Curtis Macurdy would have been content to spend his life with his wife Varia earning a living by tilling his land in the American Midwest. But Varia is from Yuulith, and when the Sisterhood called her home, she refused to go. Their big mistake was kidnapping her. For Curtis may seem like an ordinary farmer, but underneath lurks a strategic genius of the highest order.
The Macurdies had been farmers for generations, and Curtis Macurdy would have been content to spend his life with his exoticallybeautiful wife Varia, earning a living by tilling his plot of land in the American Midwest. Varia was from Yuulith, a magical world separated from Earth by only a dimensional barrier that could sometimes be broached.
The Macurdies had been farmers for generations, and Curtis Macurdy would have been content to spend his life with his exoticallybeautiful wife Varia, earning a living by tilling his plot of land in the American Midwest. Varia was from Yuulith, a magical world separated from Earth by only a dimensional barrier that could sometimes be broached.
Returning to Earth in the hopes of settling down to a quiet farmer's life, mystic warrior Curtis Macurdy is dismayed when one of Hitler's psychic recruits discovers the Bavarian Gate and unleashes the militaristic Voitusotar on the Allied forces.
The Far Side of Promise is an anthology of short stories spanning cyberpunk, high fantasy, psychological horror, and science fiction. In the titular story, a jaded deep-space miner sets out on a desperate bid for real food. The boundary between the virtual and real worlds becomes an Ouroboros. Alex Grant always gets what he wants—until he gets what he deserves in The Tower. Many people hide skeletons in their closets, but in The Roommate, Roy talks to his. At age ten, Kirsten Wren’s mother tried to kill her. To survive, she followed a ghost Into the Beneath. In A Queen’s Lament, a young monarch copes with love, betrayal, and demons. In Evergreen, seventeen-year-old Harper and her little sister find themselves alone after nuclear war. Neris dreams constantly of A Ghost Among Fireflies, an unseen force compelling her to visit a dangerous, destroyed world.
Widely considered one of the finest poets of his generation, Tom Sleigh brings to his fifth collection his trademark intensity and craftsmanship, mixing the streetwise edginess of popular culture with Greek and Latin references, myth, and dramatic lyrics. Passionately comprehensive in its understanding of contemporary reality, Far Side of the Earth is unique in its moral gravitas, consolatory power, and strangeness of vision.
Though recognized in the latter part of the 19th century as "the greatest Orientalist in Britain," the Geneva-born Anglican priest, Solomon Caesar Malan (1812–1894) was such an extraordinary person that he has defied any scholarly person to write a critical account of his life and works. Consequently, almost no one has written anything critically appreciative and insightful about him since his death. A polymath with extraordinary talent for languages and sketching, among other specialized skills, Malan focused much of his life on assessing biblical translations in ancient Middle Eastern and East Asian languages, while also producing English translations of alternative expressions of Christianity found in north Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. A life-long interest of his was comparing the proverbs of his name-sake, King Solomon, with proverbial wisdom from as many cultures and languages as he could find. That interest culminated in a three-volume work that enshrined his achievements realized through his capacities as a hyperpolyglot within the context of a search for shared wisdom across many cultures. In this volume, produced by a team of collaborators from a wide range of scholarly interests and varying expertise, we have presented a critically assessed account of the life and key works produced by Solomon Caesar Malan. In fact, it is the first work of its kind on Malan written since his death, now having occurred more than 125 years ago. Readers will journey through an itinerary that starts in Geneva before it became part of Switzerland, moves to Great Britain, and ultimately into one of the colleges in Oxford. Subsequently, it moves us into an exploration of the journey of his life that involved a huge range of places, people, and languages: starting in Calcutta, touching unusual figures from Hungary, India, and China. Those seminal experiences led Malan into studies of languages related to even more distant cultural worlds in Central, Southeastern, and East Asia. The historians among us have delved into Malan’s life in Calcutta, Geneva, and Dorsetshire, while others have explored the nature of his hyperpolyglossia, and tested the quality of his understanding of ancient literature in classical languages that include Chinese, Manchurian, Sanskrit and Tibetan. Notably, Malan’s personal library was so unique, that when he donated it to his alma mater at Oxford University, it became one of the major bibliographic precedents for what is now the Oriental Division in the Bodleian Libraries. Yet, when one follows the twists and turns of his life’s journey, and the surprises that occur from documenting the history and content of the Malan Library as well as critically analysing aspects of his opus magnum, Original Notes on the Book of Proverbs (1889–1893), we believe both general readers and scholarly specialists will be entranced.
“My name is Peter Grant. I didn’t start out to save the world, it just sort of happened. I only wanted to win back the love of the woman who broke up with me. She was chosen to work on this anthropological expedition to Bali; an excellent place to rekindle the magic of romance. I more or less invited myself along. That wasn’t the kind of magic I found. While Gayle, my ex-, was working on her tan beside a Balinese lagoon; I was chasing down headhunters in the jungles of Irian Jaya. She made the cocktail party circuit. I buried the last King of the Torajan. And while the lovely Ms. O’Conner got engaged to the Major Domo Demon of the Underworld, I became the sorcerer’s apprentice. So you tell me, how’s a guy suppose to win a woman’s heart if he can’t spend any quality time with her? I’m a child of my times, an amalgamation of nature and nurture. I did what any red-blooded American male my age has learned to do; I battled the evil lord of the universe to stop his union with the woman I love and saved all of mankind in the process. You would think that would count for something, wouldn’t you?” Man has always known the gods, the demons. They are as real as the moon and stars. From his first taste of the apple, man recognized good and evil and honored and feared the gods they represent. But someday we must ask how much of this is real and how much is just man’s invention. For Peter Grant the answer means everything.
C. S. Lewis was a British author, lay theologian, and contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia.
