Tin Sea: A Memoir Gone Rogue
By Garrett M. Brown
Memoir/Novel
Paperback ISBN-10: 099726098X
504 pages
Retail price: $24.00
Published by Lagoon House Press (2024)
Tin Sea is a hybrid memoir/novel. That is, “a memoir gone rogue”, or down a mythical rabbit hole, perhaps. Just out of college and determined to become a visual artist, the young Garry Brown is invited to join his best friend, to sell dictionaries door to door in Tennessee. A picaresque tale, it is a misadventure that finds its curiously mysterious way.
If Steven Spielberg had read this book, he might say, “Tom Hanks and I were going to do a re-make of Harvey but-it can’t be done. Wrong. This story is Harvey and then some – a mythical all-American journey of becoming an artist with a vision!”
If Taylor Swift had read Tin Sea, perhaps she’d break into song, or say, “Tin Sea is Tennessee! My Tennessee! Oh, it makes me homesick and heartsick. What a romantic and tender tale. I want to play Terri in the movie-and do songs for it, too-a treasure!”
If George Saunders had read it, he might’ve said, “Okay, Mark Twain, Will Rogers, even Garrison Keillor, move over. We’re going to a little town not far from the Grand Ole Opry where a tall country tale is about to unfold-WOW!”
If Annie Dillard had read Tin Sea, she might say something like, “Take my Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and throw in Thoreau’s Walden, and let’s all meet at Old Hickory Lake where Harvey, Elwood P. Dowd, and Garry Brown are going to throw together a joyous transcendental mystical tale!”
AmazonThree Writers/One Photographer: An Anthology
by Barbara Crane, Bill Davis, Garrett M. Brown, and Marie Pal-Brown
Anthology
Paperback ISBN-10: 0997260971
156 pages
Retail price: $22.00
Published by Lagoon House Press (2023)
Emerging from the pandemic, the founders of Lagoon House Press (writers Barbara Crane, Marie Pal-Brown, Garrett M. Brown), and photographer Bill Davis aspired to put together a collection of some of their favorite fiction, hybrid memoir/fiction, poetry, and photographs. Thus, was born Three Writers/One Photographer – an illuminating collection of fantasies, truths and images celebrating the creative spirit.
In this superb collection, we marvel at Barbara Crane’s intrepid and imaginative narrators; the hushed restraint of Marie Pal-Brown’s gorgeously lyrical poems; the wildness of Bill Davis’s arresting photos; and question what kind of artist we really want to be in Garrett M. Brown’s vulnerable autofictions. This is a wonderful book, thrilling in its courage, complexity, and insights. It is a powerful contribution to the on-going vitality of California writing and art.
–Alison Townsend, author of The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home.
Good-heartedness, love, tenderness, humility, & a devotion to the Creative govern these pages. Barbara Crane writes exquisite sentences in her daring and compelling stories. I especially love “There Had to be a Rothko.” Marie-Pal Brown’s poems, including the loving, “Your Broad Hands Touching Me,” are inspiring, tender & well-observed. Bill Davis’s photos of birds, animals, foreign landscapes, have a stateliness & a natural beauty. Garrett M. Brown’s “The Tragedy of Modern Man in Three Acts,” is a memorable essay, which includes a play about his entrance into writing as a passion. An astonishing book!
–Harry E. Northup, actor and poet, author of Love Poem To MPTF.
Daughter of the Enemy
by Marie Pal-Brown
Memoir
Paperback ISBN-10:0997260955
406 pages
Retail price: $17.00
Published by Lagoon House Press (2018)
When the author is five years old, her father, a soldier in the German Wehrmacht, is killed in battle. Daughter of the Enemy recounts how women and children survived the hardships of WWII and postwar Germany, and how a ravaged country succumbed to the silence surrounding the Holocaust. It weaves, from the frayed strands of memory, a fully human accounting of coming to terms with hard truths, finally creating a tender memorial to the father lost in war.
Praise for DAUGHTER OF THE ENEMY:
“Marie Pal-Brown’s suspenseful and vivid account grants the reader entry into the mind and psyche of a German child living through the end of WWII and the vicissitudes of its aftermath. A memoir of an individuation like hers is a treasure — a life’s work. A valuable example of a writer gathering her memories to lay the groundwork for a final healing.”
Patrick Roth, Author, Starlite Terrace
“The best memoirs draw you into another person’s world in intimate and moving ways. Daughter of the Enemy does just that, specifically evoking the author’s conflicted girlhood of hardships as WWII draws to a close in her native Germany. Throughout the postwar years, just as the fractured nation must face its tragic past and what the future might hold, the author struggles through loss, guilt, and forgiveness to ultimately come to terms with who she truly is.”
Jean Hastings Ardell, Co-author, Making My Pitch: A Woman’s Baseball Odyssey
Marie Pal-Brown was born and raised in a small town near Cologne, Germany. Educated at Durham University in England and the SDI in Munich, she emigrated to America in the early sixties. She is the co-author of three works of lexicography. Her poetry has been included in various anthologies. She lives in Long Beach, California.
The Second Mrs. Price
by Toni Fuhrman
Literary Fiction
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9972609-3-9
328 pages
Retail price: $15.95
Published by Lagoon House Press (2018)
From the moment Griff turns up in his dusty red pickup truck, Selene is infatuated. Unfortunately, she’s married to Alex—Griff’s brother. Will Selene disregard her own scruples and risk everything—the security of her marriage and the husband she still loves, her career, her home—for an elusive man she passionately desires but who may leave as suddenly as he turned up?
Praise for The Second Mrs. Price:
“A compelling tale woven from the eternal conflict between our need to belong, to be rooted, and our desire to escape those bonds and follow our passions.”
Judith Kirscht, novelist and author of The Camera’s Eye
Toni Fuhrman grew up in a small Ohio town—the fictional setting for her novel. Both The Second Mrs. Price and Toni’s first novel, One Who Loves, are intensely personal explorations of intimacy and obsession within the context of strong family ties. Toni lives in Los Angeles and is working on her next novel. She publishes personal essays on writing and reading at tonifuhrman.com
When Water Was Everywhere
by Barbara Crane
Historical Fiction
Paperback ISBN – 978-0-9972609-0-8
Ebook ISBN – 978-0-9972609-1-5
350 pages
Retail price $18.00
Published by Lagoon House Press, 2016
Click here to download Media Kit (PDF)
Once upon a time in Los Angeles, water was everywhere—in rivers that rendered
the vast plain a marsh; in underground streams that provided an abundance of water
for people, cattle and crops. This is the lush landscape that serves as a backdrop to
When Water Was Everywhere. As the story unfolds, Barbara Crane’s precise and lyrical prose,
and her deft interweaving of historical fact and human drama, make for the richest of
fictional tapestries — both epic and intimate in scale, infused with a sense of loss,
but also with hard-won hope and the possibility of redemption.
Here is the early Los Angeles basin before the American conquest, a portrait of the land and the people painted in brilliant colors … showing the emotions, environment and manmade objects woven carefully and accurately into a tense and very readable novel.
Steve Iverson, Historical Curator (Ret.)
Rancho Los Cerritos Historic Site, Long Beach, CA
Barbara Crane is a novelist, journalist and teacher. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Sun magazine and other publications. Her first novel, The Oldest Things in the World, won the Silver Medal award from ForeWord magazine. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in history and English. Barbara lives in Long Beach, California with her husband and family.