Caught in a freak storm, John Webster takes shelter in an old barn with weird symbols carved in the doors. The landowner offers him a place to stay and John, on leave from University, takes him up on the offer. But it turns out the barn has more history than he first suspected. A portal back in time, to be precise. He meets the beautiful Johanna, who is being tracked by the Witch Finder General. Modern science says that witches aren't real... but then, neither are portals back in time, so what can John believe? John finds himself torn between the past and the present, caught in a web of magic, mystery, suspicion and witchhunts.
This important book from a Pulitzer Prize finalist follows the brutal journey a group of men take to cross the Mexican border: "the single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy" (The Atlantic). In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about what happened to them. The result was a national bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a "book of the year" in multiple newspapers, and a work proclaimed as a modern American classic.
Hailed by RT Book Reviews as “fresh and original…stark and lovely,” a heroic fantasy by an award-winning author about a young woman who is trained in the art of the sinister hand of magic. A Locus Magazine Bestseller. Isobel, upon her sixteenth birthday, makes the choice to work for the Boss called the Devil by some, in his territory west of the Mississippi. But this is not the devil you know. This is a being who deals fairly with immense—but not unlimited—power, who offers opportunities to people who want to make a deal, and they always get what they deserve. But his land is a wild west that needs a human touch, and that’s where Izzy comes in. Inadvertently trained by him to see the clues in and manipulations of human desire, Izzy is raised to be his left hand and travel circuit through the territory helping those in need. As we all know, where there is magic there is chaos…and death.
The true story behind NASCAR’s hardscrabble, moonshine-fueled origins, “fascinating and fast-moving . . . even if you don’t know a master cylinder from a head gasket” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). “[Neal] Thompson exhumes the sport’s Prohibition-era roots in this colorful, meticulously detailed history.”—Time Today’s NASCAR—equal parts Disney, Vegas, and Barnum & Bailey—is a multibillion-dollar conglomeration with 80 million fans, half of them women, that grows bigger and more mainstream by the day. Long before the sport’s rampant commercialism lurks a distant history of dark secrets that have been carefully hidden from view—until now. In the Depression-wracked South, with few options beyond the factory or farm, a Ford V-8 became the ticket to a better life. Bootlegging offered speed, adventure, and wads of cash. Driving with the Devil reveals how the skills needed to outrun federal agents with a load of corn liquor transferred perfectly to the red-dirt racetracks of Dixie. In this dynamic era (the 1930s and ’40s), three men with a passion for Ford V-8s—convicted felon Raymond Parks, foul-mouthed mechanic Red Vogt, and war veteran Red Byron, NASCAR’s first champ—emerged as the first stock car “team.” Theirs is the violent, poignant story of how moonshine and fast cars merged to create a sport for the South to call its own. In the tradition of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, this tale captures a bygone era of a beloved sport and the character of the country at a moment in time.
Communism must kill what it cannot control. So for a century, it has killed artists, writers, musicians, and even dancers. It kills them secretly, using bioweapons and poison to escape accountability. Among its victims was Anna Pavlova, history’s greatest dancer, who was said to have God-given wings and feet that never touched the ground. But she defied Stalin, and for that she had to die. Her sudden death in Paris in 1931 was a mystery until now. The Dancer and the Devil traces Marxism’s century-long fascination with bioweapons, from the Soviets’ leak of pneumonic plague in 1939 that nearly killed Stalin to leaks of anthrax at Kiev in 1972 and Yekaterinburg in 1979; from the leak of a flu in northeast China in 1977 that killed millions to the catastrophic COVID-19 leak from biolabs in Wuhan, China. Marxism’s dark past must not be a parent to the world’s dark future. COMMUNIST CHINA PLAYED WITH FIRE AND THE WORLD IS BURNING Nearly ten million people have died so far from the mysterious Covid-19 virus. These dead follow a long line of thousands of other brave souls stretching back nearly a century who also suffered mysterious “natural” deaths, including dancers, writers, saints and heroes. These honored dead should not be forgotten by amnesiac government trying to avoid inconvenient truth. The dead and those who remember and loved them deserve answers to two great questions. How? Why? The Dancer and the Devil answers these questions. It tracks a century of Soviet and then Chinese Communist poisons and bioweapons through their development and intentional use on talented artists and heroes like Anna Pavlova, Maxim Gorky, Raoul Wallenberg and Alexis Navalny. It then tracks leaks of bioweapons beginning in Saratov, Russia in 1939 and Soviet Yekaterinburg in 1979 through Chinese leaks concluding in the recent concealed leak of the manufactured bioweapon Covid-19 from the military lab in Wuhan, China. Stalin, Putin, and Xi, perpetrators of these vast crimes against humanity itself, should not be allowed to escape responsibility. This book assembles the facts on these cowardly murderers, calling them to account for their heartless crimes against man concluding in Covid-19.
In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.
Caught in a freak storm, John Webster takes shelter in an old barn with weird symbols carved in the doors. The landowner offers him a place to stay and John, on leave from University, takes him up on the offer. But it turns out the barn has more history than he first suspected. A portal back in time, to be precise. He meets the beautiful Johanna, who is being tracked by the Witch Finder General. Modern science says that witches aren't real... but then, neither are portals back in time, so what can John believe? John finds himself torn between the past and the present, caught in a web of magic, mystery, suspicion and witchhunts.
Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story. In the course of his adventures, Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarchist Sufi heretics, vegan kungfu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hard-core bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.
The manager who shepherded Van Halen from obscurity to rock stardom goes behind the scenes to tell the complete, unadulterated story of David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, and the legendary band that changed rock music. Van Halen’s rise in the 1980s was one of the most thrilling the music world had ever seen—their mythos an epic party, a sweaty, sexy, never-ending rock extravaganza. During this unparalleled run of success, debauchery, and drama, no one was closer to the band than Noel Monk. A man who’d worked with some of rock’s biggest and most notorious names, Monk spent seven years with Van Halen, serving first as their tour manger then as their personal manager until 1985, when both he and David Lee Roth exited as controversy, backstabbing, and disappointment consumed the band. Throughout Van Halen’s meteoric rise and abrupt halt, this confidant, fixer, friend, and promoter saw it all and lived to tell. Now, for the first time, he shares the most outrageous escapades—from their coming of age to their most shocking behavior on the road; from Eddie’s courtship and high profile wedding to Valerie Bertinelli to the incredible drug use which would ultimately lead to everyone’s demise. Sharing never-before-told stories, Monk paints a compelling portrait of Eddie Van Halen, bringing into focus the unique combination of talent, vision, hardship, and naiveté that shaped one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time—and made him and his brother vulnerable to the trappings and failings of fame. Illustrated with dozens of rare photographs from Monk’s vaults, Runnin’ with the Devil is manna from rock heaven no Van Halen fan can miss.
