Spring Harbor Press Books

Spring Harbor books can be purchased by writing directly to Spring Harbor Press, P.O. Box 346, Delmar, NY 12054. Add $2.00 for shipping. New York residents must add their sales tax. All books, except Cheap Poems, can be ordered online from Amazon.com. Here's a link for the impatient reader: Take me to Amazon

To be released this summer: The Goddess in Love with a Horse, by Eugene Mirabelli, 214 pages, paperbound, $17.00. ISBN 978-0-935891-09-6  The story of two very unusual  families—one descended from the ancient race of centaurs (man from the waist up, horse from the waist down), and the other from Venus, a goddess so beautiful her looks could stun. They originate in Sicily and nearby Calabria, and eventually the two lines marry in Massachusetts. This is a wild and sensuous adventure, fanciful and realistic by turns, and always entertaining.

"This book is a delight from first to final page. The Goddess in Love with a Horse marries the long reach of history to the present moment, the real to the surreal, the romantic to the workaday world--and does so with great grace throughout."  —Nicholas Delbanco, author of The Count of Concord.

"The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a magical novel. It tells a story of Sicilians who migrate from Italy to America but never lose their intimacy with ancient gods. Mirabelli’s characters are paragons of beauty and superhuman desire that might have stepped out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses".  —Robert Viscusi,  author of Buried Caesars

"Eugene Mirabelli’s wildly imaginative novel The Goddess in Love With a Horse gives us the epic of the fabulous Cavallù family. The Cavallùs romp through Italian history and arrive finally on the shores of America to enrich the mingled bloods of the Republic and prepare a sumptuous banquet for the reader."
—Eugene Garber, author of Vienna ØØ

"The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a wonderfully imagined and entirely new sort of immigration novel, which mixes the mythologically rich soil of Sicily with the pragmatic grit of economic success and assimilation in America to produce a stunning hybrid of a story."
—Richard Alba, author of Remaking the American Mainstream

"This is a book whose pages, glowing with sensuality, warmth, and a palpable sweetness, provide one delight after another. The Goddess in Love with a Horse is a joy to read."
—Albert DiBartolomeo, author of Fool’s Gold

Do check out our mini-book, The Queen of the Rain was in Love with the Prince of the Sky. It's great fun. It' not listed here simply because we've devoted a whole page to it elsewhere on this web site.. The story explains why not two snowflakes are alike (though they do have a family resemblance to each other.) It's more mythology than science. But you guessed that already, right? Hey, you can even read this mini-book online. No charge. Free for nothing! Here' a shortcut to Queen of the Rain.

Body Work, by Hollis Seamon, 201 pages, paperbound, $13.00.
"No, I've never left my body," says Alice in the first tale in this rich collection of fifteen stories. She might well be speaking for all the women and girls that prize-winning author Hollis Seamon grounds so firmly in the real physical world. Her wry humor laces together tales that include a Smuckers jar full of sins, a metropolitan children's hospital full of gypsies, an antique chest full of small bones, a river full of pregnancies. Seamon captures the felt substance of women's lives, where all things imaginary, mystical, or uncanny are never completely separated from the crisp sharp chop of vegetables or the sweaty rim of a steering wheel, never far from actual blood and fat, sinew and bone.

"Seamon's use of setting and description are masterly. Her love of language is obvious, and anyone who likes to see language used well and strikingly will re-read some passages in the book. No wonder her stories have been widely published, anthologized and awarded prizes. " —Carole McDonnell in the online review Curled Up With a Good Book.

"‘The Strange Sad History of Suzanne Laflesche,’ [is] a very funny story about a woman who decides after slimming down from 282 to 145 pounds that she liked being fat better. Suzanne has a lot of reason s for this choice but the most important one is "pound for pound, my fat multiplies my orgasms. It’s really that simple." Has there ever been a better reason to have seconds on cheesecake?" —Rain Taxi Review of Books

"A sexy, edgy collection of stories about women on the brink. There isn't a coward or a victim in the bunch." —Doug Glover, critic and author of Notes Home from a Prodigal Son

"Written with grace and charm, but the women who inhabit this splendid story collection are not especially ladylike. Rather, they are broad, brazen and bawdy. Body Work is bound to delight." —Binnie Kirschenbaum, author of Pure Poetry

"The lives of women and girls are unconventionally and richly explored in Body Work...keenly revealing the magical, uncanny an symbolic meanings in everyday life." —Publishers Weekly

The Passion of Terri Heart, by Eugene Mirabelli,. 240 pages, paperbound, $15.00. Maureen Teresa McFinn, a parochial school graduate, changes her name to Terri Heart when she escapes from Boston to New York City, where she becomes an actress in pornographic movies. Just as she is achieving a kind of shabby stardom, she becomes pregnant and disappears back to Boston. Solitary and in murderous desperation after the baby's birth, Terri has an ecstatic vision during a blinding snow squall. From that moment on she knows that her role in life is to love the loveless and shelter the homeless. This is the story of Terri Heart, porn actress and practitioner of what the Church calls the corporal works of mercy, an astonishing novel of the sacred and the profane.
   
"Eugene Mirabelli has plucked the unforgettable Terri Heart from one of the most painful intersections of recent history, a time when a pure, brilliant love met the evil of a corrupting culture. Terri is a loveable tart and saint, rendered unforgettable by Mirabelli's wonderful writing. This touching, deft, and suspenseful novel, should take its place on that lovely shelf alongside Lolita."  —Andrei Codrescu, NPR social critic and author of Wakefield.

"The Passion of Terri Heart is hard, tough novel writing in the fashion of John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions and other books that find the human, not to say the divine, in what seem to be dark corners of the human condition. It is an absorbing read that will leave you winded yet inspirited at the same time."  —Eugene C. Kennedy, commentator on Catholic affairs

"Eugene Mirabelli knows something about porn stars that most people don't, that they're all too human, and beneath the veneer they usually have hearts of gold. This bittersweet love story is terrific!" —Barbara Nitke, president of The Camera Club of New York and author of Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism.

Cheap Poems, by the underpaid editors at Spring Harbor Press, 30 pages, paperbound, $4.00. You can't tell by looking at the picture of the cover that this book is no bigger than a greeting card. Yes, it's no bigger than a 5 by 7-inch greeting card! But it’s a real book with 30 pages. And it has real, though clearly whimsical, poems on the inside. Also, because it's the size of a greeting card, it comes with a sturdy white envelope so you can mail it like a greeting card. (It has a blank page at the front and back so you can write your message.) Why send a greeting card when you can send a whole book? (You can take a peek inside this book. Click on samples and you'll see some cheap poems.) Cheap Poems is not available at bookstores or online. For purchase information, click here. 

The Book of the Milky Way, paperbound, 43 pages, $5.95.
Here’s a brief whimsical tale about a man and woman who sailed from the coast of Massachusetts to the Milky Way in August of 1910. The little book has one curious paragraph per page, plus two line drawings and a nautical chart of the Milky Way. The odd facts about astronomers, charts, flowers, and even the voyages of Howard Blackburn noted in this book are true and can be found in any really large encyclopedia. Well, most of them are true, anyway. It’s a fanciful little gift for playful minds. "It says more about love, imagination and the human heart than books ten times its length." —Douglas Glover

The Tale and Its Master, by Michael Rutherford, paperbound, 64 pages, $6.50.
This novella was first published back in 1986. It’s a dark story concerning an apprentice storyteller, Remus, who finally finds a hair-raising, original tale of love and betrayal about a thief and a dragon. But blinded to the proper use of his great talent and careless of his debt to others, Remus brings down upon himself a fate much like the very story he tells. Praised by critics, The Tale and Its Master won a place in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories of 1986. Newberry Prize winner Lloyd Alexander said of it, “It’s a splendid work…The tale is both dazzling and dark, with a fine edge and vision that takes us close to heartache -- which is to say it lets us see things as they are.” Ed Atkeson drew the dragon, which extends to the back of the book, and also designed the bold initial letters which start each chapter.

The Chronic Illness Workbook, by Patricia Fennell, MSW,LCSW-R, formerly published by Spring Harbor Press, is now handled by Albany Health Management Associates. The Chronic Illness Workbook is priced at $20.00 and has a $6.00 shipping charge. It can be found and purchased at their web site.