Author: rick-lenz

SOMERSET Book Awards Hall of Fame – CIBAs, Literary Book Awards
The 2019 Grand Prize Winner of Somerset Awards is

Donna LeClair for The PROPRIETOR of the THEATRE of LIFE

A MANUSCRIPT

This is no ordinary book and the word “extraordinary” can’t begin to do it justice. It’s a gift for anyone fortunate enough to read it and libraries around the globe should add it to their collections. It should be available to everyone. Emma is a highly sympathetic character, an everywoman, in need of answers. The reader learns as much as she does about individual and universal struggles on earth, the lessons to be gleaned from suffering, and the value of sharing our stories. ~ Carrie M., Chanticleer Editorial Team

The 2019 Somerset First in Category Winners are:
- Carl Roberts for The Trial of Connor Padget
- Judith Kirscht for End of the Race
- Patrick Finegan for Cooperative Lives
- Santiago Xaman for After Olympus
- Claire Fullerton for Little Tea
- Maggie St. Claire for Martha
- Jamie Zerndt for Jerkwater
- R. Barber Anderson for The Sunken Forest, Where the Forest Came out of the Earth
Here is a listing of the Somerset Book Awards Hall of Fame Grand Prize winners!

Hard Cider by a novel by Barbara A. Stark-Nemon

Stay at home mom turns entrepreneur, but without her husband’s support, and continunually needing to manage her three adult sons, Abbie Rose Stone’s dream of producing her own craft hard apple cider faces a world of adversity in Barbara A. Stark-Nemon’s Hard Cider.

The Rabbi’s Gift by Chuck Gould

Babylonian astrology and Jewish mysticism combine with Roman history to create a timeless story of passion and fate in Chuck Gould’s The Rabbi’s Gift. Babylonian astrology and Jewish mysticism combine with Roman history to create a timeless story of passion and fate in Chuck Gould’s The Rabbi’s Gift.

The Ugly by Alexander Boldizar

Words thrown as hard as boulders are easy to catch – if you’ve had practice. Just ask our hero, Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth…In the great tradition of existentialism, Boldizar brings us a book that is hard to classify. It has aspects of the existential with a fair amount of satirical wordplay and a bit of theater of the absurd thrown in.

The Alexandrite by Rick Lenz

Marilyn Monroe, time travel, second chances – all steeped in mid-Century Hollywood history, culture, and magic.

The Manipulator by Steve Lundin

With a fast-paced storyline and a rich cast of characters, this award-winning winning novel offers a uniquely hilarious, but scary, perspective on the how the businesses of public relations and marketing can take technology to its precipice to take advantage of a media addicted public.

Individually Wrapped by Jeremy Bullian

Individually Wrapped tells us the bizarre tale of Sam Gregory’s descent over the condensed course of a couple of days. Set in a 21st-century futuristic city, technology has permeated every aspect of the city dwellers’ lives… Self-delusion is an interesting state of mind because everyone can see it except yourself, as it propels you ever deeper into oblivion, where not even technology can save you.

We would be amiss by not featuring and recognizing Judith Kirscht, our very own Pacific Northwest Somerset inspired author. Judith specializes in family sagas and societal issues.

Judith Kirscht – Somerset Hall of Fame Author

Judith was born and educated in Chicago during the Great Depression and then WWII. She taught school during the upheavals of the Vietnam protests and the Civil Rights movement. Later in life, she found herself in California, divorced and with two daughters. Judith taught creative writing at universities of very different cultures: University of Michigan and U of California, Santa Monica. Her novels continuously are awarded CIBA First Place Category ribbons for the Somerset Book Awards for Literary and Contemporary Fiction.

The Camera’s Eye by Judith Kirscht

In a world where too many rocks are thrown at those who represent anything other than the norm in middle-class white America, two friends decide to take matters into their own hands and stand up to the hatred with which they are targeted in order to save their home and ultimately their lives.

Hawkins Lane by Judith Kirscht

Hawkins Lane is excellent and, ultimately, a redemptive story about the heart-wrenching tragedies a family can survive, and about the healing powers of nature and friendship. The characters and the story will linger long after the last page is read and you will be captivated from the first page.

The Inheritors by Judith Kirscht

“The Inheritors” by Judith Kirscht is a novel of one woman grappling to find her cultural and personal identity. Tolerance of others and the need for communication is required from each of us is an overriding theme in this latest work of Kirscht that explores the complexities of human nature and family bonds.

Home Fires by Judith Kirscht

“Home Fires” is an intelligently written, fast-paced family drama that unfolds into a suspenseful page-turner. Although this novel masterfully renders the emotional hardships and tragedies that are sometimes part of dysfunctional relationships, it is not a depressing read.

Nowhere Else to Go by Judith Kirscht

“Nowhere Else to Go” is a tightly woven and insistently engaging novel about racial prejudice and the blackboard jungle of the 1960s.

HOW DO YOU HAVE YOUR BOOKS RECOGNIZED? Submit them to the Chanticleer International Book Awards – Click here for more information about The CIBAs!

The last day to submit your work is November 30, 2020. We invite you to join us, to tell us your stories, and to find out who will take home the prize at CAC21 in April.

As our deadline draws near, don’t miss this opportunity to earn the distinction your literary novel deserves! Enter today!

The winners will be announced at the CIBA Awards Ceremony on April 19, 2021, that will take place during the 2021 Chanticleer Authors Conference. All Semi-Finalists and Finalists will be recognized. The first place winners will be recognized and receive their custom ribbon, and then we will see who among them will take home the Grand Prize. It’s an exciting evening of networking and celebration!

CIBA Ribbons!

First Place category winners and Grand Prize winners will each receive an awards package. Whose works will be chosen? The excitement builds for the 2020 SOMERSET Book Awards competitions and now for the Mark Twain Book Awards.

Our Chanticleer Review Writing Contests feature more than $30,000.00 worth of cash and prizes each year!

~$1000 Overall Grand Prize Winner
~$30,000views, prizes, and promotional opportunities awarded to Category Winners

ENTER NOW!

Don’t delay! Enter today!
November 18, 2020
The ALEXANDRITE: A HOLLYWOOD TIME-TRAVEL NOIR by Rick Lenz – Magic Realism, Hollywood, Time Travel

Time-travel Noir becomes High Art with a wicked sense of humor in this fast-paced novel that offers up alternate views of Hollywood’s past and present.

Washed-out and with the doors of opportunity slamming shut on all sides, actor Jack Cade is the poster boy for the “bad things happen in threes” mantra. Getting cut from a crappy, no-pay play was just the tip of his career-crushing iceberg. His agent, who lost faith in Jack way back in another epoch, manages to dig up a temporary life preserver – an audition for a part that has Jack written all over it. An audition he misses. And Jack’s wife, no longer able to stay afloat in his sinkhole of alcohol and “bleeding actor’s ego,” jumps ship.

Just when it starts looking like it’s lights-out for Jack, an anonymous envelope lands in his mailbox. Inside is a pawn ticket that leads him to an Alexandrite ring and a psycho-physicist who claims to hold the secret of time travel. With Jack’s personal and professional lives collapsing in on him like a black hole, he walks out of 1996 and into the heyday of mid-Century Hollywood. He also walks into another man’s shoes, not to mention the scene of his recurring nightmare. Armed with “fore-knowledge” Jack has a chance to make things right in two different time periods. The only question is, how many times will he have to jump across the spectrum of an alternate reality to get it right?

Drawing from his extensive experience in the entertainment industry, author Rick Lenz delivers a stellar and believable cast of characters. From Jack Cade, whose love-hate relationship with the movie industry keeps him on the razor’s edge of failure, to Jack’s 1956 incarnation – or possibly alter-ego – Richard Blake, a movie-star handsome gemologist, whose an angry alcoholic wife and sultry, mentally impaired sister-in-law set the stage for their own rendition of a sweaty Tennessee Williams play. And there’s the incomparably complex, multi-faceted Marilyn Monroe, at the peak of her career—the golden thread that weaves everyone’s story together.

Steeped in Hollywood history and culture, The Alexandrite entices the reader with snippets of iconic set locations, facades, meeting places, studios, and stars. But the novel is more than a torch song to the movie industry. It is also a paean to hard-working actors whose careers, like Jack’s, straddle a razor.

Somerset Grand Prize award winner for Literary and Contemporary Fiction along with multiple other literary awards, The Alexandrite by Rick Lenz playfully challenges the reader to ask questions about a world that exists outside of the four dimensions in which we live. A must-read for anyone and everyone who has been touched by the magic of Hollywood.

November 6, 2017