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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781732432284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pfp |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2019 |
| Pages: | 330 |
| Sales rank: | 837,474 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
ON THE PLUS SIDE, three monthly essays on various topics, plus his regular monthly newsletter. To subscribe and begin receiving the essays in your email every Tuesday, go to RolandMerullo.com. The newsletter includes announcements of book groups and appearances, giveaways, bits of Merullo's past published writing, and a 'greeting' from the author that is often personal musing on current events and the writing life.Roland Merullo is the author of twenty-four books of fiction and non-fiction, that range from suspense novels (Fidel's Last Days, A Russian Requiem, Revere Beach Boulevard, The Return) to love stories (A Little Love Story, The Talk-Funny Girl, Leaving Losapas) to golf and travel books (Golfing with God, Passion for Golf, The Italian Summer, Taking the Kids to Italy) to humorous spiritual road trips (Breakfast with Buddha, Lunch with Buddha, Dinner with Buddha, The Delight of Being Ordinary, Golfing with God, American Savior). His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated across the globe, from China to Brazil,from Korea to Croatia, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards (see below).Much in demand as a speaker, Merullo has given informal talks, commencement, and convocation speeches at colleges and universities in New England, California, Florida, North Carolina, Minnesota, and Nebraska, as well as at open-minded churches of various denominations and hundreds of libraries, schools, and community organizations.His latest novel, Once Night Falls, will be published on December 1, 2019. The book was selected as a November pick by Amazon First Read's editors who called the novel "Both epic and intimate in its portrayal of World War II Italy." They continued by saying, "Merullo expertly illuminates the war’s devastation of the country and its culture. ...So immediate, it plunges the reader into this harrowing time, making the story—and the chapter of history—feel intensely personal. ...The book is unflinching in its portrayal of wartime turmoil. Yet heroism and hopefulness drive these characters. Once Night Falls is a page-turning, propulsive read, and the stakes are always incredibly high. But it is the characters—and the powerful lessons they bestow—that make this is a truly unforgettable story."Moments of Grace and Beauty: Forty Stories of Kindness, Courage, and Generosity in a Troubled World, a work of nonfiction, was also released in 2019.Merullo was born in Boston and raised in the working-class city of Revere, Massachusetts. He had a scholarship to Exeter Academy and graduated in 1971, attended Boston University for two years, transferred to Brown and graduated from Brown in 1975, then earned a Master's there—in Russian Studies— in 1976. He's been a carpenter, a cab driver, a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia, a college professor, worked for many months on cultural exchange exhibits in the former USSR, and he's traveled to 49 US states and across the northern hemisphere. He currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife Amanda and their two daughters. He can be reached at Roland@RolandMerullo.com.His many awards and prizes include:- Massachusetts Book Award in Non-Fiction: Revere Beach Elegy- Nomination for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award: Breakfast with Buddha- Massachusetts Book Honor Award in Fiction:American Savior- One of Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2013 (religious subjects): Vatican Waltz- American Library Association Alex Award: The Talk-Funny Girl- Boston Globe's 100 Essential Books of New England: Revere Beach Boulevard- Finalist LL Winship/PEN New England Prize: Revere Beach Boulevard- Booklist Editors Choice: In Revere, In Those Days- Maria Thomas Fiction Prize for Year's Best Novel by a former Peace Corps Volunteer: In Revere, In Those Days- Kirkus Reviews "Best of 2013" List: Lunch with Buddha- B.Dalton Discovery Series: Leaving Losapas- Good Housekeeping's Ten Wonderful Romance Novels: A Little Love StoryHis best-selling novel, Breakfast with Buddha, has gone into its 20th printing and has sold over 200,000 copies. Like Golfing with God before it, and American Savior after it, Breakfast with Buddha treats questions of philosophy/spirituality from a multi-denominational viewpoint and with a healthy dose of humor. The novel has become a favorite with book clubs all over the country and been the focus of numerous community-wide reads from Colorado to Connecticut. It was based on an actual trip Merullo took from New York to North Dakota, most of it in the company of his wife and daughters.Also based on actual road trips, and also available in various formats (including a collector's edition) is Merullo's 2012 novel, Lunch with Buddha, the long-awaited sequel to Breakfast with Buddha. Lunch with Buddha details a trip from Washington State to North Dakota with the same wonderful characters as its predecessor. In a Starred Review, Kirkus called it, "a beautifully written and compelling story about a man's search for meaning that earnestly and accessibly tackles some well-trodden but universal questions. A quiet meditation on life, death, darkness and spirituality, sprinkled with humor, tenderness and stunning landscapes." Lunch with Buddha recently went into a fifth printing and has also been widely translated.Dinner with Buddha follows the same cast of characters from Breakfast with Buddha and Lunch with Buddha as they make another hilarious, spiritually uplifting road trip across the American west.Merullo's novella, Rinpoche's Remarkable Ten-Week Weight Loss Clinic, features two of the characters from the Buddha Trilogy. Ostensibly about a weight loss clinic run by the meditation master Volya Rinpoche, this compact and deftly structured story explores aspects of addiction and self-appreciation from a fresh vantage point.An avid and accomplished golfer, his Ten Commandments of Golf Etiquette, is perfect for those who are new to the game and want to master the complicated dance that is on-course behavior. His other golf-related books include Passion for Golf; In Pursuit of the Innermost Game, Golfing with God, and The Italian Summer.The Return is a dark and thrilling sequel to Revere Beach Boulevard and follows the lives of a circle of people who are linked by one man's addiction.Merullo's humorous travel memoir, Taking the Kids to Italy, is a light read that tells the story of a disastrous family trip to Italy. Everything that could possibly go wrong, did go wrong, from illness to cold houses, but the author shines the light of laughter on all of it and creates a story that will appeal to armchair travelers and to any family that has met with vacation challenges.His novel, Vatican Waltz, received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the five best books of 2013 on the subject of religion. More serious than his other spiritual novels, it tells the intriguing story of a young Catholic woman who believes she is being called by God to become a parish priest.Merullo's 2005 novel, Golfing with God, has just been re-optioned for film by Gemfilms and the actor John Turturro held the option to Leaving Losapas for ten years.The Talk-Funny Girl, a 2011 Alex Award winner, is the story of a teenage girl in rural New Hampshire who escapes an abusive home life in a most unusual way. It follows a theme that can be found in almost all Merullo's books, that is, a person who bravely overcomes some past trauma, whether that be the stress of war, illness, divorce, addiction, or early abuse. The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.Please watch Roland's FaceBook page for news of upcoming workshops and events or visit his website www.rolandmerullo.com to sign up for his popular monthly newsletter (essays, giveaways, serialized stories, announcements).
Read an Excerpt
A Little Love Story
By Roland Merullo
Random House
Roland MerulloAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1400048672
Chapter One
Chapter 1
My year of mourning was over, and I decided to mark the anniversary by treating myself to a doughnut.
By my own choice, I had not had sex with anyone during those twelve months. I'm not sure why I did that. Maybe it was out of respect for the woman I had lost, though she wouldn't have wanted anything like that from me. My older brother is a monk, so maybe I was trying to prove I could keep up with him in the abstinence department. Or maybe I was just afraid I would meet someone I liked and sleep with her, then start to think about her all the time, then start to want to have children with her, and then she would be torn away from me and spirited off to some better world--if there is a better world--and that is not the kind of thing you want to go through twice in one year.
So on that wet September night my year of abstinence was finished, and I went out looking for a doughnut as a sort of offbeat celebration. That's all, really. A doughnut says: Listen, for your eighty-five cents I'm going to give you a quick burst of feel-good. No soul connection. No quiet walks. No long foreplay sessions in a warm one-bedroom. No extinction of aloneness. No jealousy. No fights. No troubles. No risk.
On that night, the risk I thought I was willing to take extended only as far as chocolate-glazed. Steaming cup of decaf next to it, little bit of cream, the shabby comfort of my favorite doughnut shop. It seemed a small enough thing to ask, after the year I'd seen.
The steady rain that had been falling during the afternoon and early part of the night had quieted to a light drizzle. The streets were black and wet, streaked with color from storefront neon and traffic lights. I worked my old pickup out of its parking space--foolish move, giving up a parking space in that neighborhood at that late hour--and drove to Betty's.
There is no Betty. Once there might have been, but at that point Betty's was owned by Carmine Asalapolous, a rough-edged, middle-aged man who had told me once that he wished he'd done something heroic in his life so he'd have a piece of high ground to fall back on when the devils of self-doubt were after him. Carmine, I said, just being a decent person, good father, excellent doughnut-maker--that's enough heroism for one life. But he shook his big head sadly and said no, it wasn't, not for him.
Carmine went to a two-hour Orthodox service on Sunday mornings. During the week he liked to make off-color jokes with his regular customers. He had some kind of mindless prejudice against college professors, a scar between his eyebrows that looked like a percent sign, and two young daughters whom he adored and whose pictures and drawings were taped up on every vertical surface in Betty's. He took his work seriously. If you got him going on the subject of doughnut-making, he'd tell you the chain doughnut shops used only the cheapest flour, which is why you left those places with a pasty aftertaste on your tongue.
I parked in front. The roof of Betty's was dripping and one cold droplet caught me on the left ear as I walked in. I remember that odd detail. In line at the counter I held a little debate with myself--how wild a night should it be?--then asked for two chocolate-glazed instead of one, a medium instead of a small decaf. Carmine was counting money in the floury kitchen. I could see him there through a sort of glassless window. He looked up at me from his stack of bills, pointed with his chin at the waitress's back, and made a John Belushi face, pushing his lips to the side and lifting one eyebrow, the expression of a man who had not a millionth of a chance of ever touching the waitress in a way she liked, and knew it.
I carried my paper cup of coffee and paper plate with two doughnuts on it to a stool at a counter that looked out on Betty's wet parking lot. In a minute a trim, balding man sat beside me, with a black coffee and the Sports section of the New York Times. "Nice truck," he said.
"Thanks."
"I saw you get out of it," he said.
I could not think of any response to this.
He kept trying. He said: "You don't see many of them still around. Fifty-one Dodge?"
"Forty-nine."
"Gorgeous," he said. "Like you."
I looked away. I was waiting for my coffee to cool, and was not really in the mood to talk, and though I understand sexual loneliness as well as the next person, there was not much I could do about this man's loneliness. Just at that exact moment--it was after midnight--a woman walked out of Betty's carrying a small bag and got into her car and she must have had a slippery shoe or been distracted by something because she put her new Honda in reverse and drove it across about fifteen open feet of parking lot and straight into the back of my truck.
"Whoa!" the man beside me yelled.
I took a good hot sip of coffee. I watched the woman get out, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand and looking as if she wished she had never been born. And then, very calmly, I went outside to talk to her.
Excerpted from A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Reading Group Guide
1. One of the things Jake enjoys most about his relationship with Janet is the comfort of the shared moods that make words seem unnecessary. But in what seem like Janet's final hours, Jake regrets not having said more. What thoughts and feelings should he have expressed more explicitly? What opportunities do you think he's missed for sharing his feelings?
2. What does Jake's work as a carpenter mean to him? Do you think he would continue in this line of work if his paintings earned him enough to make a good living?
3. On their first night together, Janet is standing naked in Jake's apartment when he reflects, "No woman had ever been so naked with me . . . it was almost inhuman to be as naked as that." What does he mean by this? How does Janet make him feel this way?
4. How would you describe Governor Valvelsais's feelings for Janet? Are the qualities he sees in her the same ones that attract Jake?
5. The word machine is used several times in the book to describe people in a derogatory way: the September 11 terrorists are described as machines. Ellory refers to unreflective people as machines. But Jake also describes Janet's detachment when administering her own medicine and tests as machine-like. In her case, is the description negative? How does the meaning of the word shift from terrorists and religious automatons to Janet?
6. Why does Janet add her name to the waiting list for a lung transplant? Does she have any real hope that she will survive the wait?
7. In all her confusion, Jake's mother has moments of clarity—and one significant moment of revelation when she recalls "living lobal." Why do you think it takes Jake so long to realize her meaning? Given the circumstances, did you see her blurting out "living low-ball," as Jake heard it, as significant at the time?
8. Before taking his painting of Janet to Dr. Vaskis as a bribe, Jake revises it to reflect his new understanding of her courage. What qualities do you think the painting conveyed before the revision? How do the changes he makes to the painting reflect the changes in Jake and Janet's relationship, and in Jake's openness to love?
9. Both Jake, with his painful, recent, romantic history, and Janet, with her realistically limited expectations for a romantic future, have reasons to be reluctant in exposing their hearts to what seems like a doomed relationship. What is it that makes each of them decide to take the risk?
10. Why does Jake continue to call his sister, though her circumstances and attitude never seem to improve? What does this act reveal about his character?
11. Janet explains to Jake the reasons she is drawn to politics, and also a list of reasons she would not wish to hold an elected office herself. Do you think she would be as reluctant to run for office if she were healthy? How does her illness affect her political idealism?
12. Of his mother, Gerard, and Ellory, is there one character who you think provides Jake with the best moral support? Who do you think is Jake's best advisor?
13. Why does Janet choose Jake over the governor?
14. What do you make of Amelia Rossi's elaborate Thanksgiving feast? Is this overabundance just a family tradition or do you see it as something more meaningful?
15. Why does Jake take Janet to Shanksville? What purpose does this trip serve for him, and why is it important that Janet be there?
16. Are there any silver linings to Janet's illness?