Our Ecstatic Days
Our Ecstatic Days

Author: Steve Erickson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1439142297

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Our Ecstatic Days begins as the memoir of a young mother desperate to forget a single act, committed out of love and fear, that has changed forever the world around her. In the waning days of summer, a lake appears, almost overnight, in the middle of Los Angeles. In an instant of either madness or revelation, convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, Kristin becomes determined to stop it. Three thousand miles away, on the eve of a momentous event, another young woman -- with a bond to Kristin that she can't even know -- meets a mysterious figure who announces in the dark, "The Age of Chaos is here." Against a forbidden landscape that shimmers with destiny and yearning, Our Ecstatic Days finally takes place on the terrain of a defiant heart. Human connections multiply into astonishing twists of fate -- by which the wrongs of an obsolete century may be set right -- and parallel lives spin faster toward the possibility that they will once again unite, electrifying a vision of the century to come.

The Sea Came in at Midnight
The Sea Came in at Midnight

Author: Steve Erickson

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1480409979

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DIVDIV“If you read one philosophical-doomsday kinky-sex road-trip novel this year, make it this one.” —Salon/divDIV It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and the members of a powerful cult are about to commit ritual suicide. Fleeing their ranks at the final moment, teenager Kristin lands in Tokyo, where she gains employment listening to clients’ stories in a “memory hotel” designed to address the decay of Japanese collective memory after the Second World War. But Kristin herself has a startling odyssey: Among other things, it involves answering a personal ad only to wind up imprisoned, naked, in an empty house presided over by a man known as the Occupant, hard at work on a millennial calendar that has serious implications for the future. The Sea Came in at Midnight is a breathtaking fable of redemption and one of Erickson’s most impressive visions to date. /div/div

Zeroville
Zeroville

Author: Steve Erickson

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 1480409995

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The novel that inspired the film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen: “One of a kind . . . a funny, unnervingly surreal page turner” (Newsweek). Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review Zeroville centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him “cinéautistic.” With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood—where he’s mistaken for a member of the Manson family and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—a task that takes on frightening theological dimensions. Electrifying and “darkly funny,” Zeroville dives into the renegade American cinema of the 1970s and ’80s and emerges into an era for which we have no name (Publishers Weekly). “Funny, disturbing, daring . . . dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish.” —The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent.” —The Believer “[A] writer who has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon.” —Bookmarks Magazine “Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced.” —Jonathan Lethem

Ecstatic Relations
Ecstatic Relations

Author: Carolyn North

Publisher: Sentient Publications

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1591810523

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Ecstatic Relations is a memoir of delicious love stories, a metaphor for the universal law of attraction, a way of discussing the relationship between science and spirit, a metaphor for the evolution of consciousness and a meditation on cosmic consciousness, wherein everything in the universe is interconnected, dynamic, and ultimately whole. Through the author s love for her wounded childhood dog, her passionate encounters with men and women, gay and straight, young and old, and her relationship to the husband with whom she has been bonded for decades, we get a glimpse into the Mystery of which we are all a part.

Tours of the Black Clock
Tours of the Black Clock

Author: Steve Erickson

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1480409944

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DIVDIVThe course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York Times/divDIV Tours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for a single customer identified as “Client X,” which alters the trajectory of World War II. Eventually Jainlight is accompanied by an aged and senile Adolf Hitler back to America, where both men pursue the same lover. Tours of the Black Clock is a story in which history and the laws of space and time are unforgettably transformed. /div/div

Ecstatic Healing
Ecstatic Healing

Author: Margaret De Wys

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-05-06

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1620551713

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Understanding ecstatic spirit possession for physical and spiritual healing • Details the author’s direct experiences working with Brazilian miracle healer John of God (João de Deus) and African high shaman Credo Mutwa • Includes stories of psychic surgery, spirit possession, and shamanic healing rituals • Explains how each of us is capable of miraculous healing Margaret De Wys first became aware of ecstatic trance healing when she was a young girl fascinated by the rapture of the Holy Rollers. However, it would be decades before she would be called to explore that early fascination. At a gathering in Upstate New York thirty years later she was spontaneously possessed by a sacred Zulu necklace--a gift from one of the most powerful shamans in Africa, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. Frightening yet exhilarating, the experience set her on a search to understand the depths of ecstatic healing. Margaret journeys to Brazil to work with famous healer John of God (João de Deus), where she witnesses hundreds of miraculous healings through psychic surgery. During her years of spiritual service at John’s Casa, she experiences ecstatic visions, which increase her hunger for more knowledge. She begins to attend possession rituals held by Pai Lazaro, an Umbanda priest, and finds she is a natural medium to the African gods. Called through her dreams to work with Credo Mutwa, she travels to Credo’s Healing Village in Africa, where she discovers her gift as an ecstatic healer and the meaning of true faith. In sharing her journey to reach a profound understanding of ecstatic states and shamanic healing, Margaret De Wys not only gives the reader a direct experience of holiness but also reveals the potential each of us has for miraculous healing.

Days Between Stations
Days Between Stations

Author: Steve Erickson

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1480409928

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DIVDIVIn what the Guardian recently named one of the best literary debuts ever, a love triangle intersects with a lost film masterpiece and weather as turbulent as the heart/divDIV Life stories converge and break away in Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson’s searing first novel. At the center is the tumultuous union between Jason and Lauren, who fall in love as youths in Kansas, and later relocate to San Francisco. A cyclist training for the Olympics, Jason is often abroad and unfaithful; Lauren, in turn, finds solace in Michel, a nightclub manager trying to reconnect with his past. Michel’s journey leads to The Death of Marat, a recovered lost masterwork of silent film directed by his grandfather, whose extraordinary life includes having grown up as an orphaned twin in a Parisian brothel. In a world shaped by sensuality and trauma, where sandstorms invade Los Angeles, the Seine freezes, bike racers vanish in Venice, and relationships are warped by amnesia, geological chaos and personal upheaval each wrenchingly reflect the other. /div/div

The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World
The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World

Author: Diana Stein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-31

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 1000464733

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For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art. Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.

The Ecstatic, Or, Homunculus
The Ecstatic, Or, Homunculus

Author: Victor D. LaValle

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Something is wrong with Anthony, and it's getting worse. Schizophrenia runs in his family's blood, picking off an uncle here, a mother there, and has now found a home in Anthony's mind. The women in his life -- his mother, sister, and grandmother -- bring him home to Queens and try to fix him, but his presence slowly turns their home into a semi-suburban asylum.Anthony narrates the skewed story of his family's surreal adventures in an exploitative world, from black-market employers and neighborhood loansharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. In the tradition of misfit picaresques from The World According to Garp to Confederacy of Dunces, this is the story of a family trying to save themselves from the ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.

These Dreams of You
These Dreams of You

Author: Steve Erickson

Publisher: Europa Editions

Published: 2012-01-31

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1609459067

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“Set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory. One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country’s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past. Sweeping from 1960s London and ’70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold. “Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times.” —The Boston Globe “Drama filled with exuberance.” —The Washington Post “The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up.” —The New York Times Book Review