EMPTY ROOMS What is it about empty rooms, what lingering presence is sensed when you walk in, what dark secrets do the silent walls hold... Thirteen authors have come up with innovative and dark stories on this theme, guaranteed to stay in your mind. MISSING What's missing, who's missing, how did they/it go missing... another themed collection from talented Thirteen authors who have delved into the depths of their dark imaginations and produced a range of stories to haunt your sleep.
"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."—from the Introduction American popular culture conducts a passionate love affair with the healthy, fit, preferably beautiful body, and in recent years theories of embodiment have assumed importance in various scholarly disciplines. But what of the dying or dead body? Why do we avert our gaze, speak of it only as absence? This thoughtful and beautifully written book—illustrated with photographs by Shellburne Thurber and other remarkable images—finds a place for the dying and lost body in the material, intellectual, and imaginary spaces of contemporary American culture. Laura E. Tanner focuses her keen attention on photographs of AIDS patients and abandoned living spaces; newspaper accounts of September 11; literary works by Don DeLillo, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, and others; and material objects, including the AIDS Quilt. She analyzes the way in which these representations of the body reflect current cultural assumptions, revealing how Americans read, imagine, and view the dynamics of illness and loss. The disavowal of bodily dimensions of death and grief, she asserts, deepens rather than mitigates the isolation of the dying and the bereaved. Lost Bodies will speak to anyone imperiled by the threat of loss.
Winner of a Northern Writers’ Award Longlisted for The Bath Novel Award * What if reading the wrong book could get you arrested? In a decaying city controlled by the First General and his army, expressing the wrong opinion can have terrible consequences. Clara Winter knows this better than anyone. When she was a child, her father was taken by the Authorisation Bureau for the crime of teaching banned books to his students. She is still haunted by his disappearance. Now Clara teaches at the same university, determined to rebel against the regime that cost her family so much – and her weapons are the banned books her father left behind. But she has started something dangerous, something that brings her to the attention of the Authorisation Bureau and its most feared interrogator, Major Jackson. The same man who arrested Clara’s father. With her rights stripped away, in a country where democracy has been replaced with something more sinister, will she be the next one to disappear? * ‘Provocative and prescient, The Disappeared is an unflinching tale of resistance in dark political times. Set in a near-future Britain where books are banned, this is a thought-provoking dystopian debut.’ – Caroline Ambrose, Founder of The Bath Novel Award
Each year, hundreds of thousands of people are reported missing in the United States alone. The majority of those who disappear turn up within a week, but a small percentage are never heard from again. Why did a Swedish teenager on an Australian adventure mail a cryptic letter to his family in Stockholm before disappearing forever? What became of a young woman whose car was found crashed and abandoned off a cliffside in Whatcom County, Washington? How can an individual vanish without a trace in a world so connected and monitored? This book explores ten unsolved missing persons cases from around the world, from a 12-year-old British boy who purchased a one-way ticket to London King's Cross never to return, to an American traveler who walked into the Himalayas not to be seen again. Included are exclusive interviews, statistical information and a case-by-case analysis of the most common and probable theories for each disappearance.
The arrival of those twenty Africans, though they were not the first Africans in America, represented the vanguard of an institution and an industry that would, for 246 years, survive in the unkempt median lying between the merging lanes of the sociopolitical practices of the past and the oncoming traffic of advancing sociopolitical concepts of the future. Unlike the simple annotation in Rolfe's diary announcing the arrival of the 1619 Africans, the concept of advanced sociopolitical thinking arrived on the scene with the proverbial bang. Whereas Rolfe's announcement was a precursor to the institution of slavery, the new concept of natural individual rights was a precursor of its demise. Entering the sociopolitical spectrum from the lanes of evolving religious freedom, the notion of the natural rights of the individual was ultimately destined to clash with slavery's abject denial of such rights. The convergence of these two events, as though engaged in a turf war over morality, would, years later, crash into each other with the sound of cannon fire.
The inspiration for the Peacock Original series The Calling, streaming now! "A tense, gripping page-turner that I devoured in two days—it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.” — S.J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep Israeli detective Avraham Avraham must find a teenage boy gone missing from the suburbs of Tel Aviv in this first volume in the thrilling crime series by D. A. Mishani. Crimes in Avraham’s quiet suburb are generally not all that complex. But when a sixteen-year-old boy goes missing and a schoolteacher offers up a baffling complication, Avraham finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about his life. Told through alternating points of view, The Missing File is an emotionally wrought, character-driven page-turner with plenty of twists and turns. It’s a mystery that will leave readers questioning the notions of innocence and guilt, and the nebulous nature of truth.
With Empty Rooms, bestselling award-winning novelist Jeffrey J. Mariotte introduces crime savant Krebbs and obsessive comic book fan Robey, who will quickly join the ranks of the most beloved heroes of thriller literature. Richie Krebbs is an ex-cop, a walking encyclopedia of crime and criminals who chafes at bureaucracy. Frank Robey quit the FBI and joined the Detroit PD, obsessed with the case of a missing child and unwilling to leave the city before she was found. When Richie unearths a possible clue in one of Detroit’s many abandoned homes, it puts him on a collision course with Frank—and with depths of depravity that neither man could have imagined. How do people who dwell in the darkest places—by profession or predilection—maintain their connection to the world of light and humanity? Richie and Frank will need every coping mechanism at their disposal to survive their descent into darkness and emerge unbroken on the other side. "This is not a book for the timid or easily shocked...despite this, Empty Rooms remains a highly recommended read.” —Mystery Scene
Baron Crabbe is dangerously high on legends of the Trader and rumors of a secret cache. His ace in the hole is Ryan Cawdor and his band--his prisoners. Ryan knows the truth, and it won't help Crabbe. But the only option is to play along with the crazed baron's scheme. Original.
The second installment in the Relic Master quartet! Even though Tasceron and its Emperor have fallen, there is a rumor that the heiress to the throne still lives. If so, her life is in grave danger, especially from the Watch. Galen and Raffi must race to find and protect her. Watch a Video
The Lost Generation: The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington, Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse. After the First World War, special people returned to their home towns from the front. When the war began, they were still boys, but duty forced them to defend the homeland. "Lost Generation" - as they were called. This concept is used today when we talk about writers who worked during the breaks between the First and Second World Wars, which became a test for all of humanity and were almost all beaten out of their usual, peaceful rut. One of the themes that commonly appears in the authors' works is decadence and the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy. Writers of the lost generation raise in their works the problem of young people who returned from the war and did not find their home, their relatives. Questions about how to live, how to remain human, how to learn to enjoy life again - this is what is paramount in this literary movement. Table of Contents: 1. Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms 2. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises 3. Francis Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby 4. Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero 5. Henri Barbusse: Under Fire: The Story of a Squad
