MSI Press Blog

  Just in, a review of When Liberty Enslaves: The Toxic Blend of Faith and Politics by Jerry Aveta. Sometimes you pick up a book and it grabs you by the scruff of the neck, shakes you around a bit, and makes you exclaim, “Everyone needs to read this.” Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers' Favorite Sometimes you pick up a book and it grabs you by the scruff of the neck, shakes you around a bit, and makes you exclaim, “Everyone needs to read this.” When Liberty Enslaves: The Toxic Blend of Faith and Politics by Jerry Aveta was just such a book, for me. The author effectively compares the social conditions, political situation, religious involvement, and general environment of the United States before the Civil War with our current political environment. What drove the secessionists in 1860 was the economic need for slavery for the South to maintain its power and wealth, despite the moral arguments regarding the right of all to be free and equal. The author points out th...

  Actually, there are two book reviews of  Book That (Almost) Got Me Fired by Kelly K James, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com) , which was just released (Saturday). Get some insight to prepare you for picking up the book and reading it -- and laughing -- and commiserating -- and getting involved in the life of the author. CURRENTLY #3 ON AMAZON'S LIST OF HOT NEW RELEASES. Book description: You're 52. Divorced. Single mom to a teenaged son and a tween daughter. Happily self-employed but worried about the cost of health insurance, the inevitable impact of perimenopause on your body, and whether you should keep dating a sexy plumber who's sweet and funny but lives an hour away and doesn't seem that into you. So, after 22 years of fulltime freelancing, you take a day job as a tiny, creaky cog in the corporate American machine where you're decades older than most of your coworkers - and you write about it. The Book That (Almost) Got Me Fired: A Year in...

Veteran and award-winning author, Omar Imady, has done it again with a new book, Erasures . Literary Titan Gold Award Winner. 'An exceptional novel on par with previous dystopian classics written by Orwell and Huxley.' - Los Angeles Book Review The Year is 2049. Following a brutal seven-year war, Earth teeters on the brink of destruction. The World Congress is convened to identify the enemy: unpredictability. Deep in the subterranean corridors of Zone 4 Literature Hub, Head Archivist Ray Blankenship is tasked with digitizing humanity’s remaining books. In this new world, meticulously organized, monitored, and managed, Ray is restless. In the absence of chance, of mystery and miracles, meaning is missing. Amid the order, Ray’s shocking discovery of disappearing digital texts quickly plunges his department, his superiors, and the entire principle of predictability into uncertainty. Soon, whole books begin to vanish. But not just any books. Only religious ones. As the race to pres...

                             Have you published a book recently (2022-2023) on a topic related to achieving near-native foreign language proficiency? Send it to the Journal for Distinguished Language Proficiency . JDLS is looking for books to review in JLDS 9 (2023-2024). --- We have available for individual purchase each of the feature articles from issue 8 of the journal at a very accessible price and will make the feature articles available from other issues as time goes on. Check our  webstore  to see what we have at any given time. We will announce and link each of these individually in upcoming blog posts. The  Journal for Distinguished Language Studies  is available by subscription. JDLS is a biennial journal, and it is easy for time to slip by and miss the next issue. Subscription will take care of that. Subscribe  HERE  and never miss a copy. (Publishes typically i...

It is Tuesday. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side.  Today's post discusses the difficulties in getting book reviews -- from the publisher perspective and the author perspective. Sometimes, those perspectives are the same. Reference here is not to paid reviews; those are pretty easy to get -- put up your money, and back comes a review. Reference here is to unpaid, professional reviews, what every publisher wants and expects and what every author should, too. Lost in the Haystack of Pre-Publication Reviews Pre-publication reviews are hard to get because there are very few reviewers out there, and they are overwhelmed with books being sent to them. One reviewer who wanted to review one of our ...

  A bit of a detour from the usual Cancer Diary posts, this week we are posting reviews about a well-liked but not widely known book about living with cancer (spoiler: it has a religious appeal): Surviving Cancer, Healing People: One Cat's Story by Sula, Parish Cat at Old Mission San Juan Bautista. #1 Synopsis: Sula is a cat with a divine mission who has an uncanny ability to sense which parishioners at the California's San Juan Bautista Old Mission need her attention at any given Mass. But is it really uncanny, or does St. Francis give Sula tasks during her daily conversations with him? Or is she led by God? Sula has developed a special bond with cancer survivors like herself. The bond between her and the Old Mission parishioners saw her through two bouts of cancer, flooding her with gifts: money for surgery, a home for recovery, prayers, and love. In the pages of "Surviving Cancer, Healing People: One Cat's Story" is comprised of truly charming, heartwarming, ...