Please, San Antonio! & Melisande in Paris are two delightful novellas written by award-winning authors about women who journey to Rome and Paris and find creativity, identity, love, and healing.
In Eve La Salle Caram's Please, San Antonio!, an emotionally isolated American woman's trip to Rome becomes a powerful quest to find what she has lost: her creativity, identity, and "an open place in her heart."
In Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's Melisande in Paris, a young seamstress from the French countryside comes to Paris to assist her dressmaker aunt, and rediscovers her talent, strength, and a precious "feeling of wholeness" in her new lover's arms.
Together, Caram's Beatrice and Brainard's Melisande cross geographical borders and borders of the heart with vitality and spirit, and will inspire those who believe in the possibility of heaven on heart.
Eve La Salle Caram is the author of five novels, those in her book Trio, A Corpus Christi Trilogy, and the interconnected duo of The Blue geography and Wintershine. She is also the editor of Palm Readings, Stories from Southern California, a multicultural anthology of stories by Southern California women.
For over thirty years she has taught Literature and Writing at California State University, Northridge, and Fiction Writing at UCLA Extension's renowned Writers' Program where she won the Outstanding Instructor in Creative Writing in 2006. She also teaches at Los Angeles City College whose students helped inspire her novel, Rena, A Late Journey, and who asked her to write Looking for Johnny, the short novel that completes Trio. All of her books have been used in Literature and Writing classes in California and in Texas.
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard has written three novels: When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, and The Newspaper Widow. She has also written and edited eighteen other books, including the two volumes of Growing Up Filipino, a widely praised book used in many classrooms.
Cecilia has received a California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction, a Brody Arts Fund Award, a Special Recognition Award for her work dealing with Asian American youths, as well as a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Senate, 21st District. She has also been awarded by the Filipino and Filipino American communities she has served. In 1998, she received the Outstanding Individual Award from her birth city, Cebu, Philippines. She has received several travel grants in the Philippines, from the USIS (United States Information Service). In 2001, she received a Filipinas Magazine Award for Arts. Her books have won the Gourmand Award and the Gintong Aklat Award. Her literary work is recognized as significant contributions to Filipino, Philippine American, and Asian American literature.
