Connected Editions Publishes J. Charles Sterin's Hell Scrolls

I'm pleased to announce that Connected Editions, in cooperation with its partner JoSara MeDia, has just published J. Charles Sterin's historical thriller Hell Scrolls.

Following the brutal murder of his Chinese lover, successful filmmaker Carl Benjamin is drawn into the dark world of espionage and Chinese organized crime Triads - and down the rabbit hole of history as he struggles to understand the secret past of his father who served in China and was recruited in 1949 by the Israeli Mossad.  Carl and  close friend and former special forces officer Clarence Washington are soon joined by the beautiful daughter of his father’s old Mossad controller.  They’re chased across Europe and Southeast Asia by  the sexually perverted daughter of the most powerful Triad leader, by the CIA, and by the unfinished legacies of their fathers, and  use the coded messages within a set of Chinese Hell Scrolls to gain a tenuous upper hand.   Filled with intrigue, action, and explicit sexual encounters - rooted in 35 years of wars and criminal power-plays -   Hell Scrolls delivers everything fans of history-rooted thrillers want.

Connected Editions began in the early 1990s as the publishing arm of Connected Education, Inc.,  the organization headed by Tina Vozick and me which offered online courses for academic credit with The New School in New York City, Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, Bath College of Higher Education in the U.K,, and other schools around the world.  Connected Editions published a small number of books with wide diversity on computer disks, including The Age of Choice by US Ambassador to NATO Harlan Cleveland, Decisions by American Arbitration Association president Donald B. Straus, The Keyboard and the Loom by Gail S. Thomas, fiction by Sharon Lerch, and books of poetry by Bill Dubie and Ron Buck.

The publication of Hell Scrolls by J. Charles Sterin represents Connected Editions' reanimation and entry into the current digital age of publishing - ebooks on Kindles and like devices and apps, rather than text files on disks.  Chuck and I have worked together on a variety of projects, including his video interviews with me in his textbook, Mass Media Revolution.

J. Charles Sterin is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, investigative television journalist, author and screenwriter. Over the course of his 40 year career Sterin has produced over 60 hours of television documentaries, including episodes of A&E Network's primetime series Investigative Reports an Ancient Mysteries, and documentary specials aired on PBS. Sterin is the author of the popular undergraduate textbook "Mass Media Revolution" (Pearson Education), and the history-based thriller "Hell Scrolls"(Connected Editions). Sterin co-produced a national media project with 10 of the world's leading humanist thinkers (including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologist Carl Rogers, an anthropologist Ashley Montague) and was selected by the Poynter Institute to produce its seminal PBS documentary series NewsLeaders on the leading figures of American news media. He was the co-author, along with Richard Shames,M.D., of the trend-setting late 1970s holistic health primer "Healing With Mind power" (Rodale Press) and numerous holistic health articles published in Rodale's health and women's magazines.

I decided to work with JoSara MeDia on Hell Scrolls because this small, savvy publisher did such a good job with my own novels The Silk Code, The Plot to Save Socrates, Unburning Alexandria, and The Consciosuness Plague as ebooks, as well as the Unburning Alexandria paperback published this summer. JoSara MeDia has published award-winning authors in multiple formats, including print, eBook, and enhanced eBooks as iPad and Android applications. JoSara MeDia also works with non-profit organizations, such as the Texas State Historical Association, assisting them with strategies and solutions to get their content available in these multiple formats.  Hell Scrolls is a Connected Editions imprint published by JoSara MeDia.

As a novelist myself, I take special pleasure in discovering new writers of fiction.  Hell Scrolls is Chuck Sterin's first novel, but his perception of human nature and gift for language and narrative speaks of a talent as old has the hell scrolls themselves.   He sat for the following brief interview about his novel last month:



Article about J. Charles Sterin and Hell Scrolls in the Sun Journal ...