The Mortician’s Curse By: Z. J. Hampl Lexi is a beautiful, but wild, college senior. She lives to manipulate men. Her life changes after enrolling in a mysterious college course called “Death and Dying.” In this course, secularism and liberalism run rampant, challenging the views of every student in the class. After a tour of a local funeral home with a sinister mortician, Lexi’s promiscuous and out-of-control lifestyle leads her onto a dark path. Will she ever get the chance to change, or will she be forced to endure the mortician’s curse for the rest of her miserable life?
So who suffers the greater agony, the cursed or the curser? Don't ask Boleslaw because he won't be able to tell you. There you have it, a most vexing quandary. Truth be told, if it hadn't been for the psychoanalyst who age-regressed Godfrey Christopher, a distraught divorce, to a traumatic childhood incident during one of his therapy sessions, the people and events that ultimately provoked Boleslaw's curse might never have been revealed. While in this hypnagogic state, Godfrey is confronted by a man he had met only recently and later realizes that the individual evoked by his subconscious mind appears not to have aged one iota in the intervening thirty years pursuant to the incident. While attempting to get to the bottom of the enigma he stumbles onto a conspiracy dedicated to avenging the victims of the Katyn massacre, a heinous atrocity committed decades earlier by the Soviets that claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives. Boleslaw's Curse is a novel that not only opens a window onto the Soviet KGB apparat and its infamous Spetzburo Department but also leads the reader across two continents as the brother and the son of one of the murdered victims pursue the principal perpetrators of the massacre. When they ultimately follow them to the United States the question becomes, will Godfrey Christopher's astute probing into the murders of the perpetrators combined with the work of the local police agencies there unmask these two determined assassins, or will the devious stratagems employed by their cadre of compatriotic supporters enable them to escape detection long enough for them to complete their mission of vengeance and return to their homeland? There is an additional quandary, how will the love triangle involving a captivating European woman, the ubiquitous Godfrey Christopher, and one of the assassins be resolved in that both Christopher and the assassin are equally well-liked in this novel and both seemingly driven by unassailable principles?"
Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society. Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Winner of a PEN/Heim Grant.
A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. This innovative multidisciplinary volume critically examines olfaction in Asian societies with the goal of unlocking its full potential as an analytical frame and lived phenomenon. Featuring contributions from international scholars with deep knowledge of the region, this volume conceptualizes Asia and its borders as a dynamic, transnationally connected space of olfactory exchange. Using examples such as trade along the Silk Road; the diffusion of dharmic religious traditions out of South Asia; the waves of invasion, colonization, and forced relocation that shaped the history of the continent; and other “sensory highways” of contact, the contributors break down essentializing olfactory tropes and reveal how scent functions as a category of social and moral boundary-marking and boundary-breaching within, between, and beyond Asian societies. Smell shapes individual, collective, and state-based memory, as well as discourses about heritage and power. As such, it suggests a pervasive and powerful intimacy that contributes to our understanding of the human condition, mobility, and interconnection. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Khoo Gaik Cheng, Jean Duruz, Qian Jia, Shivani Kapoor, Adam Liebman, Lorenzo Marinucci, Peter Romaskiewicz, Saki Tanada, Aubrey Tang, and Ruth E. Toulson.
Dr. Bill Stuart has spent his life trying to find a cure for the aging process. In his seventh decade, he develops a drug that reverses aging in rats but gives them cancer. When his partner injects himself, it kills him. The police accuse Bill of causing his friends death. He injects himself in an attempt at suicide. Instead of dying, he suffers agonizing pain and collapses. He awakes two weeks later in the hospital burn unit. His body has gone through a metamorphosis, and he appears to be a young man. No one knows who he is, and he cannot divulge his identity because the police want to arrest him regarding the death of his partner. He flees from the police and from brutal men who know who he is and want to steal the formula of the drug.
Ren and Carl are two friends who move to a small town called Autumn Yard. There Carl tries to get pass his brother's death, but soon his brother Max shows up returning from the grave to warn Carl about danger. In Autumn Yard Cemetery people disappeared and it's forbidden to go in and explore the woods behind the graveyard. There's an ancient curse laying there and it's about to awake once again to unleash the horrors that would take over the town and sink it into a timeless nightmare unless Carl and Ren find a way to break the curse.
George Kulles presents a murder mystery surrounded by a web of historical intrigue in this fast-paced thriller. When the world's most valuable paperweights disappear from Sotheby's New York the police suspect everyone. They're stumped and it seems the treasures will be lost to the world. There are simply no further avenues to follow. Or can the clues be found in the past of the paperweights? Kulles performed extensive biographical research to bring the world's most historically famous paperweight collectors to life. Visit the world of Princess Eugenie, who spent twenty years mourning the loss of her husband and son. Follow Oscar Wilde's meteoric rise to stardom and his disgraceful fall from nineteenth-century Victorian society. Visit Eva Peron - the woman who promoted herself from harlot to President's wife. Acquaint yourself with the eccentric world of Truman Capote. Meet some of the most famous modern collectors including King Farouk, Arthur Rubloff, Paul Jokelson and Lawrence Selman. At the center of this puzzling mystery reside three crystal paperweights - the most complex examples of glasswork ever produced. Are the tragedies the owners of these pieces suffer natural, or does it all have something to do with The Curse of the Imperial Paperweights?
