Magic Hill Publishing LLC is the imprint of novelist, short story and op-ed writer Bill Schubart

Born in New York City in 1945, I grew up in Morrisville, Vermont from the age of two. I attended Public School and then went on to Phillips Exeter Academy, Kenyon College and the University of Vermont where I got a degree in French language and culture, which I then taught until I entered communications as an entrepreneur.

I co-founded Philo Records http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Records_(folk) and in 1982, Resolution, a fully integrated e-commerce services company, offering web commerce design & integration, customer care, on-demand media manufacturing, fulfillment, distribution and information & revenue management to broadcasters, print & electronic publishers and direct marketers. 

I write and speak extensively on the media, book publishing, and civic issues and have long been a commentator on Vermont Public Radio. I have spoken at many industry and media events including Book Expo.

My interests include poetry, photography, stone gardening, classical, traditional, and primitive music. I live in Hinesburg, Vermont, with my wife Katherine, a writer and have three sons, Bill, Peter and Steven and a daughter Anna, as well as a stepson Guy and a stepdaughter Phoebe. My full CV is at www.Schubart.com.
Please also visit my Amazon author's page.

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Coming this Fall 

Coming this summer: The Correctional Facility

The Correctional Facility is an illustrated novella updating Dante Alighieri’s 700-year-old classic  The Inferno. Our guide however is not Virgil but Walt Whitman and Dante’s flaming pits are succeeded by modern brutalist prison architecture. Many of the sins of Dante’s time persist today, but mankind has scaled old ones and added new ones. Invention, technology, economics, and ​politics have nuanced and scaled our concept of evil.

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Lila & Theron
PB ISBN: 978-1-68261-356-6
EB (Mobi) EAN: 978168261356651995
Published by Simon & Schuster
June 2017

Lila and Theron is set in rural America and relates a personal story of love and sacrifice. Lila and Theron do not imagine themselves poor, nor do they covet what they don’t have. They are whole in themselves and on their land – in marked contrast to today’s victim culture of safe spaces and narcissism.
Bill Schubart grew up among farmers and loggers in Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom, where survival depended not on institutions but on family, neighbors, hand tools, and the bounty of wilderness. Lila and Theron are from a time and place where the arguments that divide us today would seem meaningless against the exigencies of kinship and survival.

The Priest
PB ISBN: 978-0-9897121-8-7
EB (ePub) ISBN#: 978-1-7328890-1-9
EB (Mobi 978-1-7328890-2-6
January 2019

The Priest follows a working class altar boy's decision to become a priest, exploring the struggle many boys have becoming men, especially around sexuality. Pierre finds safety within the vocational confines and celibacy of his Catholic faith, only then to be astonished as he experiences life vicariously in the shadow of the confessional. Ultimately, he must confront his own emerging sexuality in the real world and reconcile the inevitable collision between the security of doctrine and the risks of being human - all of which takes him to a surprising place.

The Lamoille Stories II
PB ISBN: 978-0-9897121-3-2
EB (Mobi) ISBN: 978-0-9897121-4-9
EB (ePub): ISBN: 978-0-9897121-5-6
​Audio: forthcoming
 
January 2014

A wholly new collection of Lamoille Stories from Vermont author, Bill Schubart. Many of the original characters in the 2008 edition like Jeeter, Pete, Theron and Lila are back in this new set of stories.

·  Hiding his beer from his wife, Willy discovers that if he buries a 12 oz. bottle of Old Fitzgerald beer in the woods, in time it’ll grow into a quart.

·  Auctioneer, Art Messier, comes unhinged when, at the end of his auction, his nemesis Pete and his boys bid up the value on an end-lot box of junk.

·  David unwillingly discovers the mysteries of the female sex when he loses his VW keys.

·  Eugenie raises pigs, but ever since childhood has dreaded the chaos of slaughter, until she cooks up the ultimate anesthetic send-off for her pets.

·  After 60 years of marriage, Theron’s wife Lila succumbs to diabetes on their farm. Theron defies local funeral traditions and, with the help of his friend Dr. Phil, lays Lila to her final rest.

“Lamoille Stories II” extends Bill Schubart’s collection of rural Vermont tales – some uproarious, some heartbreaking – about the characters that enriched his early years there. This is his sixth work of fiction. Bill lives, works, and writes in Hinesburg.

        

Photographic Memory

PB ISBN 978-0-9834852-8-5   June 2014
EB ISBN 978-0-9834852-8-5   Forthcoming

Photographic Memory is about the impact of photographs on memory. Are the photographs themselves the memory or do they merely record and prompt it? The story follows a boy’s struggles as he grows up in two very different cultures – one, the urbane world of his paternal grandmother, peopled with artists, publishers, and financiers, and the other, a small, tightly-knit, Vermont community of farmers, loggers and tradesmen where he lives with his mother and new French-Canadian stepfather. Widowed in World War II, David’s mother takes her infant son and flees the stifling world of her in-laws to start over in rural Vermont. Young David must now reconcile the expectations of his German-Jewish grandmother and those of his new Québécois-Catholic family. The differences come to a head the summer he accompanies his imperious grandmother on the “grand tour” and tells her he has decided to postpone college and work on a chainsaw crew in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom.

From Kirkus Reviews:
“Schubart’s latest peruses the photo-album–esque memories and experiences of a Vermont farm boy. The protagonist of this dreamlike coming-of-age story, farm-boy David, is simple by disposition. David doesn’t so much come into the world as the world—in all its quotidian minutia—comes to him. David is naïve and calm, qualities discouraged by his grandmother, who lives in New York. She mothers him when David’s own mother recedes into postpartum depression. This novel, from start to finish, is David’s life, told objectively with great insight and generous detail. Schubart, a gifted writer, uses beautiful language from the very beginning to set the scene: “They gaze at him, caught in silver halide, albumen and salt print memory, these relatives with their sad, dark eyes and sepia surroundings, Fragonard backdrops…and the reticence of hands.”

Contemporary Vermont Fiction, An Anthology

Edited by Robin MacArthur
Foreword by John Elder

Work by: Wallace Stegner, Julia Alvarez, Joseph Bruchac, Annie Proulx, Suzanne Kingsbury, Peter Gould, Miciah Bay Gault, Bill Schubart, Howard Frank Mosher, Castle Freeman Jr. Robin MacArthur, Jeffrey Lent, Laurie Alberts, Megan Mayhew Bergman and Ellen Lesser

Available at local book shops throughout Vermont. Please support your local bookstore. They are fundamental to our Vermont communities. E books available online as well at:
http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780989983822
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780989983822-0

I am Baybie: Based on the true Story of the Rev. Baybie Hoover and her friend Virginia Brown (novel)

PB ISBN 978-0-9834852-9-2
EB ISBN 978-0-9834852-9-2
​Audiobook 
​May 2013

 In 1976, I met a blind New York City street singer named Reverend Baybie Hoover. Her early life was marked by a succession of tragedies.   She was blinded at birth by an inebriated doctor, molested by a foster father and later sterilized as a young woman by a doctor who thought he was doing her a favor. When I knew her Baybie lived in a single-room-occupancy in midtown and every day, rain or shine, she made the subway trip to the Upper East Side to spend the whole day singing on the sidewalk.

I eventually produced an album (Philo 1019) of Baybie and Virginia Brown, her friend and singing partner, during which time I came to know her and was captivated by her extraordinary personality.  Baybie was a woman who had few, if any, reasons to be grateful. Yet she lived in a state of perpetual gratitude for the little she had.  She rarely indulged in any judgment of those visiting misery on her I had never met anyone who saw life and the people she encountered with such generosity of spirit. Just being in her company made me ashamed of every complaint I had ever uttered, and only in putting her life's story in writing could I ever hope to fully recall the grace and gratitude this woman brought into my easy life.

For those who have read I Am Baybie,  http://www.IAmBaybie.com makes offers readers a gallery of images of the two women and a live sampling of songs they sang on the street.

Panhead: A Journey Home (novel) 

PB ISBN 978-0-9834852-6-1
EB ISBN 978-0-9834852-7-8
February 2012

Panhead is a glossary of this author’s innate fears … a fear of motorcycles, which I have always ridden; of chainsaws, which I have used since I was fifteen; of being immobilized, which I have been, of academic failure, which I have experienced; of bottomless bodies of water in which I have swum; of initial sexual contacts, which have turned into love in some cases; and of surviving in a life no longer worth living. Somehow, the expression of these fears allays them. Is this not the great value of writing?

Fat People (short stories) 

PB ISBN 978-0-615-39751-1
EB ISBN: 978-0-9897121-2-5
Audio ISBN: 978-0-9897121-9-4
October 2010
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Why did I write Fat People? I am one. In my adult life, I’ve weighed between 240 lbs and 490 lbs. The publishing trade is bulging with remainders about how to lose weight. The diet industry is a $60B a year business with a 94% failure rate. Even hard drug and alcohol recoveries fare better. Yet little is written about how it feels to eat compulsively or what it’s like to be fat – the place where food is at once a pleasure, friend, and virulent enemy. Medical and psychological professionals opine intellectually and scientifically about the disorder, but rarely ask the fat person how they feel, how feelings trigger their addictive behavior? Fat People is simply this fat person’s effort to instill understanding and perhaps empathy for those who struggle constantly with food.     

The Lamoille Stories: Uncle Benoit’s Wake (short stories)

PB ISBN 978-0-9897121-0-1 
EB ISBN 978-0-9834852-0-9
Audio
October 2008

I grew up in a small town in Lamoille County in Northern Vermont. In our largely French Canadian family, I heard countless stories. TV came late to our home so family and community entertainments often took the form of well-told stories. The characters, eccentrics and misadventures that made up these stories have always lived in me. Stories are a uniquely human aspect of humankind. We are defined by our stories, and so as a writer I felt obliged not only to retell them to my children and grandchildren but to write them down.

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