It had been five years since Dan Winters and the small band fought the demons in the forest of Cappawhite. Since then none of them have had any memory of the event, erased by a higher force. Now though, and just when it seemed that normality had returned to the quiet village, strange occurrences are happening. An ancient entity has been summoned from the dark side, and Dan and the rest of the group must once again confront the evil which has been sent from the darkness to destroy them.
A vibrant narrative history of three hallowed Manhattan blocks—the epicenter of American cool. St. Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements. Here Frank O’Hara caroused, Emma Goldman plotted, and the Velvet Underground wailed. But every generation of miscreant denizens believes that their era, and no other, marked the street’s apex. This idiosyncratic work of reportage tells the many layered history of the street—from its beginnings as Colonial Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant’s pear orchard to today’s hipster playground—organized around those pivotal moments when critics declared “St. Marks is dead.” In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews and dozens of rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun profiles iconic characters from W. H. Auden to Abbie Hoffman, from Keith Haring to the Beastie Boys, among many others. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants’ haven, a mafia warzone, a hippie paradise, and a backdrop to the film Kids—but it has always been a place that outsiders call home. This idiosyncratic work offers a bold new perspective on gentrification, urban nostalgia, and the evolution of a community.
This study deals primarily with Ch'inan, a village in northern Taiwan whose residents belong to one ethnic group: Hokkien-speaking Chinese whose ancestors made the journey from the southeast coast of mainland China over 200 years ago. It deals almost exclusively with the complex of institutions associated with the care and management of the dead. The book covers the history of Ch'inan, and how the village is organized today, making use of historical records, such as lineage genealogies. Sociological correlates of ancestor worship in ancestral halls and before domestic altars are examined. The darker side of ancestor worship is also explored, in which the dead stand out as dangerous creatures capable of harming or frightening the living. Perspective is then expanded to other parts of Taiwan, to consider how the form of the community affects the cult of the ancestors, how different reciprocal obligations between the living the dead affect ancestor worship, and in what ways people react to the obligations of ancestor worship.
“An imaginative, dark, and creepy blend of classic fairy tales in a page-turning thriller . . . unpredictable and enjoyable.” —The Quiet Concert One girl is kept in a room where every day the only food she’s given is a poisoned apple. Another is kept in a room covered in needles—and if she pricks her finger, she’ll die. Then there are the brother and sister kept in a cell that keeps getting hotter and hotter . . . A sinister kidnapper is on the loose in Kate’s world. She’s not involved until one day she heads to her grandmother’s house in the woods—and finds her grandmother has also been taken. Already an outcast, Kate can’t get any help from the villagers who hate her. Only Jack, another outsider, will listen to what’s happened. Then a princess is taken, and suddenly the king is paying attention—even though the girl’s stepmother would rather he didn’t. It’s up to Kate and Jack to track down the victims before an ever after arrives that’s far from happy. “Paulson’s world-building is intriguing . . . compulsively readable.” —MuggleNet
Winner of the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical! Follow the footsteps of the father of American horror fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was an oddity: his life, literature, and legacy are all, well, odd. In Poe-Land, J. W. Ocker explores the physical aspects of Poe’s legacy across the East Coast and beyond, touring Poe’s homes, examining artifacts from his life—locks of his hair, pieces of his coffin, original manuscripts, his boyhood bed—and visiting the many memorials dedicated to him. Along the way, Ocker meets people from a range of backgrounds and professions—actors, museum managers, collectors, historians—who have dedicated some part of their lives to Poe and his legacy. Poe-Land is a unique travelogue of the afterlife of the poet who invented detective fiction, advanced the emerging genre of science fiction, and elevated the horror genre with a mastery over the macabre that is arguably still unrivaled today.
Ten years ago one of America's most important public figures, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, chronicled her quest both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public to help make our society into the kind of village that enables children to become able, caring resilient adults. IT TAKES A VILLAGE is a textbook for caring, filled with truths that are worth a read, and a reread. In her substantial new introduction, Senator Clinton reflects on how our village has changed over the last decade, from the internet to education, and on how her own understanding of children has deepened as she has watched Chelsea grow up and take on challenges new to her generation, from a first job to living through a terrorist attack. She discusses how the work she is doing in the Senate is helping children and looks at where America has been successful, improvements in the foster care system and support for adoption, and where there is still work to be done, providing pre-school programmes and universal health care to all our children. This new edition elucidates how the choices we make about how we raise our children, and how we support families, will determine how all nations will face the challenges of this century.
Written in response to the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, The Book of the Dead is an important part of West Virginia's cultural heritage and a powerful account of one of the worst industrial catastrophes in American history. The poems collected here investigate the roots of a tragedy that killed hundreds of workers, most of them African American. They are a rare engagement with the overlap between race and environment in Appalachia. Published for the first time alongside photographs by Nancy Naumburg, who accompanied Rukeyser to Gauley Bridge in 1936, this edition of The Book of the Dead includes an introduction by Catherine Venable Moore, whose writing on the topic has been anthologized in Best American Essays.
