Vox Humana Books

Philip Hyams is a Canadian/Israeli publisher. novelist, artist, journalist and film producer. Born in 1954 at Montreal, Que. Canada - Mr. Hyams has also lived in London, Amsterdam, Montreal and Toronto. His writing has been published in more than 250 print and electronic journals around the world from the U.S and Britain to Sweden and South Africa.

While living in Europe he performed his work under the auspices of the internationally known One World Poetry Organization along-side poets such as Jack Micheline and Gregory Corso and as an artist was very early on affiliated with the “CopyArt” movement producing graphic works on large-format XEROX color copy installations. He has also been a journalist for the Israeli edition of Internet World and an award-winning documentary health and lifestyle film producer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

A young veteran of a middle-eastern war flees his country of birth, relocating to Amsterdam. There, living the life of a civil servant by day and a “slam” poet by night, he attempts to discover some order and put some sense into his life while recovering from the violent past he has known. After falling in love with a Dutch woman, he watches as the dissolution of his marriage takes place before his eyes, accepting it, yet doing nothing to remedy or try and restore the relationship before it is too late. At his place of work, our hero stumbles across an insidious secret that complicates his life even further, as he is forced to test his own morality in his efforts to reveal a terrible hidden history to the rest of the world.
Strangely, at about the same time the above events are taking place, our main protagonist – a lover of literature and the arts – stumbles across a book in a little shop run by the “Moonies” on a backstreet of the city. The book, entitled “Solitude”, authored in the year 1837 by a forgotten Swiss philosopher, named John George Zimmerman, becomes the young man’s “gospel”, serving as a tool, guiding him in his quest as he tries to integrate his past into his present and ultimately some kind of future working reality.
A magical synergy occurs as the young man’s life and story begins to mystically become as one with the ruminations on Solitude of JGZ. And as the philosopher’s words begin to merge with those of our hero, it becomes difficult for the reader to separate the two “authors” and the lives they have lead so many decades apart from one another.
About The Author
Samuel Tzara is the pseudonym for a well-known artist and poet living in the foothills of Jerusalem.

Jeffrey Green had wanted to visit these places since his childhood in Greenwich Village, New York City, which, as much as it was a haven of poets, painters, bohemians, and intellectuals, was also the northern fringe of Little Italy. The faces he saw, the voices he heard, the stores he passed on MacDougal Street on his way to school, were all Sicilian and Neapolitan. Hardly a month went by when he and his parents didn’t eat at least once in a family-owned Italian restaurant. The fragrance of Italian food was the fragrance of his New York Jewish childhood.

At the age of 60, he finally got to Sicily, in the company of Judith his wife, and another couple. By the time he got there, it meant much more to him than an echo of his Manhattan childhood, for he had been living in Israel since 1973, and was now a citizen of Mediterranean civilization himself. So his exploration of Naples and Sicily, although frustratingly brief, was also an exploration of an assumed identity. Travel can give us both knowledge of the world and lead to a deeper self-knowledge. Just as on a trip, no matter how carefully one plans, there are always surprises, some propitious, some untoward; in this book the reader will not necessarily find what he or she expects.

Jeffrey Green grew up in Greenwich Village, New York, attended progressive schools, then went on to Princeton for a BA and Harvard for a PhD in Comparative Literature. In 1973 he moved to Israel. Since 1979 he has worked as a free-lance translator for several important Hebrew authors, including Aharon Appelfeld. He was the ghostwriter of the Holocaust Memoir, A Daughter's Gift of Love by Trudi Birger, which has been published in more than a dozen languages. Additionally he has published hundreds of book reviews, various articles, short stories, and poems. He is the author of two books in Hebrew, as well as “Thinking Through Translation,” published by the University of Georgia Press.

Imagine the impossible: one finds oneself in a heady and mysterious locale on the edge of North Africa, a country replete with colourful characters, incomprehensible customs and taboos, a spoken language lacking an alphabet, often frustrating religious practices and, in spite of all this capital ‘E’ exoticism, one still don’t want to marry a local? Or turn a decrepit ryad into a boutique hotel? Or write for the travel page in the Sunday paper? Carolyn Thériault does more than imagine it.

After making a rather drunken New Year’s Resolution to toss aside their conventional lifestyle and pension plans, Carolyn, a somewhat cynical, snarky ex-pat and self-proclaimed square-peg, with her photographer husband Chris decide to walk away from their comfortable jobs in the Land of the Round Doorknobs (Canada) to travel the world. Because their long-suffering attempts at financial independence (weekly lottery tickets) have not borne any fruit, the only apparent means to rectify this situation they believe is to teach English overseas. And Morocco seems to fit the bill. But does it?

Unconventional and candid – Stealing Fatima’s Hand stands out as an irreverent black sheep in the literary travel genre, succeeding in undoing for Morocco everything that Peter Mayle has done for Provence. The book spans two years of Carolyn’s experiences in Rabat, where with humor and honesty she struggles with Moroccan bureaucracy, sexual harassment, the threat of terrorism, devious students, randy co-teachers, and the temptation of having French pastries washed down with gin & tonics for every meal. All this in a country, where apart from her, the only vegetarians are the sheep and the goats.

Essayist, photographer and novelist, Carolyn Thériault currently resides in Turkey where she is at work upon her second book and a number of other print and other media projects.

Visit Carolyn at: http://carolyntheriault.com