CMW Journal

Serial Fiction
Vol. 2, No. 4

In This Issue

Some books are so wonderful that we want to read them over, or even again and again. Authors sometimes capitalize on this kind of success by writing a sequel, or two, and suddenly a series has been born. Children still love the old Hardy Boys and Nancy ...

  • Making Ghosts
    Making Ghosts
    by Karl Schroeder

    What stands out in memory is that first picture of Maier's idea. I am standing at her right shoulder, and she leans forward over the RISC station and taps the mouse a couple of times. The nineteen inch monitor lights up with a three-dimensional image like a mist of ...

  • Chapter 1
    Chapter 1
    by Judy Clemens

    “This here’s my daughter Katie. She’s thirteen, and lives for marching band. Plays the flute. You wouldn’t believe the way they work them kids. She’s in better shape than I ever been.” Evan the trucker laughed and patted his sizable gut, which almost touched the steering ...

  • Review Essay: P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Mystery Series
    Review Essay: P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Mystery Series
    by Kyle Schlabach

    Blood of the Prodigal (1999), Broken English (2000), Clouds Without Rain (2001), Cast a Blue Shadow (2003), A Prayer for the Night (2006), Separate from the World (2008).

    -- Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

  • Chasing the Bonnet
    Chasing the Bonnet
    by Beth Graybill

    A few years ago, when conducting dissertation research on Amish women in business, I visited a gift shop and noticed a rack of romance novels with pictures of Amish women on the cover. I asked the Amish business owner, “Do you sell a lot of these?”

    “Yes,” she said, “the ...

  • “A Whisper of Satin”: The Infant Dress Leitmotif
    “A Whisper of Satin”: The Infant Dress Leitmotif
    by Michelle Thurlow

    Although best-selling inspirational novelist Beverly Lewis is understandably credited with "g[iving] birth to" the lucrative Amish fiction genre in 1997 with the release of her inaugural adult novel The Shunning (Gorski, par. 9), Lewis was not the first author to write about horse-and-buggy Plain folk, nor was ...

  • Mennonite and Amish Serial Fiction: An Informal Bibliography
    Mennonite and Amish Serial Fiction: An Informal Bibliography
    by Ervin Beck

    Joe Springer, curator of the Mennonite Historical Library at Goshen College, wants the library to contain all books ever published by and about Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites. He not only knows the MHL catalog, but he combs both rare book and new book catalogs and seems to remember whatever he ...

  • Poetry Feature:  Six Poems
    Poetry Feature: Six Poems
    by Jeff Gundy

    We are pleased to publish for the first time a selection of six poems by Jeff Gundy, author of the award-winning Spoken Among the Trees (University of Akron Press 2007) and four other poetry collections. In these poems the worlds of popular culture—suggested by references to Ronald Reagan, Jerry ...