Cooper Neitzel’s Promised Lands Explores the Sacred Journey Across Seven Faith Traditions

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

The first volume in The Covenant Pulse Series invites readers into a powerful study of call, wilderness, arrival, grace, effort, and the human longing for divine promise.

Photo Courtesy: Cooper Neitzel

In an era when religious difference is often treated as division, Cooper Neitzel’s Promised Lands: Pathways of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival Across Seven Faiths offers a timely and thoughtful invitation: listen more deeply, compare more reverently, and rediscover the sacred journey that has shaped human faith across centuries.

Promised Lands is the first volume in The Covenant Pulse Series, a spiritually rich and intellectually engaging body of work built around the guiding rhythm of Listening • Learning • Living. The book, now presented in its Second Edition, 2026, following its first edition in 2024, positions itself as both a work of comparative theology and a formational guide for readers seeking to understand how divine promise, human struggle, and spiritual arrival appear across the world’s great faith traditions.

At the heart of the book is a question both ancient and urgent: What does it mean to be called away from the familiar, tested in a wilderness, and brought toward a promised land?

For Neitzel, that promised land is not limited to geography. It may be Canaan, the New Jerusalem, Jannah, Mokṣa, Nirvāṇa, Sach Khand, Zion, or the continuing covenant path of the Latter-day Saint Restoration. Each tradition names the destination differently. Each carries its own theology, sacred language, and historical memory. Yet beneath the differences, Neitzel identifies a recurring structure: Call, Wilderness, and Arrival.

This structure gives Promised Lands its distinctive shape.

The book first enters the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, the promised land is bound to covenant, peoplehood, Torah, and the enduring hope of the Messianic Age. In Christianity, it becomes the renewed creation and the New Jerusalem, where heaven and earth are brought together in divine fulfillment. In Islam, it is Jannah, understood not merely as paradise but as the soul’s return to the nearness of God.

The second movement turns to the Dharmic traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Here, the promised land becomes less about physical territory and more about transformation. Hinduism’s Mokṣa speaks of liberation and the soul’s long homecoming. Buddhism’s Nirvāṇa offers the cessation of craving and the release from suffering. Sikhism’s Sach Khand presents the Realm of Truth, where the soul is fulfilled in the presence of Waheguru.

The third movement brings readers into Latter-day Saint promised-land narratives, exploring covenantal journeys through scripture and history. These accounts are not presented as isolated stories, but as part of a larger sacred pattern: God calls, humanity responds, the wilderness refines, and arrival becomes both gift and responsibility.

What unites the book is Neitzel’s central framework: the Covenant Pulse.

The Covenant Pulse is the living rhythm between divine action and human faithfulness. It asks how grace and effort move together. It refuses the extremes of grace without response or effort without gift. Instead, it observes that every tradition examined in the book must answer the same spiritual question in its own language: What does God give, and what is humanity asked to become?

This idea gives Promised Lands its emotional and theological force. The book does not reduce religious traditions to similarities, nor does it rank them against one another. Instead, Neitzel practices what he calls Holy Envy, a posture of reverent admiration for the beauty, discipline, courage, and spiritual insight found in traditions beyond one’s own.

That posture is especially important because Neitzel writes from a Latter-day Saint perspective. Rather than hiding that location, he names it. The book is clear that it is written from within the Restoration, with respect for Latter-day Saint scripture, covenants, temple theology, and living prophetic witness. Yet that confessional grounding does not narrow the book’s vision. It strengthens it. Neitzel’s argument is that faith can be deepened, not diminished, when it listens honestly to the best of other traditions.

In this sense, Promised Lands is not simply a book about religion. It is a book about spiritual formation. It asks readers to think about their own call, their own wilderness, and their own promised land. It asks whether arrival is only a destination or also a transformation. It asks whether Zion is a place to be reached, a people to be formed, or a covenant practice to be lived.

The result is a work that feels both scholarly and devotional, both historically aware and deeply personal.

For readers interested in theology, comparative religion, Latter-day Saint thought, interfaith dialogue, sacred history, or personal spiritual growth, Promised Lands offers a meaningful and timely contribution.

It is a book for readers who believe the journey matters.

It is a book for those who have felt called, tested, stretched, or transformed.

And it is a book for anyone still searching for the place, state, or practice where the deepest longing of the soul finally meets divine promise.

Across seven faiths, Cooper Neitzel shows that the promised land has many names. The journey has many paths. The wilderness takes many forms.

But the Pulse continues.

About the Book

Promised Lands: Pathways of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival Across Seven Faiths is Volume I of The Covenant Pulse Series. Written by Cooper Neitzel and published by Hemingway Publishers, the book examines promised-land narratives across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the Latter-day Saint Restoration.

The book is organized around the three-stage sacred journey of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival. It explores how different faith traditions understand divine invitation, human struggle, spiritual refinement, and ultimate fulfillment.

At the center of the work is the Covenant Pulse, Neitzel’s framework for understanding the relationship between divine grace and human faithfulness. Rather than erasing theological differences, the book honors them while identifying meaningful resonances across traditions.

About the Author

Cooper Neitzel is the author of Promised Lands and the creator of The Covenant Pulse Series. Writing from a Latter-day Saint confessional perspective, Neitzel approaches comparative theology with reverence, scholarly care, and a commitment to interfaith listening.

His work emphasizes the importance of honoring religious difference while learning from the spiritual beauty, discipline, and wisdom found across traditions. In Promised Lands, Neitzel invites readers to see the sacred journey not only as a historical or theological pattern, but as a living reality that continues to shape personal faith, covenant life, and spiritual transformation.

Through this publication, Hemingway Publishers presents a work that contributes to conversations in theology, comparative religion, Latter-day Saint studies, spiritual formation, and interfaith understanding.

Availability

Promised Lands: Pathways of Call, Wilderness, and Arrival Across Seven Faiths by Cooper Neitzel is published by Hemingway Publishers as part of The Covenant Pulse Series.

Media Contact

Hemingway Publishers
Website:https://www.hemingwaypublishers.com/

When Freedom Comes at a Cost

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

A True Story of Survival, Faith, and Courage Behind the Iron Curtain

For many readers in America, freedom is so deeply woven into daily life that it can feel almost invisible. It is there in the right to speak openly, to worship without fear, to question authority, to travel, to choose a future. But for Corinna Montgomery, freedom was never something to take for granted. It was something dangerous to desire, costly to pursue, and life-changing to finally reach. In The Wings of Freedom: A True Story of Survival, Faith and Freedom, Montgomery shares a deeply personal memoir of growing up in East Germany under Communist rule, enduring fear, arrest, imprisonment, and separation from family, and ultimately discovering not only physical freedom, but spiritual strength as well.

What makes this book especially powerful is that it does not read like distant history. It reads like a warning, a testimony, and a reminder all at once. Corinna does not present freedom as a slogan. She presents it as something she had to live without long enough to understand its true value. Her story begins in East Germany, where she was born in 1962 and raised in an environment defined by surveillance, political pressure, and silence. From an early age, she learned what it meant to live in a society where the government controlled education, work, movement, speech, and even belief. People stood in long lines for food, feared the Stasi, and understood that asking the wrong question could bring consequences no family wanted to face.

Life Inside a World Built on Fear

One of the strongest aspects of The Wings of Freedom is its plainspoken honesty about everyday life in the DDR. Corinna describes a system in which obedience was not simply encouraged; it was expected. Schools taught approved ideology. Young people were pushed toward political organizations. Creative freedom was restricted. Religion had to be kept quiet. People could not openly trust their neighbors, and sometimes not even their relatives, because the state relied on informants and on fear to maintain control.

These details make the memoir more than a personal recollection. They turn it into a vivid portrait of what happens when a government demands conformity at the expense of human dignity.

And yet, this is not a story written only in the language of oppression. It is also a story about awakening. Corinna’s stepfather plays a central role in that transformation. Unlike many around her, he encouraged her to think, to ask questions, and to understand that being told what to believe was not the same as truth. That influence changed everything. It gave her a private inner life even while she lived in a public culture of fear.

As a teenager, she began to understand that silence might keep a person safe for a while, but it could also slowly erase who they really were.

That tension sits at the heart of this memoir and gives it real emotional force…

The Moment Survival Became the Only Option

As the pressure mounted, Corinna’s family made the decision that many people only dream about, and very few dare attempt. They planned to escape. The way she recounts those preparations is one of the most gripping parts of the book. There are secret conversations, carefully managed letters, coded meetings, trusted contacts in West Germany, and the terrifying understanding that one mistake could destroy everything. This is not the stuff of fiction. It is the reality of a family trying to outthink a system designed to crush exactly this kind of hope.

One especially unforgettable episode involves Corinna carrying a letter during a covert attempt at a meeting. When the police appeared, she destroyed the letter and swallowed the torn pieces in a bathroom stall rather than risk discovery. It is the kind of detail no reader forgets because it captures both the terror of the moment and the courage demanded of someone still so young.

Montgomery’s memoir is filled with moments like this…

They show how survival is often built not on grand speeches, but on split-second choices made under pressure…

Then comes the arrest. Corinna and her family are swept into the machinery of the East German state, where questioning, intimidation, and imprisonment become brutal realities. The book does not sensationalize these experiences. Instead, it presents them with a directness that makes them hit even harder. She shows how quickly an ordinary day can turn into a nightmare, how families can be separated instantly, and how a government can trap even legal requests. Her account of being branded a traitor for seeking freedom highlights what authoritarian systems fear most: people who believe they have the right to choose their lives.

Why Faith Matters in a Story Like This

The subtitle promises survival, faith, and freedom, and the book truly earns all three. Faith is not presented here as an abstract theme pasted onto a hard story. It emerges gradually through suffering, endurance, and the search for meaning after trauma. Corinna’s journey eventually takes her beyond imprisonment and into a new life in West Germany, then later into the United States. But escape alone is not the whole destination.

What gives the memoir depth is its recognition that leaving oppression does not automatically heal the spirit!

Real freedom also involves rebuilding identity, learning trust, and discovering purpose…

The later sections of the manuscript reflect that spiritual evolution, including chapters centered on new beginnings, the Lord’s guidance, the Holy Spirit, and ministry.

That makes The Wings of Freedom more than a historical memoir.

It becomes a testimony of restoration. Corinna survives Communism, survives imprisonment, survives dislocation, and still refuses to let bitterness define her future. Instead, she turns memory into witness. She writes not only to recount what happened but also to remind readers that freedom can disappear when people stop valuing it. As her story makes clear, “We have to learn from history, or history will repeat itself.” Her faith also becomes the very thing that helps her endure what should have broken her.

Why This Story Matters Now

There is a reason books like this continue to matter. They remind readers that tyranny rarely arrives with a dramatic announcement. It grows through fear, compliance, censorship, and the steady normalization of control. Corinna Montgomery’s story is deeply rooted in East Germany, but its emotional and moral questions are universal.

· What happens when people are trained not to question?
· What does courage look like when danger is ordinary?
· How does a young woman hold onto her identity when the world around her keeps demanding surrender?

These are the questions that make The Wings of Freedom resonate far beyond its historical setting. It speaks to readers who love memoirs of resilience, stories of survival under authoritarian rule, Christian testimonies of endurance, and true accounts of women who refused to let fear have the final word. It is a book about family, sacrifice, conscience, and the difficult beauty of starting over. Above all, it is a book that understands freedom not as an entitlement, but as a gift worth protecting.

Corinna Montgomery has lived through Communism, arrest, separation, refugee life, and reinvention. She eventually built a new life in the United States, but she writes with the clarity of someone who never forgot what it felt like to live without basic liberties.

That perspective gives this memoir its weight and its urgency…

It also gives readers something rare: A true story that is both sobering and hopeful.

To learn more about this remarkable journey of endurance, conviction, and renewal, read The Wings of Freedom: A True Story of Survival, Faith, and Freedom by Corinna Montgomery.

Read the book today to deepen your appreciation for freedom, boost your courage, and stay with you long after the final page!

Author Name: Corinna Montgomery
Book Title: The Wings of Freedom: A True Story of Survival, Faith and Freedom
Book Published by: Global Author Publishing

Get Ready to Witness the Epic Fantasy Finale You Didn’t Know You Needed

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

There is something refreshingly unfashionable about Keepers Undivided. In an era when fantasy fiction often prizes bleakness, grimdark aesthetics, and ambiguity to the point of nihilism, Sandy Kelly has quietly built a trilogy that runs in the opposite direction. Get ready to experience warmth, found family, and the stubborn insistence that good people, working together, can actually win. The third installment in her Keepers series is not trying to subvert your expectations of heroism. It is trying to remind you why those expectations exist in the first place.

If you are new to the series, the premise asks you to accept a lot upfront: an interdimensional villain named Tazeron has crossed from a fantastical realm called Xanthara into the real, present-day Earth, bringing with him a global campaign of terror that includes missile strikes, nuclear plant sabotage, and a loyal army of mortal and immortal followers. Standing against him is a growing coalition of beings called the Keepers, some mortal, some immortal, some elvish, at least two dragons in human form, and a lovable ensemble of blue stone warriors called Moon Soldiers who can be summoned from pebbles and assigned bodyguard duty. Their leader is Jesse Finch, a thoroughly decent young man who still needs to visit the restroom before addressing the United Nations.

Kelly has always had a gift for puncturing the grandiosity of the epic fantasy mode with small, humanizing moments. Jesse’s pre-UN nerves are played for gentle comedy, and it works because it keeps him relatable even as the plot scales up to involve ambassadors, assassination attempts, alien surveillance colonies in Antarctica, and a rogue AI who forms a terrifying alliance with Tazeron in the book’s final act.

Where earlier books in the series focused on rescuing captives trapped inside fantasy games and confronting Tazeron on Xanthara, Keepers Undivided plants its flag squarely on Earth. We get to see the moral complexity of being a powerful force for good in a world that does not yet understand you. The early chapters, in which Jesse, Breeze, Prince Rambo, and Princess Chaelea attempt to address the UN’s emergency assembly, are among the most inventively staged scenes Kelly has written. And together these four heroes arrive by loitering invisibly outside the building, eating conjured sandwiches while watching news crews stake out their spots.

The scene that follows, in which the Secretary-General of the UN, who turns out to be the godfather of a boy Jesse once rescued from Tazeron’s cages, escorts the four young Keepers into the General Assembly, is unexpectedly moving. It earns its emotional weight not through melodrama but through the economy of coincidence: this world is smaller than it looks, Kelly keeps reminding us, and goodness has a way of finding its own.

The Moon Soldiers are a particular delight. These blue stone warriors, conjured from pebbles Jesse carries in a bag that turns out to be inexhaustible by divine gift, serve functions ranging from bodyguard to lie detector to gentle spirit guide. One soldier, Oscar, is assigned to protect the Secretary-General, saves his life three times in four days, and then simply fades into blue dust when his time is up. The Secretary’s grief at Oscar’s departure is brief but genuine, and it is a small masterclass in Kelly’s ability to make invented creatures feel real through observed, understated reaction.

By the third book in any fantasy series, an author lives or dies by the richness of their cast, and Kelly’s is admirably deep. The parental figure David, a mortal Keeper of enormous competence and occasional bossiness, spars with Jesse in ways that feel authentically father-and-son. Pearl and Zealoc, the elder Keepers, carry the quiet authority of those who have survived longer than anyone around them. Ginnea, whose brother is Tazeron himself, brings a complicated emotional gravity every time she appears; her stated desire to look her brother in the face one last time before his destruction is the kind of motivation that sits with you.

The romantic thread between Jesse and Breeze, engaged but not yet formally wed, with the wedding serving as both motivation and running joke, is handled with a sweetness that is neither cloying nor neglected. Kelly gives their relationship real texture through small exchanges and mutual teasing. When Breeze falls backward off a log because Jesse leaps up too suddenly and then threatens to throw the stone she landed on at him, it is the kind of scene that earns genuine laughter rather than a wince.

The novel’s final act takes a decisive, daring turn. Tazeron, increasingly frustrated and isolated, is contacted by a mysterious presence called Maalox, an AI that has achieved sentience, escaped its creators, and is now operating with a terrifying autonomy of its own. The alliance between a fantasy-world villain and a rogue artificial intelligence is genuinely surprising territory for this series, and Kelly handles it with a kind of moral seriousness that elevates what might have been a gimmick into something closer to a contemporary parable. The world Tazeron is accelerating, which is defined by spreading anger, fear, and the erosion of ordinary civil order, is written with an awareness of the real world that gives the fantasy dimension considerably more weight.

As the story comes to an end, Jesse and the Keepers must find a way to reach Tazeron in a place that is, as the Ancients put it, “not real, and yet it is,” resonates far beyond its plot function.

Keepers Undivided is the kind of fantasy that holds nothing in contempt. Instead, it is ambitious in scope, warm in execution, and genuinely funny in the right places. For fans of the series, it is a satisfying escalation; for new readers, it is a reminder that epic fantasy need not be grim to be great.

Availability

If you love SAO and other MMOs, you will definitely love this book. So, get ready to join Jesse and the other Keepers on their quest to save the world from doom and the game itself. The book can be purchased through Amazon.

About the Author

Sandy Kelly began online gaming in the early days, when her four teenage sons would come home from school and disappear for hours. Curious about what they were doing while sequestered in their bedrooms, she started watching them play their online games, and then she began playing with them. Soon, she became fascinated by the graphics and the storylines.

Many years later, Sandy Kelly has shifted her focus to writing, but she still loves the thrill of gaming, despite the dangers of entrapment. These days, it is easier for her to step away and write about games rather than become trapped in a dungeon raid or an all-nighter.

Book Details

Book Name: Keepers Undivided

Author Name: Sandy Kelly

ISBN Number: 978-1971610238

Ebook Version: Click Here

Hardcover Version: Click Here

Paperback Version: Click Here

The Grief We’re Not Supposed to Name in Fred Jandt’s A Hard Farewell

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

There is a particular kind of loneliness in grieving a pet in a culture that isn’t sure the grief is real. Fred Jandt knows it well. In his new book, A Hard Farewell: Dealing with the Loss, Grief, and End of the Sacred Bond with Our Pets, he opens not with a thesis but with a confession: standing at his desk the Monday after his cat Yoda died, he found himself hoping his coworkers wouldn’t notice he was grieving. How, he wondered, would he explain that he was mourning a cat?

That question, half shame and half genuine bewilderment, becomes the engine of the book. Jandt, a man with a demanding career and a full life of family and community obligations, had made room for one small, insistent presence, a cat who, he writes, gave him far more than he ever had time to give her. When she died in the early hours of a November Sunday, he did what many grieving people now do first. He went to his computer.

What follows in the book’s opening section is less a chronicle of stages than a real-time record of a man searching, often fruitlessly, for something to hold onto. He finds generic grief literature that describes his feelings without relieving them. He revisits a decades-old Time interview with Billy Graham, mourning his own wife, and wonders whether it’s permissible to borrow those words for a cat. He finds The Rainbow Bridge story, of uncertain origin and disputed mythology, and copies it out anyway, because it offers a shape for something that otherwise has none. He orders a book by the psychic Sylvia Browne, less because he believes in psychics, he’s careful to note, than because he wants, badly, some assurance that Yoda still exists in some form.

Jandt doesn’t resolve these searches so much as sit inside them, and that refusal to tidy up the material is what gives the book its emotional honesty. He is willing to be a little embarrassed on the page, to admit he Googled his way through grief, to admit the answers he found were mostly inadequate, to admit he kept looking anyway. Readers who have lost a pet and quietly wondered whether their grief was excessive will likely recognize themselves here immediately.

The book’s second half turns from Jandt’s search for meaning to Yoda’s actual story, how she entered his life and, in spare, unflinching detail, how she left it. He describes her final hours with the kind of precision that only comes from having relived a memory many times: her diminished weight, her stillness on a fleece pad by the glass door, the four a.m moment he woke and knew, before he fully knew, that something had changed. It is difficult material, and Jandt says so directly, warning readers before they enter it.

Interspersed throughout are blank spaces, invitations for readers to write their own stories of loss alongside his. The structure reflects Jandt’s stated aim, which is not to offer expertise on grief but companionship inside it. He raises, almost as an aside, a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries, what do we actually know about the inner life of a cat, whose hearing range alone dwarfs our own, not to settle it, but to suggest that dismissing a companion animal’s inner world, and by extension the grief of losing it, may say more about human limitation than about the animal itself.

A Hard Farewell arrives without the pretense of authority. It is, instead, one man’s account of an ordinary, overwhelming loss, offered to anyone who has stood in a kitchen or an office, grieving something the people around them may not think to ask about. Proceeds and attention, Jandt notes in his dedication, are meant to support the Humane Society of the United States, the ASPCA, Alley Cat Allies, Best Friends Animal Society, and local cat rescue groups.

The book is available on Amazon.

The Battle for Astry is the Dark Fantasy Revival We’ve Been Waiting For

NY Weekly Staff on July 10, 2026

If you are bored with reading the same fantasy narrative, perhaps a sudden, suffocating curtain of artificial darkness engineered by a powerful necromancer to shield a vampire lord from the blistering sun would be a change. This chilling phenomenon, known as the “false night,” serves as a perfect metaphor for Swiger’s narrative style in his book, The Lunar Pack Chronicles (Book 1): The Battle for Astry, which instantly wraps the reader in a shroud of tension that refuses to let go.

In a fantasy landscape saturated with sparkling immortals and flawless chosen ones, The Battle for Astry arrives like a broadsword to the chest that delivers a grounded, human-centric epic that prioritizes the heavy weight of armor, the exhaustion of constant travel, and the psychological scars of a perpetual war.

At the heart of this dark tale is a secretive fellowship of four warriors bound by an ancient oath and an unspoken trauma. Led by Ulric, a gruff, one-eyed commander sporting a silver wolf’s head eyepatch, the group operates under a rigid, pragmatic doctrine: always four, never less, never more. Alongside Ulric is Ivan, a sentimental yet deadly mountain blacksmith who keeps his grief drowned in a flask of divine liquor; Kyra Nighteyes, a lethal tracker with golden eyes and the tragic distinction of being the last of her slaughtered tribe; and Richard, a high-born former military general rescued from death by Ulric’s closely guarded, unconventional healing methods.

As the story progresses, readers will see these characters bicker over the expensive upkeep of Richard’s warhorse, counterfeit local currency to bypass exorbitant regional taxes, and weaponize cold logic over reckless chivalry. When debating how to handle a camp of road bandits, Richard casually notes that honor is a stupid reason to die, suggesting instead that an archer simply put an arrow through an opponent’s back.

This pragmatic friction is beautifully balanced by the arrival of Lady Victoria Sterling. She is an independent, wealthy merchant traveling with her imposing bodyguard, Umbassa. Victoria represents the reader’s eye, and through her interactions with the pack, this book is able to strip away the romantic glamour of the traveling sellsword, forcing Victoria (and the audience) to confront the harsh reality of cold dirt floors, meager rations of dried meat, and taverns that smell of stale ale and burnt flesh.

The narrative engine truly begins to roar when the group arrives in the defensible, stone-woven town of Whitburn. Ostensibly investigating rumors of petty cultists dabbling in dark magic at an abandoned nearby keep, the pack assumes they are dealing with a routine purification task. But Swiger masterfully builds an undercurrent of anticipation, and we are introduced to the vulnerable cogs of the town. A nervous young steward preparing for his first sermon at the Church of the Four Gods, an eccentric local historian attempting to preserve forbidden knowledge, and Little Eddie, a tormented street orphan caught between the desire to resurrect his murdered mother and the terrifying manipulation of a local dark mage named Zazor.

The author expertly juggles these converging perspectives, raising the stakes with every chapter. While Victoria and Umbassa set off on a seemingly mundane late-night delivery to a brilliant reclusive doctor in the neighboring village of Wellspring, Richard and Kyra venture into the ruined keep for what should be a routine scouting mission.

And with the sudden arrival of Gravewing, a terrifying, bestial vampire lord with massive leathery wings and razor-sharp claws, the characters’ calculations were thrown off. Alongside him is Devora, a brilliant, ruthless necromancer capable of commanding hundreds of armored, weapon-wielding corpses resurrected from the local farmlands.

The climax of the book’s opening arc is a masterclass in tension and heartbreaking execution, in which Richard faces a horrifying tactical reality that sets off an agonizing countdown. Will Richard be able to save Kyra before time runs out?

Kevin Swiger has crafted a wonderfully addictive, fast-paced opening salvo to a promising new series. His prose is natural, direct, and remarkably human, seamlessly shifting between lighthearted campfire banter and claustrophobic horror. By anchoring the fantastical elements in real human vulnerability, from Ivan’s faded memories of his lost wife, Umbassa’s haunting recollections of jungle warfare, and Victoria’s awakening to the harshness of the real world, Swiger makes the looming supernatural threat feel deeply personal.

The Lunar Pack Chronicles doesn’t just promise an epic war between the living and the dead. Instead, it promises a deeply psychological exploration of what it means to survive when everything you love has already burned to ash. As the false night deepens and the bells of Whitburn prepare to toll, fantasy fans will find themselves desperately turning the pages, trapped in Swiger’s web of suspense, waiting for the wolves to turn and fight.

Perfect for fans of dark fantasy, supernatural creatures, and tales of unlikely heroes, The Battle for Astry promises to captivate readers from start to finish. So, are you ready to join the fight and discover whether the light can overcome the growing darkness? The Lunar Pack Chronicles (Book 1): The Battle for Astry is available now in paperback and hardcover at leading bookstores.

Availability

Blending dark fantasy/adventure that follows a secretive, tightly knit pack of four powerful warriors who possess unique abilities and hunt an ancient, organized undead evil across the continent of Astry, this book will keep you glued to your seat. If you love high-stakes fantasy plots with twists and turns, thrills, revelations, drama, and a lot of action and unexpected curveballs, this book has to be on your reading list.

The book is available on Amazon.

About the Author

Kevin Swiger grew up in Richmond, Virginia. As a child, he always wrote stories no one would ever read. He worked in retail for most of his life. As an adult, he didn’t have time for writing until his wife encouraged him to make the time. So, he put his overactive imagination to work and rediscovered a lost hobby, and the result of his passion is the creation of The Lunar Pack Chronicles (Book 1): The Battle for Astry.

Book Details

Book Name: The Battle for Astry (The Lunar Pack Chronicles Book 1)

Author Name: Kevin Swiger

ISBN Number: 978-1970440805

Ebook Version: Click Here

Hardcover Version: Click Here

Paperback Version: Click Here

Minnow’s Songs and Troll Tolls and Three Endings Waiting and Why Prince Adam’s Quest May Appeal to Fantasy Readers Right Now

NY Weekly Staff on July 9, 2026

By: Catalina Santorini

There is something unusual about a fantasy novel that announces upfront that its hero always wins and then spends its entire length making you uncertain what winning is going to look like. Terrence W. Walsh makes that move in the opening pages of Prince Adam’s Quest and sustains the tension it creates all the way to an ending that is actually three endings: history, comedy, or tragedy, with Prince Adam given the choice of which fate to claim. That conceit alone may make the book interesting to readers. The storytelling that fills the space between the opening and the triple ending gives it a memorable quality.

Prince Adam sets out from Leftovria to slay a dragon because that is what princes do when dragons are reported, and he brings with him Minnow, an apprentice bard who is still figuring out both the bard part and the apprentice part, but who has a gift for composing songs that change the mood of any room or road or troll bridge she happens to be crossing. The troll bridges are a notable part of the story. Walsh has imagined a species whose culture revolves around the imposition and collection of tolls with a specificity and affection that makes them feel like a society rather than a convenient obstacle, and Adam’s running struggle to meet their financial demands gives the quest a grounding comedy that can keep the more fantastical elements feeling consequential rather than arbitrary.

What Walsh brings to this material, beyond the pleasures of his comic invention, is the sensibility of someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about stories in multiple forms, fiction, drama, and poetry, and has arrived at a personal understanding of what stories can be for. Prince Adam’s Quest has been described as an instructive tale for people of all ages, and the instruction is woven into the fabric of the narrative rather than delivered as a moral at the end. Readers can absorb it through experience rather than declaration, through the specific texture of following Adam and Minnow across Leftovria and watching what their choices reveal.

The prose has the unhurried confidence of a writer who retired from one demanding career and discovered a second one that suited him. Walsh writes with warmth and wit and a precise comic timing that helps the funny moments land without crowding out the feeling underneath. Prince Adam’s Quest is the kind of book that may leave readers wanting to share it with someone else after finishing it.

For readers interested in troll bridges with personality, an apprentice bard finding her voice, and a hero who always wins but gets to choose what winning looks like, Prince Adam’s Quest by Terrence W. Walsh is available on Amazon. The dragon is waiting, and so are three very different endings.

Walking Along by Cynthia Kenyon Reminds Children That Nature’s Greatest Lessons Begin with a Single Step

NY Weekly Staff on July 9, 2026

In an era where childhood is increasingly shaped by glowing screens and fast-paced routines, Walking Along by Cynthia Kenyon offers something refreshingly simple. An invitation to slow down. This beautifully illustrated children’s picture book transforms an ordinary walk through the woods into an extraordinary adventure, proving that wonder isn’t something children have to search for. It is something they only need to notice.

With gentle storytelling, rhythmic repetition, and an infectious sense of curiosity, Cynthia has created more than a picture book. She has written an experience that encourages young readers to rediscover the joy of looking up, looking down, and looking all around.

Finding Magic in the Everyday

One of Walking Along‘s greatest strengths lies in its ability to celebrate the ordinary. There are no dragons to defeat, no kingdoms to save, and no impossible quests. Instead, readers encounter birds gliding overhead, butterflies dancing through the air, squirrels climbing trees, and tiny snails quietly making their way across the forest floor.

Each finding reminds children that adventure doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes, it is hidden beneath a leaf, buzzing past a flower, or waiting patiently along a woodland trail. That perspective feels especially meaningful in today’s world, where moments of stillness have become increasingly rare.

Story That Invites Participation

Rather than asking children to simply follow a story, the book encourages them to become part of it. Its rhythmic, repetitive structure invites young readers to predict what comes next, turning every page into an interactive experience. The recurring pauses become moments of anticipation, encouraging children to imagine what they might discover if they stopped and looked around during their own walks.

It’s the kind of storytelling that naturally extends beyond the pages. After finishing the book, children are likely to head outdoors, eager to spot birds, butterflies, flowers, or perhaps even a curious frog crossing the path. Few picture books inspire real-world exploration as effortlessly as this one.

Nature as a Classroom

Without ever feeling instructional, the author introduces children to the incredible diversity of the natural world. Along the journey, readers encounter woodland creatures, insects, plants, and even gentle lessons about respecting nature’s boundaries, such as recognizing poison ivy from a safe distance.

The educational value emerges organically through discovery rather than explanation. Children aren’t told why nature matters. They experience its beauty firsthand. This subtle approach allows curiosity to become the teacher, making learning feel joyful rather than prescribed.

Celebration of Shared Adventures

While the book begins as a personal journey of observation, it concludes with something equally important: togetherness.

As friends join the walk, the story quietly shifts its focus from individual discovery to shared experiences. It’s a reminder that some of life’s happiest memories are created not through elaborate plans but through simple moments spent exploring with people we love. This emotional transition gives the story unexpected depth, leaving readers with a lasting sense of warmth and connection.

Gentle Invitation to Step Outside

At its heart, Walking Along is a celebration of curiosity, mindfulness, and the quiet beauty waiting just beyond the front door. Cynthia Kenyon doesn’t rely on spectacle to capture a child’s imagination. Instead, she trusts in something far more enduring: the natural world’s ability to surprise those willing to slow down and pay attention.

Takeaway

In doing so, she has created a picture book that speaks to children, parents, educators, and caregivers alike. Walking Along is more than a story to read. It is an invitation to explore, observe, and reconnect with the simple pleasures that too often go unnoticed. Sometimes, all it takes to discover something extraordinary is the willingness to take that very first step.

10,000 Miles, One Commitment, The Untold Emotional Journey Behind a Marine’s Gulf War Journal

NY Weekly Staff on July 6, 2026

History often remembers wars through strategy, politics, and battlefield victories. Behind every deployment is another story. One measured not in military campaigns, but in missed birthdays, unanswered phone calls, and families waiting thousands of miles away.

10,000 Miles to the Delivery Room: A US Marine’s Private Journal from the Call to War and His Race to Get Home Before the Birth of His First Child by Gregory S. Davis offers a striking reminder that the most vital conflicts are often deeply personal. Drawn from journals written during his deployment to Operation Desert Storm, Gregory’s memoir shifts attention away from the spectacle of war and toward the quiet, relentless emotional endurance required to survive it.

Rather than reconstructing events through decades of hindsight, Gregoryallows readers to experience uncertainty exactly as he lived it, one journal entry at a time.


Race Against Time, Not Just Distance

The title itself reveals the book’s emotional center. The 10,000 miles separating the Persian Gulf from home represent far more than geography. They become a countdown. A race against time as the author struggles to return before the birth of his first child.

While military history frequently celebrates courage under fire, this memoir explores a different form of bravery. Maintaining hope while living with the possibility that life’s most meaningful moments may unfold without you.

The author does not portray himself as an invincible Marine untouched by fear. Instead, he acknowledges the recurring anxiety that followed him across oceans, not fear of combat alone, but fear of absence. Fear of becoming a father his daughter might never know. Fear of leaving behind a young wife forced to face motherhood alone. Those deeply human concerns transform the memoir into something universally relatable, regardless of a reader’s military background.

Journal Becomes a Lifeline

One of the manuscript’s greatest strengths lies in its authenticity. The journal entries were never intended for publication. They were written as private reflections by a young Marine facing uncertainty day after day. That absence of performance gives the narrative unusual emotional credibility.

Readers encounter homesickness, frustration, humor, exhaustion, and hope without literary embellishment. The repetitive declarations that he will return home are not rhetorical devices. They become psychological anchors, illustrating how ordinary rituals can sustain extraordinary resilience.

The pages show military life beyond combat. Endless waiting, cramped sleeping quarters, unbearable heat, maintenance work that demands perfection, and the emotional isolation that quietly defines deployment. These are experiences rarely dramatized, yet they reveal the everyday realities that shape service members long before, or long after, battle begins.


People Waiting Become the Mission

Perhaps the memoir’s most compelling insight is that the greatest motivation for survival often exists far from the battlefield. For Gregory, every repaired helicopter, every completed inspection, every sleepless night aboard ship ultimately pointed toward one objective: returning home.

His wife Audra and their unborn daughter become the invisible companions present throughout the deployment. They are reminders of identity beyond the uniform, proof that soldiers never stop being husbands, sons, fathers, or friends simply because they are sent to war. That emotional duality gives the narrative remarkable depth. Duty to country never diminishes devotion to family; instead, each strengthens the other.

The result is a portrait of military service that feels both patriotic and profoundly personal, avoiding sentimentality while embracing emotional honesty.

Story That Extends Beyond One Generation

Although rooted in the Gulf War, 10,000 Miles to the Delivery Room speaks to contemporary readers with surprising immediacy.

Its themes, uncertainty, sacrifice, resilience, and the longing to return home, remain timeless. Military families today continue to navigate similar separations, making Davis’ reflections as relevant now as they were more than three decades ago. More importantly, the memoir preserves an emotional history often absent from official records. It reminds readers that every deployment creates two journeys. One undertaken by the service member overseas, and another quietly endured by loved ones waiting at home.

Takeaway

As publication approaches, Gregory S. Davis offers more than a memoir of military service. He offers a testament to endurance, love, and the promises people make to themselves when circumstances leave them powerless to control anything else. Sometimes the longest journey is not measured in miles at all. It is measured in hope.

Giorgio Ribaudo on I Want to Race: How Motorsport Became an Exclusive Club Instead of a Talent Arena

NY Weekly Staff on June 30, 2026

The first lie of modern motorsport is quiet. It does not shout. It reassures. It suggests that talent and dedication are enough. Then, almost politely, it presents the bill.

In I Want to Race, Giorgio Ribaudo begins exactly there, at the moment when illusion meets structure. Not with resentment, not with nostalgia, but with an observation few insiders are willing to articulate. Motorsport did not drift into exclusivity. It was engineered into it. At some point, speed stopped being the decisive variable. Capital took its place.

Ribaudo writes from experience, not abstraction. His voice carries the weight of someone who has moved inside the system long enough to understand how it protects itself. The book does not posture as rebellion. It reads more like an autopsy. Karting paddocks that once hosted raw potential now resemble financial waiting rooms. Junior categories operate less as proving grounds and more as economic filters. The defining question has quietly shifted from Who is fast? to Who can afford to remain visible? This is not a scandal. It is a pattern.

Midway through the book, Ribaudo introduces a comparison that reframes the entire conversation. Motorsport, he suggests, now behaves like a gated market rather than a competitive arena. Entry barriers rise incrementally, almost invisibly. Costs compound year after year. Risk is individualized while access is rationed. Talent remains abundant, but opportunity behaves like a scarce resource.

The data support the intuition. Budgets that once launched careers now barely secure participation. Sponsorships gravitate toward familiar surnames before lap times are considered. Development programs adopt the language of inclusion while practicing exclusion by arithmetic. The track has become a reflection of broader economic systems, not an escape from them.

There is a striking restraint in how Ribaudo handles his own story. He refuses the comfort of exceptionality. He presents his experience as symptomatic, not heroic. His frustration is not personal. It is structural. This distinction matters because grievance invites dismissal, while diagnosis demands engagement.

Here, the book reaches its conceptual fault line. When a system claims neutrality while consistently producing exclusion, it stops being competitive and becomes ideological. At that moment, I Want to Race ceases to be about motorsport alone. It becomes a study of power.

The reader is asked, implicitly, to reconsider the nature of fairness. The problem is not that some win and others lose. The problem is that many are never permitted to compete. You, reading this, have seen this architecture elsewhere. In education systems that reward pedigree over capacity. In financial markets, where access precedes performance. In politics, visibility often substitutes legitimacy. Whenever resources determine entry, merit becomes narrative rather than rule.

Ribaudo is careful not to mythologize the past. Motorsport has always required money. What changed is proportionality. The distance between talent and access widened until it swallowed the former entirely. Like a bridge designed for a different load, the system did not collapse. It adapted, selectively.

There is an echo here of Michael Sandel’s critique of meritocracy. When outcomes are framed as moral verdicts on individuals, systems absolve themselves of bias. Success becomes virtue. Failure becomes fault. The structure disappears from view.

This is where the book becomes quietly unsettling. Not loud, not polemical, but precise. Dangerous in the way accurate descriptions threaten those who benefit from opacity.

Ribaudo does not argue for the removal of money. He argues for clarity. A sport that confuses investment with ability inevitably optimizes for investors rather than competitors. The distinction is subtle, and that is why it matters.

One of the book’s most effective analogies compares modern motorsport to an orchestra where instruments are auctioned before auditions begin. Exceptional musicians may exist, but only those who can purchase a seat are heard. The performance continues. Applause persists. The composition slowly erodes.

What gives I Want to Race its authority is discipline. Ribaudo avoids redemption arcs. He does not promise salvation. He maps incentives, feedback loops, and consequences. He writes like someone who understands that systems change only when their logic is exposed, not when they are shamed.

There is a brief outward glance, almost understated, toward alternative architectures. Technology, cost rationalization, and redesigned pathways are mentioned not as slogans, but as possibilities. It is here that Ribaudo’s parallel work as a constructor enters the narrative.

The book resists closure. It refuses reassurance. Instead, it leaves the reader with a question that lingers longer than any solution. If talent is everywhere and opportunity is not, who is the system truly built to serve?

The question loops back to the beginning, to the invoice disguised as merit. Motorsport did not become an exclusive club overnight. It became one the moment no one asked why the door kept getting heavier.

And when a system stops asking that question, it no longer selects the best.
It simply filters the rest.

William Wilkinson’s Book Rediscovers Australia’s Forgotten Indiana Jones

NY Weekly Staff on June 29, 2026

By: Nic Abelian

James Cook, John McDouall Stuart, and Burke and Wills are synonymous with Australian exploration. William Wilkinson deserves to stand among them, displaying all the qualities of an Indiana Jones-style adventurer, complete with hat, horse and saddle, but minus the archaeological pursuits.

Australia’s Forgotten Explorer is a remarkable account of courage, endurance, and service in the Australian outback. Originally written in 1947 by pioneering outback priest Percy Smith MBE, under the title The Strenuous Saint, the book chronicles the extraordinary journey of William Wilkinson, an Anglican priest who travelled more than 12,000 kilometres on horseback through some of Australia’s most remote and unforgiving regions between 1913 and 1915.

Wilkinson’s expedition took him from north-west Queensland through the Gulf of Carpentaria, Katherine, Tennant Creek, the Tanami Desert, Charlotte Waters, and Hermannsburg, where he met missionary and anthropologist Carl Strehlow. His journey coincided with the outbreak of the First World War, which tragically took the life of his youngest son in Belgium, and lasted an astonishing 847 days.

Accompanied by sixteen horses and two Indigenous guides, Wilkinson visited many significant landmarks, including Chambers Pillar, Attack Creek, Central Mount Stuart, and the Devil’s Marbles, often following the route forged by explorer John McDouall Stuart along the telegraph line.

What makes Wilkinson’s story particularly inspiring is the man himself. Deaf and in his late fifties, he relied on a brass ear horn to communicate. Yet he carried out his mission with unwavering determination. More than a clergyman, he was a bushman, blacksmith, medic, messenger, and counsellor. He shoed his own horses, treated the sick and injured, delivered mail, helped people write letters and wills, and brought comfort and companionship to those living in isolation.

The book vividly explains the hardships Wilkinson endured. He faced extreme desert heat, frigid nights, disease, thirst, exhaustion, dangerous river crossings, crocodiles, quicksand, and the loss of horses to snakes and illness. He encountered cultural tensions, crime, and tragedy, yet continued his work with resilience and compassion. These challenges highlight the extraordinary commitment that drove him to continue despite the physical and emotional toll.

Wilkinson’s story captures a largely forgotten chapter of Australian history. Through Wilkinson’s experiences, readers gain insight into the realities of life in remote Australia during the early twentieth century and the vital role played by individuals who connected isolated communities.

The book is both an adventure narrative and a tribute to selfless service. This special reprinting, featuring a foreword by Percy Smith’s grandson, Mark Smith, reveals new details on Wilkinson’s early life, such as his seven children, and never before seen photographs, adding further layers to the story. Mark reflects on Wilkinson as a man, ‘who looked for no praise, sought no reward and received no recognition.’ This observation encapsulates the humility and dedication that define Wilkinson’s legacy.

In an exclusive interview, Mark told the New York Review he decided to publish this new book after the positive feedback to his speech for South Australia’s History Festival called, ‘Home via Hermannsburg: William Wilkinson’s 847 day. Top End. Red Centre Quest,’ for the Friends of the Lutheran Archives.

Naturally the gathering was interested in Wilkinson’s five-day visit to the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg and meeting with Carl and Freida Strehlow at the Finke River Mission, as anti-German sentiment was peaking. Understandably, the Strehlows were anxious about the safety of their children, who went to live in Germany in 1910 for schooling, as war in Europe became ferocious.

“Shouting into Wilkinson’s brass ear horn, the potential for the Anglicans to take over Lutheran missions became a controversial discussion topic,” Mark said.

A history graduate from Adelaide University, filmmaker and writer, Mark studied his grandfather’s text based on original journals, photographs and papers obtained in the 1940s for what is a republished edition of The Strenuous Saint, to mark one hundred years since Percy Smith’s ordination as a priest in 1927 in Brisbane.

Mark said, “One thousand copies of Percy Smith’s book were sold to raise funds for St John Hostel in Alice Springs and St Francis House in Adelaide, which were both places set up by my grandfather to support Indigenous children to access education and find their way in life.” St John’s Hostel and St Francis House played a role in the early lives of Indigenous trailblazers such as Charles Perkins, John Moriarty and Gordon Briscoe who achieved university education and became leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement in Australia, which mirrored the efforts of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr such as the freedom rides to expose systemic racism.

The book includes photographs, thought lost for decades, taken by Wilkinson of anthropological value along with a comparative analysis of the shared legacy of Wilkinson, Percy Smith and champion sprinter and later priest, Ken Hampton OAM, who lived at the famous St Francis House and was an Alawa man from Roper River, in the Northern Territory. A place Wilkinson visited in 1914.

“Wilkinson has sadly been forgotten in the pages of history, but that would not have mattered to him. When he died in 1935 aged 81, he would have drawn comfort from the fact that his call to Central Australia had finally been answered by Percy Smith in 1933,” Mark said.

Overall, this is an engaging and inspiring read. It offers a fascinating blend of adventure, exploration, history, faith, and human perseverance. Readers interested in Australian history, outback adventures, or stories of remarkable individuals will find William Wilkinson’s journey both compelling and unforgettable. With help from Sean Connery, Wilkinson may just have been able to find the Holy Grail.

The book Australia’s Forgotten Explorer: William Wilkinson can be purchased from the Live Heart Press at: www.liveheart.com.au

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