BLUE MONKEYS coming soon from SHY CITY HOUSE [Chicago] is a story-within-a-story. Meet the modern translators of the lost language of Atlantis – and their New York City neighbors; follow the Mediterranean Bronze Age copper trade to North American Lake Superior. Organized in 3 sections plus a Coda, the upbeat novel spans 2019 – 2022 — the continental USA and the ancient/modern Aegean. Professors Pidge & Pearl translate Crete’s Minoan Linear A via the story of Pasikennae, a sea-faring bull leaper in their book whose excerpts introduce some chapters in the novel. It begins in Spring, 2019, as NYTimes journalist David Rochester and his TV star husband Alan Tapley move w/twin toddlers from LA to a NYC Beaux Arts apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Here, the people and events they encounter include both the autumn arrival of a new tenant who is murdered within a month — and a global pandemic. The evidence for whodunnit where, when, and how occupies the arcs for both BLUE MONKEYS.
BLUE MONKEYS is available for purchase at:
Barnes and Nobles
Books-A-Million
IndieBound
The back cover of HOW SHE CAME TO KNOW coming soon from PAGE TURNER BOOKS, INC. [North Carolina] has a short synopsis whose white lettering is better read when you hold the IRL book. The longer version: HOW SHE CAME TO KNOW is the story of Marwa Al-hal, a Muslim-American-born daughter of immigrant Alexandrian Egyptians who moved to Battery Park City in lower Manhattan so their daughter could attend Stuyvesant High, one of the City’s magnet public schools for math & science.
The novel begins in the fall of 2000, when high school junior Marwa meets 22-year old Denim Prix (“Pree”), the highest-paid male model in NYC. Marwa’s turbulent junior year of high school follows. Later, Marwa goes on a date with Denim Prix in East Hampton, where he has a key to a celebrity mansion belonging to a movie star with whom he shares a past … that he hopes Marwa’s innocence can redeem.
The climax of the novel is Marwa’s 9/11. Marwa’s story concludes 3 years later, Summer2004-April 29, 2005 (Marwa’s 21st birthday). The coda chapter, 10 years later in 2015, reunites family and friends at a gay wedding in upstate NY.
HOW SHE CAME TO KNOW Now available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, and iBooks!
Fiction – short stories
Sept. 4, 2025 Probabilities in The Heartland Review. https://elizabethtown.kctcs.edu/community/theheartlandreviewpress/
June 25, 2025 Even in Queens in Perceptions Magazine https://www.flipsnack.com/morrowj/perceptions-2025/full-view.html
April, 2025 The Sand Octopus Volume 15 Tenth Muse https://lsbassen.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/493d5-tenthmusevolume15_reduced.pdf
Poetry
7/7/25 July and Veranda in the 2025 Summer Muses’ Gallery Anthology, Message in a Bottle https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1312427347139996&set=a.579194347129970
6//6/25 Winged Burning Bush in Rhode Island Bards Poetry Review 2025, publisher Local Gems Press, check out the website and Facebook page. The Rhode Island Bards Team
5/25/25 Veranda on Highland Park’s Poetry FB page and Instagram https://highlandparkpoetry.org/
12/13/24 Autumn Garden hybrid poem stankoart.com in inaugural issue of 912 Review, a literary & art journal celebrating the intersection of poetry and visual art https://www.912review.com/_files/ugd/a7af41_d20dbc0b241041f4b60fd5973e0effb6.pdf
L. Shapley Bassen 