Spencer Seward


All Books

How to Free a Naked Man from a Rock

Spencer Seward, Robert Kane, Stephanie Halpern

Publication Date: February 1, 2011

$24.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-423-8

Description:

High School Literary Anthology


The ideal text to get high school kids writing instead of texting


There’s a 17-foot-tall naked guy who lives in Florence, Italy. He spends most of his time being ogled by anyone who cares to look. He’s okay with this—he isn’t the least bit ashamed. He’s been doing this for over five hundred years, after all.


Come to think of it, maybe you’ve seen him before. His name is David. His picture’s on the cover of this book.


David began his life as a very large, very lonely, and very slightly mistreated block of rock. When David’s father, the legendary sculptor and all-around artistic genius Michelangelo, looked at the rock, however, he didn’t just see a simple piece of weathered marble—he saw the stone boy, the statue, trapped inside.


When you look at rocks, what do you see? What are the things you see in life that no one else sees? Chances are that you see some pretty cool, pretty wild stuff.

Did Pirates Rip Her Arms Off?

Robert Kane, Stephanie Halpern, Spencer Seward

Publication Date: February 1, 2011

$24.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-495-5

Description:

Middle School Literary Anthology


This is the middle school anothology that makes middle school kids want to get in touch with their inner poet or pirate tale teller.


What do you do when you’re the goddess of love, but you don’t have arms? That’s the trouble with the Venus de Milo, this crazy armless statue some guy found on an island called Milos about two hundred years back. You’ve probably seen the statue somewhere before… maybe on the cover of this book!


Nobody’s quite sure how the Venus de Milo lost her arms. The French sailors who bought her, though, claimed that they battled brigands on a
beach to get to her. Apparently, her arms were ripped off during the fight!


That’s a pretty cool story.


It might not be true, but, now that you’ve heard that version of the tale, you’ll probably never forget it. It’s unique and exciting, and only the Venus’s own rescuers could have told it like that.


There are an infinite number of Venus de Milos in the world—objects, people, places, and ideas that are strange, cool, and quite possibly, unique to your life. And, just like those French sailors, you, too, have awesome versions of those Venuses’ stories to tell.

News

Beth Gilstrap interviewed on This Podcast Will Change Your Life!

This episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life stars the Beth Gilstrap (Deadheading & Other Stories, I Am Barbarella: Stories). It was recorded over the Zoom between the This Podcast Will Change Your Life home studio in Chicago, IL and Gilstrap’s home in Kentucky, not North Carolina, in December 2021. You can listen to this episode here, or below, […]

Beth Gilstrap, author of DEADHEADING AND OTHER STORIES, interviewed for Southern Review of Books

Whether reading her beautifully-detailed descriptions of place in the outstanding “What Magic” and “Lake Hartwell, South Carolina” or diving into the hurt but determined mind of Layla in “Still Soft, Still Whole” and “Deadheading,” it’s clear that Beth Gilstrap knows how to capture the essential truths of place and people. Her latest collection, Deadheading & Other […]

Beth Gilstrap Discusses Short Story Collection DEADHEADING With The Rumpus!

Beth Gilstrap’s second story collection, Deadheading, won the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Award and publishes tomorrow. It includes stories Leesa Cross-Smith characterizes as “little gardens—the words blooming, the rain too.” While reading, I kept coming back to this blurb. These stories are deeply rooted in the lives of working-class women in the Carolinas, […]

Reviews

DEADHEADING AND OTHER STORIES by Beth Gilstrap reviewed in Necessary Fiction!

Deadheading, the practice of pruning dead flower heads in order to preserve the plant, provides Beth Gilstrap with a rich metaphor around which to organize her new story collection. The twenty-two stories in Deadheading & Other Stories, which won the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, range widely in content, tone, and voice. But as […]