Announcing...
Family Matters
A profound examination of family and the power of love.
Lance Lee (Second Chances), son to David Levy, records his family’s turbulent history amid their well-known entertainment ventures, including his father’s production of fan favorites Dr. Kildare, Bonanza, and The Addams Family. Lee candidly shares his family dynamics, starting with his Jewish father’s challenges with antisemitism in the advertising field, to his mother, famous model Lucille Wilds, and their multiple marriages to each other—alongside their tumultuous relationship based on secrecy and bursting with friction. Lee unearths heartbreaking truths in this deeply personal journey, as he explores the impact of his upbringing on his own life as a husband and father.
Available November 15, 2022 at all bookstores and online outlets.
The Tale of Brian and the House Painter Mervyn
2022 Readers Favorite Bronze Medal, Best Books for Children’s Fable
A comic fable in which a painter stuns a magical village with works too good to be true.
...a thoroughly enjoyable yarn that manages to succeed on two levels: as a colorful and imaginative fantasy for children and a slyly hilarious treatise on art, government, and religion for adults.
Available from April 15 2022
Orpheus Rising
An Indie Best Book of 2021 - Kirkus Reviews
Imaginative and emotional, this underworld adventure offers thrills, chills, and insightful lessons.
Lee’s curious, myth-touched adventure, which reads like a blend of The Phantom Tollbooth, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a modern-day Orpheus story, finds a lonely boy named Sam stuck in the middle of nowhere with a father, John, who grows greyer by the day. The two spend their time silently doing chores, and every night they share the same terrifying nightmare, though neither speaks of it. One day a mysterious book arrives, and Sam discovers that what happens in it can come true in real life. Inspired, he uses its strange power to change everything for himself and his father, opening the door to a dangerous world where nothing is as it seems. With the help of Sam’s imagination they team up—John somewhat reluctantly—with a wise and distinguished elephant who loves to dance. Together, the three embark on a quest to save Sam’s mother from the afterlife.
Elemental Natures
Selected Lyrics, Sequences, and Artwork with New Poems and the Essay “The American Voice”
Lee (Homecomings) unites a selection of work from “old favorites” and poems he feels he has “neglected” in this cohesive and lyrical collection. Classic themes—such as love, pain and suffering, and religion—unfold amid vivid word imagery and profound symbolism, enveloping readers in a mix of “self and other, just as the present mixes with the past and any number of hoped-for futures.” Lee provides glimpses of a writer at work through the filter of time in this massive tome, packing a multitude of meaning into dramatic inflection and phrasing while challenging readers to open the wounds caused by being human.
New Poems Section
I have inaugurated a new section, “Poems”, where current work or work of particular interest will be posted time to time. This is inaugurated with poems dealing with the collision of a contemporary sensibility with classical works or sites, including a new version of the end of Homer’s Odyssey, No One Comes for Penelope— , with drawings by Ron Sandford; poems dealing with my interaction with the Rome, Roman Poems, with drawings by Charles Shearer; and poems on Greece: An Incendiary Ground— Encounters with Greece, also with drawings by Ron Sandford. These artists kindly offered interpretative artwork for the poems…
Homecomings
The new book of poetry by Lance Lee
Announcing a new book, “Homecomings”, my sixth book of poetry.
Just out from Birch Brook Press, it is available on Amazon in the US and UK and other online outlets, and through your local bookstore in both countries.
A poet, playwright, novelist and writer on drama and screenwriting, Lance Lee is the author of thirteen books. A past Creative Writing Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, his fourth collection of poetry, Seasons of Defiance, was a finalist in the 2010 National Best Books Awards. Homecomings, his sixth collection, reinforces his considerable achievement as a poet. In Seasons of Defiance, he had written: “There is nothing left for me to do but go/ deeper, ever deeper, into my meaning.” (“Dreaming The End of Going West”). That is what he does in Homecomings, his passion and compassion in engaging with a panoramic range of experiences deepened. He writes with conviction: “I see all there is, and all a man may see.”
Transformations
The new book of poetry by Lance Lee
Lee’s writing, passionate and with a strong sense of the physical, is outstanding for its investigation of the human and natural world and the connections he often makes between the two. Particularly moving in this book is his imaginative and thoughtful search into the human predicament. Work by different artists complements the selection which is very appropriate as the visual is important to this poet and many of the poems take inspiration from paintings or other art forms.
New eBooks!
Six books are now in eBook format: Becoming Human, Human/Nature, and Seasons of Discontent, my most recent poetry; Second Chances, a novel, Time's Up and Other Plays, and the popular A Poetics for Screenwriters. It will be interesting if their availability through the various Kindle stores, or iBooks, Nook or other outlets increases their reach-- it is a transitional age for writers reaching their reading audience. Also three novels of my father, David Levy, that I saw reprinted, have also made it to eBook format, and are similarly available: Network Jungle, about an early sex and violence scandal on TV, Potomac Jungle, a political piece, and The Gods of Foxcroft, an early, and prescient, sci fi work on cloning and rebirth...
“Human/Nature” is now available in electronic form on Kindle.
Seasons of Defiance named finalist in the 2010 National USA Book Awards
Seasons of Defiance
The new book of poetry by Lance Lee
Unashamedly post-Keatsian in tone, transatlantic in bias, Lee’s strongest strain of originality lies in his marrying of lyric celebration with precise imagistic clarity; there’s the Hughsian fascination with animal forms, both real and metaphorical; there’s the packed line, the lush diction, the muted experimentation and the force of a restlessness that sustains the tempo.