In his family life Angus Stonefield had been gentle and loving, in business a man of probity, and in his relationship with his twin brother, Caleb, a virtual saint. Now Angus is missing, and it appears more than possible that Caleb—a creature long since abandoned to depravity—has murdered him. Hired to solve the mystery, William Monk puts himself in Angus’s shoes, searching for clues to the missing man’s fate and his vicious brother’s whereabouts. Slowly Monk inches toward the truth—and also, unwittingly, toward the destruction of his good name and livelihood.
Appearing together in English for the first time, two masterpieces that take on the jazz age, the Nuremburg trials, postwar commercialism, and the feat of writing a book, presented in one brilliant volume The Death of My Brother Abel and its delirious sequel, Cain, constitute the magnum opus of Gregor von Rezzori’s prodigious career, the most ambitious, extravagant, outrageous, and deeply considered achievement of this wildly original and never less than provocative master of the novel. In Abel and Cain, the original book, long out of print, is reissued in a fully revised translation; Cain appears for the first time in English. The Death of My Brother Abel zigzags across the middle of the twentieth century, from the 1918 to 1968, taking in the Jazz Age, the Anschluss, the Nuremberg trials, and postwar commercialism. At the center of the book is the unnamed narrator, holed up in a Paris hotel and writing a kind of novel, a collage of sardonic and passionate set pieces about love and work, sex and writing, families and nations, and human treachery and cruelty. In Cain, that narrator is revealed as Aristide Subics, or so at least it appears, since Subics’ identity is as unstable as the fictional apparatus that contains him and the times he lived through. Questions abound: How can a man who lived in a time of lies know himself? And is it even possible to tell the story of an era of lies truthfully? Primarily set in the bombed-out, rubble- strewn Hamburg of the years just after the war, the dark confusion and deadly confrontation and of Cain and Abel, inseparable brothers, goes on.
Expelled from school, advised to leave university, and forced to resign from the army, Captain Jacinth Crewe has few options. He joins a sinister British Government security organisation. He trains in Rome and there is one final mission - to kill an American diplomat and his wife. The choice has to be made. And there is no turning back.
How could he murder a brother, his sister-in-law, his young niece and nephew as they slept in their beds? Jerry Mark was a Peace Corps volunteer, lawyer, 4-H leader, vice-president of his Cedar Falls H.S. senior class when he graduated in 1960.
For Regina Schwartz, we ignore the dark side of the Bible to our peril. The perplexing story of Cain and Abel is emblematic of the tenacious influence of the Bible on secular notions of identity - notions that are all too often violently exclusionary, negatively defining "us" against "them" in ethnic, religious, racial, gender, and nationalistic terms. In this compelling work of cultural and biblical criticism, Schwartz contends that it is the very concept of monotheism and its jealous demand for exclusive allegiance - to one God, one Land, one Nation or one People - that informs the model of collective identity forged in violence, against the other.
The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.
The year is 2028. Man's most ancient and feared enemy still walks the earth. For centuries, he has been consolidating his power and marshaling his dark forces for one last play. Walker Cain is the Man of Shadows and has only one agenda: to establish a one-world order through which he can control our destiny and remove our freedoms of personal choice. For him, no other plan can be worth his time and resources. He is the beast and intends for all to carry his mark. Benjamin Jasher has been a historian for as long as humanity has lived to record the advancement of civilizations. As a young man following The Great Flood, the ancient patriarch Noah presented him with a special duty and a challenge: to record the march of history. To ensure his life's work continued, he was permitted to live as long as necessary. But he needed to make special note of the acts and machinations of the most insidious man who ever lived, Cain.
The Adventures of Cain and Frankie tells the true story of two Siberian huskies that were brought into author Jodi Ekberg's life to help her through cancer treatments and the subsequent surgeries and broken bones. Says the author, "I had become weak and depressed while I was going through cancer treatments and had finally given up fighting. I thought that my days were numbered. My husband Bruce saw how depressed and sick I was getting. So when I said I wanted a husky puppy, he found Cain, hoping that somehow the puppy could help me. Bruce trained him while I watched. The more Cain learned how to do things, the more I wanted to be a part of it, so I started to go to other doctors to see if they could help me. "Bruce noticed that when I was with Cain I was not depressed and seemed to be getting better each day. Cain was treated like one of our children, as our kids are grown up. Cain went everywhere we went, and did everything we did, including eating what we ate and sleeping in our bed. "Bruce and I had discussed the possibility of getting another husky so Cain would not be alone. We felt that if one husky could help me to heal, than two may help me heal twice as fast."
Cain has been ranked as one of the two best dramatic poems written in England in the nineteenth century. Because of its religious heterodoxy, which veiled a political iconoclasm, and also because of Byron’s notoriety, Cain stirred up a storm among Tories and clergymen “from Kentish town to Pisa.” From 1821 to 1830 more was printed about its eighteen hundred alarming lines than about the twenty thousand of Don Juan. One solemn Frenchman even translated the work in order to supply his countrymen with a text that he could then rewrite and confute. After the initial controversy, readers began to regard Cain not merely as revolutionary propaganda but as a fictional portrait of common youthful experience: a sequence of aspiration, discontent, uncertainty, confusion, misunderstood isolation, fear, frustration, anger, and finally a rash, inevitable, but futile revolt that led to a future of hopeless regret. Truman Guy Steffan here presents a text, arrived at by collation of the first and several later editions with the original manuscript (presently in the Stark Collection of the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin). The first eight essays, which comprise Part I, cover a number of literary topics: Byron’s defense of his purposes in Cain and the relevance of his dramatic theory to the poem; the characterization that is an ideological confrontation, a revelation of personal conflict, as well as a rendering of individuals who have an existence independent of the author; the principles that controlled Byron’s absorption and expansion of biblical materials; the integration of the imagery with the dramatic substance; the incongruities of the language; the metrical heterodoxy; and a description of the manuscript and of Byron’s insertions. Part II contains the text of Cain, accompanied by notes on the variants, the manuscript cancellations and additions, certain linguistic details, and the scansion of some unusual verses. Then follow annotations on allusions, sources, and analogues, and on a few passages of the play that have elicited unusual conflict over interpretation. Part III provides a history of Cain criticism, from the opinions of Byron’s social and literary circle and of the major periodicals and pamphlets to the more complicated contribution of the twentieth century. This important work stands not only as a valuable addition to Byron scholarship but also as an illuminating record of the changing critical and cultural attitudes from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s. Steffan has done a remarkable job in bringing together and synthesizing an enormous body of material.
