How does a black woman maintain her sense of self, when most of her friends are white? In public spaces and private, Dawn Downey is under attack by an onslaught of microaggressions. She struggles to find balance between personal relationships and personal integrity. In the process, she unconsciously takes on characteristics of the privileged. But after a photo of a racist toy shows up in her social media feed, she discovers her black power.
If you can imagine it fully, completely, down to the last grain of sand, then it will become. That is the magic in imagication. The Imagicators tells of a world imagined so completely, down to the last grain of sand, that it became. Now, eighty years after a girl from our world first imagicated the world of Windemere, Windemere is crumbling. The King and Queen have separated, and the civil war rages between their forces. This chaos mirrors the turmoil in the lives of Spenser and Elaine, two youngsters from our world who are drawn into Windemere to uncover the cause of the rift, vanquish the usurper who thrives on the anarchy, and restore the balance. To do so, Spenser and Elaine must discover their own power to imagicate.
The Mustards Seeds is a collection of short stories based on well known bible stories but taken from unique perspectives; like Judas’ narcissistic attitude as he recounts his valued role in Christ’s ministry and Peter’s consuming fear and doubt as he sinks needlessly into the stormy sea. John has added a fun and modern element to these ancient narratives while working hard to capture the real life feelings and emotions behind these people’s experiences. Perhaps you will find new insight and relevance to God’s word as you experience it anew through the minds and hearts of the Mustard Seeds.
When Milton and Marlo Fauster die in a marshmallow-bear explosion, they get sent straight to Heck, an otherworldly reform school. Milton can understand why his kleptomaniac sister is here, but Milton is—or was—a model citizen. Has a mistake been made? Not according to Bea “Elsa” Bubb, the Principal of Darkness. She doesn’t make mistakes. She personally sees to it that Heck—whether it be home ec class with Lizzie Borden, ethics with Richard Nixon, or gym with Blackbeard the pirate—is especially, well, heckish for the Fausters. Will Milton and Marlo find a way to escape? Or are they stuck here for all eternity, or until they turn eighteen, whichever comes first? ★ “The author’ umpteen clever allusions . . . make this book truly sparkle.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred
Sniper is the behind-the-scenes story of one of the most frightening rampages to occur in U.S. history—and how it was stopped. For more than three weeks, the nation watched in disbelief as Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs were held hostage by anonymous gunmen shooting innocent civilians at random. Sniper is the definitive account of those alleged gunmen, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, and the massive manhunt that ended with their capture by a heavily armed SWAT team in an early-morning raid at an interstate highway rest stop. Two Washington Post reporters, Sari Horwitz and Michael E. Ruane, retrace the steps of Muhammad and Malvo from their first meeting on the island of Antigua to Malvo’s defiant confession in a Virginia jail. Drawing on exclusive reporting about that confession, internal police documents, and a wide range of law-enforcement sources, Horwitz and Ruane track in remarkable detail the murderous trail Muhammad and Malvo are accused of having followed to the Washington area and reconstruct the eerie way in which the two moved invisibly around the nation’s capital in the midst of one of the largest police investigations in U.S. history. Horwitz and Ruane also take you inside the police command center where local and state police, joined by the federal government’s most experienced crime fighters, worked desperately to stop the killings, unaware that a fundamental error—investigators were wrongly fixated on a white van—was allowing Muhammad and Malvo to slip through the dragnet. We meet FBI negotiators, veteran detectives, forensics experts, prosecutors, and politicians who faced perhaps the biggest challenge of their careers as they confronted frustrating setbacks, logistical nightmares, and the overwhelming pressure of a high-stakes investigation. In a fast-paced narrative that outdoes even the most acclaimed television cop shows, Sniper recounts the extraordinary police work that enabled investigators to quickly exploit the clues handed to them by Muhammad and Malvo that finally led to their arrest. Part gripping drama, part real-life portrait of law enforcement at work, Sniper is also a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of American society in an age of terrorism.
In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.
Tragically, relatively little of this flourishing nation and its rich culture has survived. Its stories, however, live on today. In this priceless and engaging collection, native Cherokee and professional storyteller Lloyd Arneach recounts tales such as how the bear lost his long bushy tail and how the first strawberry came to be.
