Capra Press

CAPRA PRESS

I Never Expected This Good Life: Poems and Stories by Jennifer Futernick will be published next month by Capra Press, an independent press with a long tradition of publishing quality works by established and emerging authors including Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Anais Nin, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Charles Bukowski, Gretel Ehrlich, and Raymond Carver. This book is the re-launch title of Capra Press, established in 1969 by Noel Young and now owned once again by the family.

Not really a memoir, this book is a collection of poems, essays, and stories about Jennifer’s life. Divided into seven sections — family (parents and siblings), marriage, children, body, faith, the outside world, and work — each focuses on such diverse subjects as loss, kinship, trust, and how we choose to remember and tell our personal stories. Above all, I Never Expected This Good Life is about love—its sorrows and elusiveness, incomparable joys, and the surprise one feels when love eventually shows up and is mutually sustained. Jennifer notes the myriad ways that the heart extends its influence into every touch, look, thought, and reply, something that has surprised this exuberant and zestful author, especially because she was certain at age seventeen that she would never have a good life. Her joy at being proved wrong finds expression in the thankfulness that infuses this volume.

Kate Abbe, author of Joy Riding and Nothing Curved, writes, “The author’s spirit vibrates through these refreshingly honest and open pages. Jennifer Futernick does not shy away from the joy and pain of ordinary life, but reveals in surprising and delicate detail the connections and transitions that make up ‘the good life.’”

Theatre director Susan Finque compares Jennifer’s richly detailed journey through life to “Everywoman—struggling through an unpredictable and at times harrowing childhood and finding a way to a deeply meaningful life of marriage, children, family and work. This memoir unfolds to become a joyful shout out to the strength, power and enduring complexity of love.”

Jennifer will be reading from her upcoming book on Dec 7 2011 7:30 pm at The Booksmith 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA 94117 http://www.booksmith.com

The book will be available December 2011. For more information, please see https://caprapress.net