's Bones), Joyce writes in a way that is unclassifiable. It is even possible to find the ghost of Kafka haunting the title story. But it is clear that Joyce is committed to his message.
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Perchan's Cholera: Eros and Exile by Robert Perchan hardcover Somewhere in smoky-industrial-military modern Korea a poet is living in a garret with a whore. The poet plies his trade, which is observation. The whore plies hers. and from this intersection of East and West is born Perchan's Chorea, a trenchant and breathtaking montage, a suigeneris misguided tour through the only country in the world that rhymes with a venereal disease. And as the poet makes his through the seedy red light world he inhabits, his observations pile up and drift like moving sand, until an unforgettable picture emerges that is raw and dynamic and unique, a picture of both Korea and the post-modern world spliced together with bar talk, sex talk, and allusion. |
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Watermark Books & Cafe 4701 East Douglas/Wichita, Kansas 67218/(316) 682-1181 Hours: Monday - Friday: 8:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. (Cafe opens at 7:00 a.m.) Saturday - Sunday: 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (Cafe opens at 7:00 a.m.)
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