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VieVie La Fontaine
Price range: $3.99 through $12.99When I first published this book in 2018, wars raged in various parts of the world, just like today. Hourly, we were allowed to follow the horror and depravity as it unfolded. On June 14, 1940, during World War II, Germany invaded Paris, marking the start of the German occupation. At that time, there wasn’t the ease of news delivery at citizens’ fingertips. Instead, acts of bravery that we seldom consider occurred. Despite the possibility of severe punishment, the underground press distributed newspapers to offset the Vichy and German propaganda. Often, coded messages relayed instructions to members of the Resistance. An attempt to distribute and obtain daily news was itself a death sentence if found out. Yet, the spirit of the oppressed was undaunted.
VieVie La Fontaine is the story of two souls drawn together by a force they couldn’t comprehend.
Facts are intertwined with Fiction as this tale of incredible bravery unfolds. Maybe, there existed a Mark and VieVie. We may never know, but I offer VieVie La Fontaine in honor of the strength and determination of so many. -
The Secret Guy: A New England Diary: A New England
$29.99It does not matter who he is, my Secret Guy. The only thing which matters is that he is mine. We meet in private. Nobody can comment. No one can interfere. If it becomes necessary to meet in public, we require anonymity within a crowd of strangers. When our story is finished, then finally, others may know it. Future readers of these pages will know it, in due time.
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A People Set Apart
Price range: $3.99 through $26.99When chance, the flamboyant scion of a well-to-do family, makes it to the United States from his war-torn Biafra, it doesn’t occur to him that life isn’t going to be the same as it is in his homeland.
But he learns fast. And by sheer will and personal grit, he is able to bulldoze his way in his new abode. Turning adversities into advantage he develops one of the most enduring relationships ever imagined. Turnkey, his nemesis turns friend, and over a short period of time, that metamorphosis yields an instant result. Chance schools him to change course and makes him to understand that he can buy himself out of the box seemingly reserved for him and his ilk that will place him in low level of society’s cadet in perpetuity. Having seen the light, they hit the ground running. Their friendship bossoms, and Chance becomes his greatest confidante.
When Chance offers to take him and a group of his American friends to his homeland of Biafra, a country remembered in flashpoints of war and pillage and destruction, and man’s inhumanity to man, Turnkey is there to defend his friend and dispel all erroneous notions of a people he hasn’t met except one man.
Biafra, plundered since time immemorial, and thought dead, has risen from the ashes of pillagery by dint, and indefatigable spirit of her irrepressible people to hoist her flag in the firmament for all to see. In Biafra, Africa is unbound.
Turnkey, a fortuitious child, and even luckier than a cat with more than nine lives, doesn’t leave anything to chance. Like his father, he toils from a young age knowing where he’s coming from but also with an eye to where he’s heading to. Yet, it’s him that the mighty God has had his path cleared before him.
And when fortune smiles on him owing to a huge bequeathal of his granduncle, it’s to Chance that he turns to, and it’s in his friend’s homeland that he chooses to invest his largesse because he wholeheartedly believes that they’re a people a set apart in spite of the challenges right and about them.
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Not For Women Only: Short Stories for a Lazy Day
Price range: $3.99 through $14.99Zygier’s first book, Not-For-Women-Only, Short Stories for a Lazy Day is written for people that can sit somewhere quiet with a cup of coffee or tea, OK, maybe with a glass of wine, and read. Though the title might suggest that only women can or should read it, doesn’t mean men can’t. The stories might also imply that it’s only subject is a woman and a man
bumping into themselves on a street corner, though that’s not a bad idea, it’s really much more than that. Yes, they do meet, otherwise what is the point? So, yes, they do meet in a street, on an elevator, parachuted into Afghanistan with a special force’s unit to a young woman that feels that she should have the same equality as men in Victorian England and dresses like a man then finds herself in love with an aristocrat that thinks it’s his sister and both end up in India. Since Zygier had a stint in the army, he takes that thought in many ways. Some sad, some funny and some serious. Such as an officer in Afghanistan that saves a female reporter from a sniper to a General that doesn’t want to get involved with women till he’s stuck on a plane with one. Though this is Zygier’s first book, he started to write as a hobby and later joined a writer’s group. There he was encouraged to put some stories together and publish them. -
Red and the Egg Pie
Price range: $3.99 through $12.99Red is best friends with her Granny. Red also loves visiting friends, and her granny reminds her to mind her manners. What happens when Red doesn’t listen? Join Red as she realizes that learning a lesson doesn’t always taste good.
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Warriors of the Deities: Orisha Bloodlines
Price range: $3.99 through $34.99This book is a tribute to the ancestors who walked before us and the power that still flows through our blood.
It is fiction, yes-but it’s also truth, myth, memory, and resistance. To read this is to reclaim something forgotten.
This story isn’t just meant to entertain-it’s meant to awaken.
As you journey through the Yoruba land of Ilaro, ask yourself:
What traditions are worth fighting for?And what truths are you brave enough to reclaim?
Myth meets memory.
Bloodline meets destiny.
And silence meets revolution.
This is not just a novel. This is a calling.
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The Arkansas Traveler
Price range: $3.99 through $7.99Reliving his masterpiece.
Dive into a journey of creativity and humor as one man turns life’s challenges into unforgettable poems. Discover how a little wit can change everything. This book shows how laughter, poetry, and resilience can transform even the toughest of times.
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The Road from Money: The Journey Continues Part 2 (1937 – 1955)
Price range: $3.99 through $16.99The Road from Money, the Journey Continues (Part 2) 1937 – 1955, Estella arrives in Chicago from Money, Mississippi, during the Great Migration north for millions of African Americans. She leaves behind the Jim Crow South and the cotton fields to the promise of a better life in the north. Seeing the vast difference between a big city and a small rural town, Estella finds it both exciting and challenging. With her family’s help, she settles in to find new friends, romance, and employment during World War II. She soon realizes that racism is not just in the South; it exists everywhere. Like thousands before her migrating north, her strength of character and perseverance paves the way for her success and enduring spirit. Set in the backdrop of Chicago’s Bronzeville community, the Harlem of Chicago, the reader will feel the beat of the city’s nightclubs on South Park Avenue, the sound of church choirs, the dangers of a big city, and the emotions of a nation at war. Estella experiences a new world with the coming of the television age and the beginning of the civil rights movement. She and her family find love, discrimination, and opportunities. They live and work together to overcome the obstacles placed before them.
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The Road from Money: The Journey Continues PART 3 (1956 – 1968)
Price range: $3.99 through $16.99The Road from Money, The Journey Continuous, part 3. Join Estella as she continues her path to success during the joyous and turbulent times of the 1950’s and ’60s; including the Korean and Vietnam War, the beginning of the space age, ongoing civil rights demonstrations, and assignations of key civil rights and political leaders. All set in the background of Chicago’s Bronzeville and Hyde Park neighborhoods. Watch Estella as she accumulates several apartment buildings, and experience the music, movies, culture and racial dynamics of the era.
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A Reason for Living
Price range: $3.99 through $14.99It is the mid-1960s in Kingston, Jamaica, and the country is steeped in social, political, and economic inequities. Howard Baxter, the heir to a real estate empire, has no interest in seeking or managing wealth. Painting and deflowering Jamaican maidens are his passions. As he combs the streets looking for greater meaning in his pathetic life, it soon becomes apparent that Howard’s journey will not be easy. Bernaldo Lloyd, a member of the Baxter clan, is a medical student who is sensitive to the hopelessness of the Jamaican masses. Inspired by his close friend and Howard’s cousin, Ras Robin Pone, and their ties with the Rastafari movement that calls for social and economic equity, Bernaldo is determined to overthrow the corrupt government. As Howard, Bernaldo and Robin become influenced by The American Black Power and Civil Rights movements demanding equal rights for African Americans, the women in their lives both love and criticize them. But when revolution breaks out, Howard finally discovers a purpose for his twisted life that leads him in a direction he never anticipated. In this tale of love, passion, and self-discovery, three Jamaican men become caught up in a 1960s revolution that reveals injustices, oppression, and a purpose for one of them.
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My Journey with the United Nations and Quest for the Horn of Africa’s Unity and Justice for Ethiopia
Price range: $3.99 through $22.99The book is focused on vital issues for the institutional development of various countries including human settlements as well as the need for cooperation and mutual support of the countries in the Horn of Africa plus the achievement of the justice required by Ethiopia for the huge war crimes perpetrated by Fascist Italy with the Vatican’s complicit support.
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BABY SIS AND ME
Price range: $3.99 through $18.99A perfect story for little ones learning about family, pets, and the special things that make their world feel like home, from the loving bounds that bring them together to the small details that make each day feel bright and exciting.
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Janine: Tale of an Abandoned Wife and Mother
Price range: $3.99 through $15.99Janine is left homeless and penniless when her husband deserts her. She is left to explain all his thefts and misdeeds as she loses her friends and status. All the while, she must protect her children as she builds a new life. When Janine discovers a way to recover some of her money, she resorts to wits and stealth. Many women are caught unawares by the deeds of their spouses. Not everyone is as eventually fortunate or brave as Janine.
Mark Eric Johansen is a retired bus mechanic. He began seriously writing when he had time to devote to retelling the events he had heard and seen. He is working on a chronicle of forty years in a diverse, racist, bewildering work environment. Mark and his wife have always lived in the Chicagoland area.
Janine is Mark’s first completed fiction piece.
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War Is Hell: A Tale of War And One’s Man’s Search for Meaning
Price range: $3.99 through $13.99This story is told by a soldier who was a part of the bloody war in Burma, the executive officer of a rugged group of American jungle fighters. He tells us in great detail what the war did to him and how he feels about taking another man’s life even to protect his own as he searches for meaning in it all…
World War II is winding down in the summer of 1945, but not for Major Jenkins and his band of Merrill’s Marauders. They have spent months combing the Burmese jungle for the notorious Japanese commander Colonel Maruyama and his troops. Major Jenkins, Captain Beltrans and what was left of their band were outnumbered two to one; so, they had to devise a plan that would overcome the odds. But after they settled the score with their enemy, they had to march hundreds of miles through the jungle back to their base near the Indian border. It was now August, and the war was over, but how would the local civilians living along the only trail out of Burma view the American soldiers?
Their journey back home was fraught with unexpected dangers and facing unplanned enemies through an unforgiving jungle. They had never been taught at West Point how to fight their new enemy.
After the war, Captain Beltrans is convinced that he should return Colonel Maruyama’s samurai sword to his descendants in Japan. However, what he thought would be a routine side trip to a modern country turned into a harrowing adventure in Japanese politics and a thousand-year-old culture. He ended up in an ancient Zen Garden in Kyoto wondering if he had done the right thing by killing enemy soldiers and civilians during the war. Does he get help from his deceased native grandmother?
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The Devil In The Cave
Price range: $3.99 through $17.99When a World War II Veteran, Archibald Arthur, a United States Serviceman retired from active military duty in November 1943 after a grueling experience fighting the Japanese in the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska, he must battle to rebuild his civilian life and emerge from the ashes. The Post Traumatic Stress-Disorder was intense, but finding a job at the Anchorage Hotel in Downtown Alaska provided a safe haven for him to revitalize and start over. But when he met a vacationing young lady from Zagreb, Croatia at the Hotel, his world was turned upside down after a beautiful picnic with her in the foot of the Alaskan Mountains.
The Devil that must have killed her in the woods was too powerful, but he must face him to avenge her demise and, in the process, discovering it was far more complicated than he had previously imagined. It took years of living in the mountain foot, surviving bitter winters and learning for him to discover that the battle that he must fight was not only carnal, but spiritual as well. Deep inside the cave with his loyal dog, Gossiper, they came face to face with the Devil and that marked a new beginning for them both……
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The Angels of Opi
Price range: $3.99 through $15.99Seven Boys Held Captive for 11 years! When Daniel Ciarletta and his father, Pete, boarded a boat in 1947 bound for Italy, to visit Pete’s ailing father, they could not have known what awaited them. Everything changed for Daniel and the Ciarletta family. Daniel was abducted and taken to Opi, a rural mountain community that had survived for centuries by sheep herding until 1943, when retreating German soldiers seized all the boys and able-bodied young men as work prisoners. Daniel soon became a work prisoner as part of a devious plan by the citizens of Opi-including the local priest who had evidentially lost his “moral compass”- to abduct young foreigners to take the place of the men they had lost. With no idea of where he was or why, and unable to speak Italian, Daniel began working in the fields and plotting his possible escape. Meanwhile, back in America, the once happy and loving Ciarletta family began to slowly disintegrate under the burden of conflict, anger and guilt caused by Daniel’s mysterious disappearance.