Kila Springs Press Catalog
Newer Titles
The Crocodiles of Chibembe
A Natural History
David Ollier Weber
Two middle-aged Americans, Daniel Schuman and his wife Laura, are among a truckload of international travelers on an overland safari through backcountry Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi in 1993. Camping in the bush in lion territory, digging out of muddy streambeds, making friends in remote villages, scouting game on the open veld, stalking an elephant in a mopani thicket on foot, confronting near-tragedy while crossing a crocodile-infested river in a rickety boat... they receive an immersive education in animal and human behaviors in keeping with the driver's tongue-in-cheek warning: Mamba Safaris is an acronym for “Many Anxious Moments in Bleedin’ Africa.” If I were ever to try to turn this trip into a novel, Daniel later reflected, I’d have to make up some more detailed back-stories to flesh out my fellow travelers…. What I could also do, I mused, was have them killed off one by one. Alistair dragged from his tent in the night by the prowling lion at Nsefu... Greta “taken” by a crocodile at the river ford... Reg jumped by a leopard on the fringe of bush camp... Nigel overrun and trampled by the bull elephant... Gerhard, haplessly without a knife, swallowed by a python... Melody bitten in the butt by a black mamba during a loo stop.... I could eliminate them in inverse order to the degree to which we’d connected, and spare them according to their youth and physical attractiveness.... I’d have suspense, mounting tension, incident. Who among us would be next to fall victim to Africa’s perils? Who among us would be left, who’d be at the wheel, by the time we pulled into the Kamuzu International Airport parking lot?
ISBN: 9781733847940
Paperback, Paperback, 406 pages
Publication date: June 16, 2020
List Price: $18.95
Tax & Shipping: $6.05
Still Life with Colostomy (Book One)
Not me
David Ollier Weber
When you look between your legs and the toilet bowl is crimson, you know it’s not a good sign….
If you’re David Ollier Weber, you spend the next weeks and months seeking diagnoses, weighing treatment options and contemplating courses of action:
In fact, what you’d glimpsed was so off-putting you’d begun to entertain the notion of simply letting the disease run its course. Do nothing, shun treatment altogether. Nature, you’d concluded, has given you a clear message: Die.
This, of course, is Nature’s message from the moment of conception—and a mixed message, to be sure, because every strand in your DNA is also coded to snarl, “Screw that!”
ISBN: 9781733847919
Paperback, 581 pages
Publication date: March 13, 2020
List Price: $19.95
Tax & Shipping: $6.05
Still Life with Colostomy (Book Two)
Yes, you
David Ollier Weber
One morning in the shower a thought takes shape under the water drumming on your scalp….
What if you recast everything in second person? Let the generic “you” morph into the personal, particular “you?” That would suggest, paradoxically, more of the universality you’re aiming for and you think is justified… even though what you’re recounting is undeniably individual, autobiographical. It would provide a certain remove from your own experience. A sliver of objectivity.
In the “I” convention the author is other. The reader remains separate, outside, passively regaled by someone apart who’s relating their idiosyncratic thoughts and experiences (the unisex “their”). In the “you” construction (it’s too infrequent in literature to be styled a convention), reader and author are fused. The former might never have done anything remotely like what the latter is ascribing to them (that’s the unisex “them,” although almost surely they have done something at least recognizably similar) or felt at all the same way (emotionally, philosophically, politically), but that knowing, familiar, maybe accusatory “you” sucks the reader inside the author’s skin.
ISBN: 9781733847902
Paperback, 793 pages
Publication date: January 17, 2020
List Price: $21.95
Tax & Shipping: $7.05
When Life Hands You Lemons…
...and other trite bullshit we tell ourselves to get through cancer.
Katie Weber
When the possibility of death is put in front of your face, you start to look back on your life, intentionally or not. We all do this occasionally, but when death is staring you down, one way to take it on is to reflect on all the blessings that your life has already brought you. Duhhh…I know…such a trite observation. But trite observations become trite for a reason: they are based in real human experiences that happen to many of us every day. And people lean on them in times of struggle, because their very triteness is what brings comfort: you are not alone. Others have been here before you. And they made it well enough that a saying evolved surviving that struggle. It’s what the best art does. It taps into the universal human experience and expresses it just.so. That’s right, I said it. Trite sayings are art. In their own right.
ISBN: 9781733847926
Paperback, 121 pages
Publication date: October 29, 2019
List Price: $10.00
Tax & Shipping: $5.00
Where's Mother?
A Novel in Three Voices
Christine Leigh-Taylor
Margaret Drake is one capable woman. She’s happily married to engineer Tom, teaches college English and is raising three bright, good-looking, self-possessed kids.
Then the idyll is shattered, Tom decides to try the single life and teenage daughter Laura is instantly plunged into management of the household while Margaret reenters the social scene. The situation turns murkier when Margaret moves with her children to Nashville in a foolhardy attempt to maintain a relationship with a young drifter who fancies himself a budding country music star.
The time is 1985. There are no cell phones, no laptops, and no social media. What happens unfolds first from Laura’s viewpoint, then from Tom’s, and finally from Margaret’s. Where’s Mother? is simultaneously a coming-of-age story and a cautionary tale of mid-life delusions. Transformation is the thread that unites the reflections of each story-teller.
ISBN: 0971648173
Paperback, 228 pages
Publication date: September 22, 2012
List Price: $12.95
Tax & Shipping: $5.05
My Life in Sports
A Novel in Four Quarters
David Ollier Weber
So there I sat, bare as a baby in a diaper under my swaddling cloths, nearly three- quarters of a century of experiences embodied in the sack of wrinkled gooseflesh uncomfortably enclosed... reviewing the table of contents for my "Apologia Pro Vita Sua." My "Scenes from the Seven Ages of Man"... or rather, of "A man".... Only why seven? Far be it from me to question Shakespeare or his source, apparently
Ecclesiastes. But that seems an odd divisor, doesn’t it? In more than the numerical sense? You could just as easily use three, say, like the periods in ice hockey and lacrosse. Childhood, vigorous adulthood, senility. Or five, like the sets in men’s tennis. Or nine, for that matter, like the innings in baseball... even fifteen, the rounds in a championship boxing match, if you’re into really fine-grained detail. Granted, the World Series can go to seven games. But four strikes me as the most à propos segmentation—like the quarters in football and basketball. Childhood, young adulthood, middle age, old age. "My Life in Four Quarters." Obvious sports metaphor.
I like that title....
ISBN: 0971648142
Paperback, 529 pages
Publication date: July 23, 2012
List Price: $19.95
Tax & Shipping: $6.05
Bad Trips: Stories
David Ollier Weber
Jerks. Bitches. Punks. Spades. They’re on the roads. They’re crossing the roads. They're fouling the buses. They’re fouling on the basketball court. In "Jerks," a comfortably “well-insulated middle-class middle-manager—padded by file-folderfuls of official paper against these vicissitudes”—responds to an act of road rage with a conflicted equanimity that, as he prowls the streets of Berkeley, quickly spirals into a something else.
In "No Fault," a car-proud investment advisor on his way home from a frustrated tryst encounters a dog and a moral dilemma on a lonely highway in Northern California.
In "Bus Ride," a lawyer commuting across San Francisco Bay after teaching an evening class agonizes over how to react to the vicious provocations of a trio of loutish young passengers.
In "American Pastime," a graduate student at an urban university works off his ennui in a pickup basketball game that wounds more than his pride. White, liberal, educated, affluent, the protagonists in these four stories find they are not who they seem—to themselves or to the “others” who suddenly loom to test their character.
ISBN: 0971648180
Paperback, 230 pages
Publication date: September 22, 2012
List Price: $11.95
Tax & Shipping: $4.05
CHUN
David Ollier Weber
In a remote cabin above California’s Big Sur coast, Roger Nall lights a candle and kneels before his paperback copy of the I Ching. His potter girlfriend Sharon slumbering nearby, is pregnant. They’ve talked about having their baby here in the cabin—alone, without electricity, unassisted. It occurs to Roger to consult the ancient Chinese Book of Change for a Confucian augury.
The year is 1968. Roger writes poetry while living on savings from his pre-Vietnam Navy service. To him, “natural” childbirth is a romantic and philosophical choice. In his own eyes he’s “a bearded recluse with his hippie woman resolutely scorning all the frou-frou of civilization, determinedly celebrating the joys of rusticity according to the great American transcendentalist tradition.” When it comes to childbirth, he maintains, millennia of human history prove “Nature is perfectly capable of blipping a baby out of the womb without any fourth-party interference.”
Sharon agrees. She’s been encouraged by a Berkeley friend who gave birth at home using only an emergent breathing technique for pain control called the Lamaze method. Sharon is young, vigorous, healthy and brave. She is as committed as Roger to the organic life.
Roger tosses the coins to derive the fateful l Ching symbol. It’s a set of six broken and unbroken lines—yin and yang—labeled CHUN. This hexagram, he reads to his dismay, stands for “DIFFICULTY.”
But he finds a hopeful coda in the explanatory text. “If we heed the omens,” it promises—and there will be no lack of them when Sharon goes into labor—“our success is assured....”
ISBN: 9780971648166
Paperback, 230 pages
Publication date: July 1, 2012
List Price: $13.95
Tax & Shipping: $5.05
Other Titles from Kila Springs Press
Catch/Release: A Novel
David Ollier Weber
There are hitchhikers and then there are hitchhikers. There are also wives, trout, concealed weapons, Republicans and the Lone Ranger.
ISBN: 0971648159
Paperback, 268 pages
Publication date: December 12, 2010
List Price: $17.95
Tax & Shipping: $6.05
Back Cover
Family Fun: Stories
David Ollier Weber
"...Disturbing and frightening.... A kind of raw, physical prose that I found quite impressive."- Daniel Menaker, The New Yorker
ISBN: 0971648131
Paperback, 248 pages
Publication date: April 24, 2006
List Price: $13.95
Back Cover
Read excerpt
Baja: A Novel
David Ollier Weber
"...An unrelenting escalation of fear and violence.... What willingness to risk death does a man owe a woman to whom he has no formal commitment...?"- Philip Libros, Amazon.com
ISBN: 0971648123
Paperback, 282 pages
Publication date: February 1, 2006
List Price: $13.95
Tax & Shipping: $5.05
Vanity (Fiction)
David Ollier Weber
“...An honest account of how us boys in this odd land where no one ever quite grows up look at reflective glass and wonder, 'Is that me? Did anybody else survive the wreck?”- Bruce Anderson, Anderson Valley Advertiser
ISBN: 0971648107
Paperback, 129 pages
Publication date: April 3, 2002
List Price: $12.95
List Price: $5.05
Accustomed to Hope: The Episcopal Church on the Mendocino Coast
St. Michael and All Angels, Fort Bragg, California, 1902-2002
David Ollier Weber
"...Better than a charming introduction to the beginnings and subsequent vicissitudes of Anglican life on the Pacific Coast..., the author manages to write touching social history of the area...”- Caroline T. Marshall, James Madison University
ISBN: 0971648115
Paperback, 183 pages, illustrated
Publication date: December 13, 2002
List Price: $25.00
Tax & Shipping: $6.00
Oakland: Hub of the West
David Weber
Photography by Peter Menzel
"Exceptionally well done: extensive, detailed historical essays with a striking selection of historical photographs...."- Wikipedia, "Books about Oakland, California"
ISBN: 0932986161
Hard cover, large format, 224 pages, illustrated
Publication date: 1981 Continental Heritage Press (American Portrait Series)
List Price: $24.95
Out of print