BOOKS, ART, TRAVEL AND MORE
Are you looking for perfect gifts for all the special people on your holiday gift list? Well, here they are! Scroll through ArtsMart, and you’ll find a dozen or more super gift ideas - fascinating books on every subject, writing workshops and courses, even calendars - something for everyone on your list! And they all come with the wish that you have a joyous holiday season and a peaceful - and healthy - new year.
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With raging talent and heartfelt bonhomie, these twentieth-century American women sang their way to stardom. All died before the age of 36. Within separate chapters, one for each celebrity, the book reveals their triumphs and tragedies, the details of their final hours, and explores the notion that frantic, constant, touring schedules may have contributed to the anxieties and dramas surrounding their early deaths. Through these illustrated pages, the reader will become familiar with these outstanding singers and their music. Endnotes, bibliography and discography are given for each subject.
This debut novel provides a wonderful sense of the New York City of the 1970’s. Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, squalid six floor walk-ups and posh co-ops, streets crowded with hustlers and cabbies, all come to life. The bars Michelle frequents have characters right out of central casting. The reader becomes submerged in the sights, sounds, and smells of NYC. 
Ellen Bass, Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, writes, “At times spare and lyrical, at times rich with sensory detail, Entrekin invites readers into the intimacy of Walking Each Other Home. This generous collection honors devotion, lives well lived, and the legacy of children and grandchildren. This poet embraces both beauty and truth: ‘I am the blue flowers / the tiny white bones in the grass.’”
What the Country Wrought explores and connects the meanings, nuances, and feel of “country.” 
It’s 2054 A.D., and the world needs a rest from men. Women have developed a novel solution, and the men can’t wait to leave. When my taxi driver tells me he has bullet wounds from the Russian police, speaks five languages, and is teaching at Harvard, I start taking notes. After the funeral, a widow loses all her married friends. Then karma sends flowers.
In these lush and candid poems, MAGGIE STETLER plumbs dreams, memories and buried feelings to reconstruct her chaotic childhood, her broken family and fractured self. A fugitive trail of cobalt blue…a room full of hummingbirds… startling images of beauty uplift and sustain her as she journeys toward love and wholeness. In the end, she is a white-haired, sensuous woman under a magnolia tree in full, unabashed bloom; awake to who she is and what remains, surrendering to the firmament, embracing joy. 
Eleni Traganas is an award-winning renaissance artist in many fields: musician, composer, painter, writer and poet. In Shaded Pergola she brings her unique talents to haiku and short poetry. With luxurious original sketches and botanical illustrations inspired by antiquarian engravings, the poems of Shaded Pergola embody evanescent impressions meant to speak for themselves―and lead the reader into a transitory and spellbinding world where nature and the human soul find a common but rarefied affinity.
Marsha Blitzer’s chapbook was inspired by her experiences in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was a time of deep despair for many, a time of great hope for most. The poems deal with the issues she faced raising a young son and working as a corporate lawyer in that highly turbulent legal environment. She describes street crime, setting up a Russian language pre-school, corporate lawlessness, friendships with Russians and expatriates, and more. The book’s title, Malaya Bronnaya, refers to the street in central Moscow where her apartment was located, across from historic Patriarchs’ Pond.
If the curators knew
Sixty-Something and Flying Solo: A Retiree Sorts It Out in Iowa is an edgy, humorous memoir with serious ponderings. An Oregon transplant with no kids and no significant other, the author is someone about whom readers could say, “I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, but if she can make it, I can, too.” Pieces such as ‘What Not to Say at a Funeral’ and ‘Dusting and Other Insanities’ provide a backdrop for monthly accounts of her fall into retirement’s abyss where she clings to her to-do lists while she alters her diet, her wardrobe and her vow to become more domestic. When she resurfaces a year later, she’s surprised at the landscape and what has saved her.
“Reading Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’s new poetry collection is like listening to a powerful concerto by Mozart or Beethoven. Concerto for an Empty Frame is presented in the form of a musical score, complete with Italian notation. Even her definitions are poems, such as these lines from her definition of “concerto:”
The interplay between the two poets immerses us in family relationships, encounters with the natural world, and most of all, a mature understanding of the contradictions in all of our lives.
In the Christian States of America, where religion rules, one woman discovers the only rules are about survival.
A world at war. Romantic tension. A forlorn girl determined to win over a man she cannot have.
“Mother Tongue is not only dramatic and engrossing, it is also insightful and wise. Read it! Read it! You will never forget it!”