West Seneca native releases second science fiction novel - West Seneca Bee
West Seneca native releases second science fiction novel - West Seneca Bee |
- West Seneca native releases second science fiction novel - West Seneca Bee
- The CBC Books fall reading list: 30 books to read now - CBC.ca
- Sol Stein, Publisher, Author and Champion of James Baldwin, Dies at 92 - The New York Times
| West Seneca native releases second science fiction novel - West Seneca Bee Posted: 25 Sep 2019 02:19 PM PDT
John Caligiuri has had a love of science fiction since he was a boy growing up on Greenbranch Road in West Seneca. Now, he's sharing that love with the next generation of fans as a sci-fi author himself. Caligiuri's second novel, "Cocytus: Sanctuary in Hell" was recently released. It's the sequel to his first novel, "Cocytus: Planet of the Damned." In all, there are four books in the series, with two yet to be published. The name "Cocytus" comes from the lake of fire in the ninth circle of hell in Dante's "Inferno". Caligiuri's work heavily references popular mythological and science fiction stories from the past, references he began picking up as a child in West Seneca. Caligiuri used to spend every Saturday with his mother at the West Seneca Library, checking out as many science fiction books as he could find. He kept that love of sci-fi through his years at St. John Vianney Elementary School and Baker-Victory High School. "I used to grab as many books about science fiction and history as they would let me check out," Caligiuri said. "I would just consume them. I was just an avid reader of those types of story. Basically, I think I read everything they had in that place, probably a couple times."  John Caligiuri As he got older, Caligiuri became more critical of the work he consumed. He began to think that he could write a quality science fiction book himself. He got that chance around 2012. Caligiuri had built himself a career as a computer engineer, working for Kodak. The company declared bankruptcy in 2012 and he was out of a job. At an age where he was too young to retire, but not exactly young enough to embark on a new career, Caligiuri faced a difficult decision. Should he relocate to another part of the country to continue in the same line of work or should be do something he had always wanted to try: write novels. He started off writing some short stories that he now admits were "pretty bad." But he improved over time by taking classes and going to seminars. He was picked up by a publisher, which allowed him to more easily share his work with the world. In addition to the two published novels and two in tow, he recently wrote an award-winning short story called "Wait- ing for the End of Time." For the "Cocytus" series, Caligiuri began in a familiar setting: Western New York. The main character, Dante Carloman, is driving down Route 86 from Cornell University to his home in Fredonia for Christmas vacation. The adventure takes him to another planet where he has to get out of a sort of human death camp. Through his travels, he discovers previously unknown information about human's role in the galaxy. In "Sanctuary in Hell," the small group of humans from the first book starts to spread out across the galaxy to better understand an evil force that "has it in" for humans. "It's kind of a fast-paced adventure, I try to lace it with some humor, not keep things too heavy," Caligiuri said. "I put together a diverse group of people and creatures, who find a strange way of working together and solving what seem to be insurmountable problems." Caligiuri also employs some of his computer engineering background to keep the story rooted in some semblance of reality. As an example, he uses one of the most popular science fiction works of all time: Star Wars. He says that the scenes where Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are on the other side of the universe from each other, but are communicating via hologram couldn't actually happen due to the speed of light. He calls the communication across the galaxy in his story a "Pony Express type set-up." He believes that makes for a more interesting story. "You can't do any direct communication because the distances are so great, but you can physically move things through hyper-space," Caligiuri said. "It helps stories develop because you don't have instant communication. It introduces a certain level of confusion and different conflicts and such that you wouldn't have in some other storyline where you can talk to anyone anywhere, instantaneously. I kind of like to keep that sort of stuff somewhat reality-based and tie that in with what a person reading the story could follow without too much trouble." While Caligiuri's work is dense with references and homages to popular science fiction work, he doesn't believe that a reader has to be a sci-fi obsessive to enjoy the work. For example, fans of the early 20th century H.G. Wells book "War in the Air" may pick up on an homage in the upcoming third novel in the "Cocytus" series. But if not, Caligiuri hopes readers will enjoy the adventure aspects of the story. And while you may never be quite sure where in the universe Caliguiri is taking you as a reader, you can be sure that there is one rule he will follow. "The only requirement I have in my stories came from my daughter. She said 'dad, you can't kill any kids.' So, that's the one rule for all my stories, no kids are going to die," Caligiuri said. Caligiuri's writing may take him all over the real and imagined universe, but its base is in West Seneca. He's happy to share the love of science fiction he developed as a child a half-century ago with the kids of today. "It really did all start with my mom taking me to the library in West Seneca and just reading all the books that I could and just enjoying them immensely and taking me away to another world," Caligiuri said. "I just wanted to take that concept and share that pleasure with other folks." email: tnigrelli@beenews.com  |
| The CBC Books fall reading list: 30 books to read now - CBC.ca Posted: 23 Sep 2019 09:09 AM PDT The CBC Books fall reading list is here! Here are 30 books from Canada and around the world to check out this season.  In Night of Power, Mansoor Visram, his wife Layla and son Ashif were forced to move to Canada when Idi Amin expelled South Asians from Uganda. In 25 years, Mansoor has risen from working at a used car lot to running a dry cleaner in Calgary. He has big entrepreneurial dreams for him and Ashif, who is chasing his own ambitions at a major corporation in Toronto. Layla, who runs her own home cooking business, sees her son and husband growing distant and feels herself drifting away as well. Anar Ali is a novelist and screenwriter who lives in Toronto. Her short story collection, Baby Khaki's Wings, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, the Trillium Book Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize.  Award-winning author, journalist and human rights activist Sally Armstrong is this year's CBC Massey Lecturer. In her lectures, titled Power Shift, Armstrong argues that improving the status of women is crucial to our collective surviving and thriving. The facts are beyond dispute, she argues: when women get an education, all of society benefits and when they get better healthcare, everyone lives longer.  The Testaments is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale and includes the "explosive testaments" of three women. The book answers questions on the inner-workings of Gilead, the oppressive dystopia where Offred, the novel's original narrator, was stripped of her freedoms and forced to be a handmaid for powerful men. Atwood is a celebrated Canadian writer who has published numerous novels, poetry, nonfiction and comics. The Testaments is on the shortlist for the 2019 Booker Prize and the longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize.  In We, the Survivors, Ah Hock, an uneducated man from Malaysia, is trying to make his fortune in a new country that falls short on its promises. Working a series of low paying jobs, Ah Hock ends up murdering a migrant worker from Bangladesh and serves time in prison for his crime. Years after his release, Ah Hock speaks to a local journalist about the murder and tries to understand how he became a killer. Tash Aw is an award-winning writer, whose past books include the novels The Harmony Silk Factory, Map of the Invisible World and Five Star Billionaire.  Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from Driftpile Cree Nation. In his second poetry collection, NDN Coping Mechanisms, he uses poetry, prose and textual art to explore how Indigenous and queer communities and identities are left out of mainstream media. The work has two parts — the first explores everyday life and the second explores influential texts such as Treaty 8. Belcourt won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his first collection, This Wound is a World.  Taffy Brodesser-Akner's new novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, is about a middle-aged doctor in New York named Toby Fleishman, who has just ended a 14-year marriage. He's pretty sure there's only one villain in his story. It's obviously his ex-wife Rachel, who always paid more attention to her high-powered career than to their family. Then one day Rachel drops their two kids off at his apartment and disappears. Toby is forced to deal with the fallout — and to consider the possibility that he never really understood the story of his own marriage. Brodesser-Akner is a writer for the New York Times Magazine. Fleishman Is in Trouble is her first novel.  Ta-Nehisi Coates's first novel, The Water Dancer, tells the story of Hiram Walker, who is born into bondage in Virginia. His father is plantation owner Howell Walker and his mother is Rose, who has been sold away. Despite having a photographic memory, Hiram has no memories of his mother until he has a vision of her during a near-death experience. After almost drowning, Hiram resolves to escape from the Deep South and becomes involved with the Underground. Coates won the National Book Award in 2015 for his nonfiction book Between the World and Me. He is a MacArthur fellow and writes Marvel's Black Panther and Captain America comic book series. The Water Dancer is the latest selection for Oprah's Book Club.  In Greenwood, it's the year 2038 and most of the world has suffered from an environmental collapse. But there is a remote island with 1,000 year-old trees and Jake Greenwood works as a tour guide there. From there, the novel takes you back in time as you learn more about Jake, her family and how secrets and lies can have an impact for generations. Greenwood is on the longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Christie has been longlisted Prize twice before — in 2015 for If I Fall, If I Die and in 2011 for The Beggar's Garden. He lives in Victoria and Galiano Island, B.C.  In Michael Crummey's new novel, The Innocents, a young brother and sister live in isolation in Newfoundland, surviving alone on the bits of knowledge their parents left behind. Their loyalty to one another is the reason they are able to persist through storms and illness, but their relationship is tested as they grow older. Crummey is a poet and novelist from Newfoundland and Labrador. Two of Crummey's novels have been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction — Sweetland in 2014 and Galore in 2009. The Innocents is longlisted for the Scotianbank Giller Prize.  Empire of Wild follows a woman named Joan, who hasn't given up on finding her husband, even though he's been missing for a year. One morning, a hungover Joan finds herself in a packed preacher's tent on a Walmart parking lot. The charismatic Reverend Wolff is none other than Victor, who claims to have no memory of Joan or their life together. Cherie Dimaline is a Métis author whose novel The Marrow Thieves won the Governor General's Literary Award for Young people's literature — text and was defended by Jully Black on Canada Reads 2018.  This Is How You Lose the Time War is a debut fantasy novel co-written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. When two time-travelling agents from warring factions begin a clandestine correspondence, they're each determined to make sure their side has the best hope for the future. But when they fall in love, their secret may have deadly consequences. El-Mohtar's short story Seasons of Glass and Iron won Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated series Craft Sequence.  Break in Case of Emergency follows Toby Goodman, a teen whose father left their small town before she was born and whose mother dies by suicide when she's a young girl. When she finds out that her estranged father is coming back to town and wants to meet her, Toby must try to make sense of her life amid surprising revelations about her family history. Brian Francis is a writer and columnist for The Next Chapter on CBC Radio. His first novel, Fruit, was a finalist for Canada Reads 2009. He is also the author of the novel Natural Order.  Talking to Strangers explores how we interact with people we don't know, and the impact of the assumptions we bring to these conversations. As with his previous books, Malcolm Gladwell uses anecdotes and a narrative voice to examine how societal structures shape human behaviour, including decision-making and the spread of ideas. Gladwell is the author of several books, including Blink, Outliers and The Tipping Point.  When Omar Ali is informed his ex-girlfriend Anna has died, he resolves to retrieve her suicide note from her parents. Filled with grief and unable to cope, the 27-year-old line cook spirals out of control, participating in break-ins and online terrorism. Adnan Khan was the recipient of the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize for Emerging Writers and was a reader for the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2017. There Has to Be a Knife is Khan's first book.  Helen Knott is a poet and writer of Dane Zaa, Nehiyaw and European descent. Her memoir, In My Own Moccasins, is a story of addiction, sexual violence and intergenerational trauma. It explores how colonization has impacted her family over generations. But it is also a story of hope and redemption, celebrating the resilience and history of her family. In My Own Moccasins is Knott's first book.  Agnes, Murderess is inspired by the local legend of serial killer Agnes McVee, a 19th-century B.C.-based roadhouse owner who allegedly killed miners for gold during the Cariboo Gold Rush. The tale of Agnes McVee has never been verified, but in this graphic novel, her life is imagined as one filled with ghosts, betrayal, passionate love affairs and, of course, murder. Sarah Leavitt is a Vancouver comics creator and writing teacher. Her debut book was Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me.  In Frogcatchers, a man wakes up without his memory, and finds himself in a strange hotel room with an old-fashioned keychain. He thinks the building is empty until he comes across a young boy, who begs him not to use the key for fear of releasing whatever else is locked away. Jeff Lemire is an acclaimed Toronto comics creator who recently won an Eisner Award for the comic book series Gideon Falls. Some of his previous graphic novels include Roughneck and Essex County.  Ami McKay's family has a history of dying early, thanks to a a genetic disorder called Lynch syndrome. This discovery began with McKay's great-aunt Pauline Gross, who, in 1895, went to a doctor with the expectation she would die at a young age. What followed was a decades and generations-long study of one family and their relationship to cancer. It would become the longest and most detailed cancer genealogy study ever. In Daughter of Family G, McKay explores this family history while grappling with the fact she tested positive for the gene while raising a family of her own.  Inland takes place in 1893, as a drought chokes the lands of Arizona Territory. Nora is a strong-willed frontierswoman awaiting the return of her husband, who is out in search of water. Lurie is a former outlaw on a dangerous journey west. Their stories unfold alongside one another, until eventually colliding. Téa Obreht is a writer based in New York. Her first book, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction (now known as the Women's Prize for Fiction).  Anna Mehler Paperny is a journalist who has struggled with depression her entire life. After a suicide attempt in her 20s, she decided to look into her disease: how it's caused, treated and talked about. Part memoir, part investigation, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me is a examination of an illness that is far too common and far too little understood. Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me is shortlisted for the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.  Indie pop band Tegan and Sara have written a memoir. The book, titled High School, will share the life story of the famous identical twins and LGBTQ icons. Tegan and Sara Quin grew up in Calgary at the height of grunge and rave culture in the 1990s. High School is written in chapters alternating between Tegan's point of view and Sara's and will explore how they coped with their parents' divorce and how they navigated issues around love, drugs, sexuality, queer identity and academic pressures during their high school years.  David Szalay's novel Turbulence links the stories of 12 passengers on a series of flights around the world. The narrative passes from one character to the next, each chapter exploring a new personal crisis — whether it's a mother worrying about her son's cancer treatment or a journalist heading out on a delicate assignment. Szalay was born in Montreal, but grew up in London and now lives in Budapest. His previous novel, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.  For Three Women, journalist Lisa Taddeo spent eight years travelling across the U.S., hearing the stories of ordinary women from a variety of backgrounds and learning about their complicated perspectives on desire. Three women are featured in this book: Lina, a suburban mom from Indiana who ends up having an affair after her husband refuses to kiss her on the mouth, Maggie, a 17-year-old high school student from North Dakota who describes having a physical relationship with her married teacher, and Sloane, a successful business owner whose husband enjoys watching her have sex with others. Taddeo lives in New England. Her writing has been published in New York Magazine, Esquire, Elle, Best American Sports Writing and best American Political Writing.  Jesse Thistle has earned many honours for his work in academia, including the 2016 Governor General's Silver Medal. He is also a Trudeau and Vanier Scholar. He specializes in Indigenous homelessness, a topic he understands all too well. Abandoned by his parents and raised by his difficult grandparents, Thistle struggled with addiction as an adult and spent 10 years homeless. He shares his story of overcoming his circumstances in the memoir, From the Ashes.  I Hope We Choose Love is a collection of essays and prose poems from writer, performer and social worker Kai Cheng Thom. Thom explores several social movements and the issues that complicate them, such as violence, complicity and forgiveness. She calls for respect, nuance, understanding and love as we work toward making the world a better place.  Trick Mirror is a collection of insightful and humourous essays from New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino. With each essay, Tolentino tackles some phenomenon of popular culture — from social media to female literary characters — and explores the way they interact with our own self-delusions. Tolentino was born in Toronto, but grew up primarily in the U.S. Trick Mirror is her first book.  The Dearly Beloved tells the story of two clergymen and their wives over several decades. Charles intended to follow his father into academia, but joined the church after an inspiring lecture. He falls in love with Lily, a fiercely independent woman who doesn't believe in God. James grew up in a poor family in Chicago, resentful of his father's alcoholism and mother's anxiety. Nan, the dutiful daughter of a beloved Mississippi minister, changes his life. The lives of the two couples intersect in Greenwich Village in 1963, as Charles and James are chosen to shepherd the Third Presbyterian Church through dark times. Cara Wall is a New York-based writer. The Dearly Beloved is her first novel.  Based on a real reform school in Florida that operated for over a century, The Nickel Boys is the chilling tale of a young black man named Elwood Curtis who is sent to live at a juvenile reformatory after an innocent mistake. The Nickel Academy bills itself as a place of "physical, intellectual and moral training," but in reality it is a place where young boys are subject to physical and sexual abuse. Coming of age in the early 1960s, Elwood struggles to hold onto the words of his idol, Dr. Martin Luther King, in the face of cruelty. Colson Whitehead is a celebrated American writer whose previous book, The Underground Railroad, won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Carnegie Medal for fiction and many other honours.  Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea, but was adopted by a Canadian family and raised in a small town. When she was in her early 20s, she decided to travel back to Korea to meet her extended birth family and other young people who were adopted from Korea and raised abroad. Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. shares Wills's journey and also explores the impact of being raised by a family of a different ethnicity and culture. Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. is on the shortlist for the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.  Red at the Bone begins in 2001, as 16-year-old Melody appears for her coming of age ceremony in front of her loving family. The event brings forth painful and joyous memories from before Melody's birth, and how her unexpected arrival brought two families from different social classes together. Jacqueline Woodson is an American fiction writer and poet whose acclaimed work includes Brown Girl Dreaming and Another Brooklyn.  |
| Sol Stein, Publisher, Author and Champion of James Baldwin, Dies at 92 - The New York Times Posted: 25 Sep 2019 02:44 PM PDT  Sol Stein, a prolific novelist and playwright, savvy publisher and visionary editor who helped fashion a collection of trenchant essays by James Baldwin, a former high school classmate, into a literary classic, "Notes of a Native Son," died on Thursday at his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 92. The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Dr. Edith Shapiro, said. A Chicago-born transplant to the Bronx, Mr. Stein had in the 1950s been a fiercely anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Washington's Cold War propaganda radio network, and a leading defender of civil liberties. But he made his most lasting mark in publishing. In 1962 he and his wife at the time, Patricia Day, founded the publishing house Stein and Day, which had immediate success that year with the director Elia Kazan's debut book, the novel "America, America." The story of a Greek youth who makes his way to the United States, the book sold three million copies, and Mr. Kazan turned it into a movie, released the next year. Mr. Stein was Stein and Day's editor in chief. Among the other authors and scholars he worked with were Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, his former professors at Columbia; and David Frost, Budd Schulberg and Dylan Thomas. Stein and Day also published the defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, the writer Claude Brown, the critic Leslie Fiedler, the socialite and memoirist Barbara Howar and the Soviet Union scholar Bertram Wolfe, among many others. In one of the many books Mr. Stein himself wrote, "Bankruptcy: A Feast for Lawyers" (1989), he exposed the "bureaucratic nightmare" that had accompanied the financial implosion of Stein and Day after 27 years in business. He was also among the 10 founding members in 1957 of the Playwrights Group of the Actors Studio, which included Robert Anderson, Lorraine Hansberry, William Inge and Tennessee Williams. Mr. Stein's lifelong association with Mr. Baldwin began when they were both editors of The Magpie, the literary magazine at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. It was perhaps an unlikely bond: As Mr. Stein would say, he was white, Jewish and attracted to women while Mr. Baldwin was black, the stepson of a Pentecostal minister and attracted to men. Their friendship resumed after World War II, reaching its literary apex in 1955 with the publication of Mr. Baldwin's "Notes," his anthology of essays on the black experience. Mr. Stein edited the book. Image  Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard, once described the friendship between the two men as "one of the great moments in interracial harmony and intimacy in the history of American literature." Mr. Stein chronicled their relationship in "Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century: Notes of a Native Son" (2004). Solomon Stein was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1926, to Louis and Zelda (Zam) Stein, Jewish immigrants who had fled Russia. His mother became a translator for the United Nations. His father was a jewelry designer. The family moved to the North Bronx in 1930. Sol was considered charming and cheeky, prickly and precocious. He was said to have performed as a magician at Carnegie Hall as a teenager. In high school, by Mr. Stein's account, The Magpie's faculty adviser would read out loud the students' published short stories with so anesthetizing a delivery that it drove another classmate, Richard Avedon, to shift his career goals from writing to photography. But Sol persevered. Mr. Stein went on to enroll at City College, but his studies there were interrupted when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1944. He voluntarily transferred to the infantry and served in Germany during the post-World War II occupation. After returning from military service, he completed his bachelor of social science degree and earned a master's in English and comparative literature at Columbia. His first two marriages, to Sondra Klein in 1947 and to Ms. Day in 1962, ended in divorce. He married Dr. Edith (Tennenbaum) Shapiro in 2000. In addition to Dr. Shapiro, his survivors include four sons, Kevin, Jeff, Leland and Andrew, from his marriage to Ms. Klein; two sons, Robin and David Day Stein, and a daughter, Elizabeth Day Stein, from his marriage to Ms. Day; his sister, Toby Stein; Dr. Shapiro's children from a previous marriage, Mark Shapiro and Lynn Helmer; six grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren. Besides working as an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Mr. Stein was a member of its ideological advisory staff starting in the early 1950s. The journalist Robert Scheer, who was editor of the left-leaning Ramparts magazine in the late 1960s, branded him "The Archdeacon of the Cold War." "His work at Voice of America and later in publishing," Mr. Scheer said in an email, "was critical to the central mythology of the Cold War based on a unified internationalist communist enemy committed to world conquest." Mr. Stein was opposed to infringement of civil liberties from both the left and the right. He was also the executive director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which condemned the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy's quest for subversives in the early 1950s. Mr. Stein contributed articles to magazines, worked as an editor at Beacon Press and wrote plays. He became so frustrated by the feuding among the principals of a British production of one of his plays that in 17 days he transformed it into his first novel, "The Husband," published by Coward-McCann in 1969. Two years later, he published his second novel, "The Magician," which portrays justice as illusory. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Webster Schott, an author and critic, described it as "superior fiction" and added, "I cannot recall a novel of this kind with greater momentary pleasure." Altogether, Mr. Stein was the author of more than a dozen books, including how-to guides for novelists, and he sold software that was marketed as "guaranteed to eliminate writer's block." He said the best advice he received as a fledgling author was from a college teacher: "He said to me, 'Stein, your jacket is blue, your shirt is blue, your tie is blue — that's what wrong with your stories!' From that point on my stories and eventually my novels became 'colorful' in every meaning of that word." But he did not ignore other aspects of the writer's craft. In "Stein on Writing" (1995), he advised: "Be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator." "Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader," he added. "Not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."  |
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