New Releases by Michael Downing

Queenie meets Frying Plantain in this courageous coming-of-age story, set in the 1990s, about a mixed-race Black girl fighting for recognition in a South Carolina Cherokee community that refuses to accept her ancestry as legitimate. On the rain-swollen banks of the River Etsi in South Carolina, Ophelia Blue Rivers—six years old in 1992—catches frogs and stretches to reach the swaying sunflowers. She’s an orphan raised in a rustic cabin by her Grandma Blue, a descendent of the Black Cherokee Freedmen. Caught in deep currents of history that she doesn’t understand, she is, as her grandma says: “half Black, half Cherokee, and all mixed up.” While Ophelia may not always understand where she came from, there’s no mistaking where she’d rather be: caught in the warmth of Grandma Blue’s cabin, listening to bedtime Cherokee legends as collard greens hiss in the frying pan. But one day, a tall stranger with a black denim jacket and a charming smile appears, and his arrival shatters Ophelia’s world. She finds herself whisked away from all she knows to live with her Auntie Oba, the boisterous woman she had only met in rumours. So begins Ophelia’s spirited, at times harrowing, search for home and family—a journey that takes her from a majority-white high school to the inner sanctum of a Black evangelical church to the throbbing dance floors of underground Southern clubs and to a final, devastating encounter with the scion of a wealthy, white family. She must ask herself: What does it mean to belong when the terms of that belonging come at such a high price? With dazzling language, keen insight, and an unforgettable voice, Black Cherokee is not only an astonishing novel but a profound meditation on race, identity, and coming of age from a major literary talent.

Author and musician Antonio Michael Downing's debut picture book is about big changes and big feelings, and speaks to all kids experiencing the highs and lows of childhood. Little Tony is full of love for his grandmother, his home in Trinidad and delicious pholourie. But he's also full of other big feelings, including anger. His grandmother tries to teach him to be patient — patience is a star in his crown, she says — but it's hard. He tries to keep his anger in, but when he loses at ping-pong to his brother or he has to come in from playing . . . Yaaarrgh! When Little Tony and his brother move away from their beloved Trinidad, there's even more for him to be upset about. His new home is cold, full of new people, and there's no pholourie anywhere! Yaaarrgh! But then he remembers his grandmother's lessons, and a surprising thing happens . . . A charming and heartwarming story based on the author's own childhood, Stars In My Crown is an ode to big feelings but even bigger triumphs.

Welcome to Happy, Texas—a small Panhandle town with a name that doesn’t always ring true. Discontent is brewing in Happy as Brother Bob questions his beliefs as pastor of a church. Jen, his choir director, flounders in her unhappy marriage while caring for her mentally ill sister, Cheyenne, and cowboy James struggles between what is right and finally finding true love. When an elder Hispanic member of their community—Joaquin—learns his granddaughter, Angelica, has fallen into the hands of traffickers, this unlikely group of townsfolk unite and embark on an epic journey to save her. Angelica is being held by coyotes—the frightening human kind—across the river from the West Texas town of Presidio on the Mexican border. It will be a miracle if she survives long enough for her grandfather and his Happy crew to rescue her. With poignancy and humor, Land of Dust and Hope deftlyillustrates the resilience of the human spirit in its forthright depiction of the experiences of people who are desperately trying to cross the US border and the importance of challenging the traditional notions of love, faith, and sin.

A Black immigrant journeys from the Caribbean to Canada—and through multiple musical personas—in a "deeply moving" memoir "suffused with poetic prose" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). As a clever, willful boy in a tiny village in the tropical forests of Trinidad—raised by his indomitable grandmother, Miss Excelly, and her King James Bible—Antonio Michael Downing is steeped in the legacies of his scattered family, the vibrant culture of the island, and the weight of its colonial history. But after Miss Excelly's death, everything changes. The eleven-year-old seems to fall asleep in the jungle and wake up in a blizzard: he is sent to live with his devoutly evangelical Aunt Joan in rural Canada, where they are the only Black family in a landscape starkly devoid of the warm lushness of his childhood. Isolated and longing for home, Downing begins a decades-long journey to transform himself through music and performance. A reunion with his birth parents, whom he's known only through story, closes more doors than it opens. Instead, Downing seeks refuge in increasingly extravagant musical personalities: "Mic Dainjah," a boisterous punk rapper; "Molasses," a soul crooner; and, finally, an eccentric dystopian-era pop star clad in leather and gold, "John Orpheus." In his mid-thirties, increasingly addicted to escapism, attention, and sex, Downing realizes he has become a "Saga Boy"—a Trinidadian playboy archetype—like his father and grandfather before him. When his choices land him in a jail cell, Downing must face who he has become. "Lush language and sensory details make the fascinating events of this memoir pop. An authentic, entertaining, and timely account of a creative immigrant's experiences." — Booklist "Downing's elegant, engaging memoir will have particular significance to readers from the Caribbean diaspora, but it will be understood by any reader who has ever had their world suddenly upended and needed to make it whole again." — Library Journal "A rich memoir about how far some folks have to travel just to arrive where they began." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

This hilarious, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately heartening novel is the companion to the critically acclaimed, national bestseller Perfect Agreement "Beautifully and economically written, and very funny." —Linda Wertheimer, NPR This is your chance to enroll in English 10 at highly rated Hellman College—if you can find a place to sit in the fantastically overcrowded classroom. Mark Sternum, whom readers first met in Downing’s beloved novel Perfect Agreement, is a veteran teacher. Twenty years older, separated for six months from his longtime lover, and desperate to duck the overtures of double–dealing deans above him and disgruntled adjunct faculty below him, Mark has one ambition every day he is on campus—to close the classroom door and leave the world behind. His escape, however, is complicated by his contentious, complicated wrestling match of a relationship with the Professor, the tenured faculty member with whom Mark has co–taught this creative–writing workshop for ten years. The spectacle of their rigorous, academic relationship is a chance for students—all of us—to learn what an amazing arena the classroom can be. Replete with engaging writing exercises, harsh criticism, and contrarian advice, Still in Love is the story of one semester in a college classroom. And it is an urgent reminder that we desperately need classrooms, that those singular, sealed–off–from–the–world sanctuaries are where we learn to love our lives.

Recently widowed, unhappily stuck on a pricey whiplash tour of Italy, Elizabeth Berman comes face to face with the first documented painting of a teardrop in human history, and in the presence of that tearful mother, and the arresting company of the renowned and anonymous women painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, she wakes up to the possibility that she is not lost. Mitchell left me everything, just as he promised. "Everything," he liked to say during his last month on the sofa, "everything will be yours," as if it wasn't yet. I was left with that and two adult children who could not tolerate my sitting in my home by myself—admittedly, rather too often in a capacious pink flannel nightgown and the green cardigan Mitchell was wearing on the afternoon he died. That's how Elizabeth winds up on a tour better suited to her late–husband, a Dante scholar. Mitchell masterminded the itinerary as a surprise for their thirty–fifth wedding anniversary. Itching to leave as soon as she arrives in Padua, Elizabeth's efforts to book a ticket home are stymied by her aggressively supportive children, the ministrations of an incomprehensibly Italian hotel staff, and the prospect of forfeiting the sizable

The youngest of nine children, Michael Downing was three when his father died — suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed. The family diagnosis was God's will. As a boy, Downing rigorously trained as a spiritual athlete, preparing to vault into heaven. But eventually he escaped the religious dogma, and the family arena — until one of his brothers died in 2003, suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed. Alarmed, Downing pursued a diagnosis: Drawn into a world of researchers, clinicians, and manufacturers with their own arcane ethics and faith, Downing discovered he had inherited a mutant protein from his father, and the first symptom would be his sudden death. To save his life, a defibrillator was hard–wired to his heart. Within weeks, he needed emergency surgery to remove the device and the life–threatening infection he got with it. Two months later, he was re–implanted — only to read in his morning newspaper that the new wires anchored to his heart were prone to failure. His device might be powerless, or it might deliver a series of unwarranted, possibly fatal, shocks. From a bedeviled boyhood in the Berkshires to a grim comedy of errors in one of Boston's best hospitals, Life with Sudden Death is a wild ride.

Scot lebt bei Sam und Ed, zwei Schwulen, die kaum damit gerechnet haben, sich eines Tages um ein Kind kümmern zu müssen, noch dazu um ein Kind wie Scot. Denn der zeigt Vorlieben, die eher zu einem Mädchen passen würden: Make-up, Parfüm und singende Haarbürsten. Auch wenn er sie mit seinem Verhalten oft in den Wahnsinn treibt, erkennen Sam und Ed an seinen Problemen, wie sehr sie selbst sich längst der Umgebung angepasst haben, und sie nehmen zusammen mit Scot den Kampf um die Selbstbehauptung auf. Frühstück mit Scot, 2007 von Larie Lynd wundervoll verfilmt, ist alles andere als ein Kinderbuch. Der Autor erzählt vom scheinbar idyllischen Leben der weißen Mittelschicht in Neuengland. Nachbarn, Freunde, Lehrer, alle müssen sich in der Auseinandersetzung mit Scot bewähren. "So klein er auch war, und so hoch die Räume waren, Scot hatte es doch geschafft, die Temperatur zum Kochen zu bringen. Das ist sein Talent, er ist ein Katalysator."

An enlightened modern couple faces sudden parenthood-and the embarrassing truth about their own definitions of normal-in this hilarious novel chronicling a joyride into the unknown. Sam and Ed are living the good life: happy, healthy, devoted ...

Mark Sternum, a professor who teaches spelling and grammar at Boston's McClintock College, is full of droll observations about the rules that govern our language, but he leads a diligent if somewhat detached life. Friends and family try to coax him into deeper involvement, yet he keeps even his lover at arm's length. He screens all incoming calls, including his eccentric sister's "word pictures" about the waning days of their comatose mother. One day, an African–American single mother who has failed the college's basic skills test for the last time accuses Mark of "prejudgism," and Mark is fired. Blown off course, he monitors the ensuing academic skirmish from a distance as his case makes national headlines, and turns his attention instead to the graceful rhythms of a small Shaker community. As the scrambled pieces of Mark's life and the simple ways of the Shakers begin to merge, Mark finds new beauty in his own maddening, blissful dependency on the people in his life. Funny and generous, Downing's seemingly effortless prose juxtaposes cunning portraits of academic functionaries weathering the age of political correctness with the people and values of the last Shaker families in America.

Almost 100 years ago, lawmakers across America first debated, ridiculed, & then embraced the possibility of saving an hour of daylight. This is a portrait of public policy in the 20th century, a perennially boiling stew of unsubstantiated science, profiteering masked as piety, & mysteriously shifting time-zone boundaries. Downing sifts through a century of Congressional hearings, contemporary newspaper reporting, town meetings, & the annual tidal wave of letters to editors & weblog diatribes -- & he lets Daylight¿s vociferous opponents & voracious proponents speak for themselves, a dizzyingly hilarious debate that seems destined to continue for as long as we ask one another, ¿What time is it?¿

A close-up look at the scandals that rocked the San Francisco Zen Center, a leader in alternative religious practice and the counterculture in America, and their repercussions. The remarkable forty-year history of the people who established the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia in the history of the world has never been told. Michael Downing wondered why. "I'm living proof of why you better not speak out," explained one ordained Zen priest. "The degree to which I was scapegoated publicly was most effective in keeping everyone else quiet." In 1959, a Soto Zen priest took leave of his family in Japan to minister to the congregation of a Buddhist temple in San Francisco. Alan Watts and others spread the word that an authentic Zen Roshi was living there, and students, poets, drifters, and seekers began to attend his lectures. Impressed by their sincerity and commitment, Suzuki Roshi began to offer instruction in zazen (meditation) and other Buddhist practices to these devoted young spiritual pioneers. The San Francisco Zen Center was born. And then, in 1983, meltdown. A sex scandal rocked Zen Center, and it triggered tragedies and headlines about abuse of power that called into question the whole matter of alternative religious practice in America. Overnight the most prominent community of Buddhists in the West found itself at the vanguard of a cultural revolt against spiritual authority. For Shoes Outside the Door, Michael Downing spent three years studying documents and interviewing more than eighty people who were there, at ground zero. As engaging as any mystery, as mysterious as any political campaign, as political as any family gathering, this story will haunt and challenge readers as they unravel this essential chapter of American history.

Anne Fossicker, a successful magazine editor who has a good, thoughtful husband, Ted, and three bright children, suffers paralyzing guilt after their youngest daughter disappears from school one day.