Winter Evocations is a celebration of winter. The long dark nights and colder days provide the perfect excuse to take a moment out, to put our feet up and indulge in a bit of comfort. This book is designed to dip into over a cosy hot drink, and perhaps make us feel better about this so often maligned season.
There are certain special—and rare— books that refresh our understanding of how children see the world. This is one of those books. It's the story of a boy growing up in a lost time in an idyllic place—rural Virginia of the late 1940s. Charlie Lewis is the only child of city people who, after the war, choose to live at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a "gentleman's farm" near Charlottesville. Six years old when his family settles in the renovated corn crib on old Professor Jame's place, Charlie grows up in his personal version of heaven. His innocence is, of course, lost in the process. And so is his version of heaven. But, as the old saying goes, still waters run deep, and Charlie runs deep, with a natural (almost supernatural) affinity for the land and its animals. For knowledge , he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws and "the curse left on the land by slavery"—as old Professor James puts it—are still very much in evidence. Even so, Charlie's passions endear him to these men. They understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him. And more—they love him. Winter Run is a story that lets us escape for a moment our own noisy and complicated contemporary lives. Like The Red Pony, like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, it takes us back to the joys of childhood's unrestricted enthusiasm and curiosity.
Contributors include: Basho, Will Campbell, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Donald Hall, Ron Hansen, Jane Kenyon, Jamaica Kincaid, Barry Lopez, Kathleen Norris, Henry David Thoreau, John Updike, E.B. White and many others.
A compelling historical thriller set in 1700s Sweden from an exciting new literary talent. "Exquisitely suspenseful, beautifully written, and highly recommended." -- Lee Child "Visually acute, skillfully written; it won't easily erase its tracks in the reader's mind." -- Hilary Mantel "Wolf winter,'" she said, her voice small. "I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is." He was silent for a long time. "It's the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal," he said. "Mortal and alone." Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackån, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow. While herding the family's goats on the mountain, Frederika happens upon the mutilated body of one of their neighbors, Eriksson. The death is dismissed as a wolf attack, but Maija feels certain that the wounds could only have been inflicted by another man. Compelled to investigate despite her neighbors' strange disinterest in the death and the fate of Eriksson's widow, Maija is drawn into the dark history of tragedies and betrayals that have taken place on Blackån. Young Frederika finds herself pulled towards the mountain as well, feeling something none of the adults around her seem to notice. As the seasons change, and the "wolf winter," the harshest winter in memory, descends upon the settlers, Paavo travels to find work, and Maija finds herself struggling for her family's survival in this land of winter-long darkness. As the snow gathers, the settlers' secrets are increasingly laid bare. Scarce resources and the never-ending darkness force them to come together, but Maija, not knowing who to trust and who may betray her, is determined to find the answers for herself. Soon, Maija discovers the true cost of survival under the mountain, and what it will take to make it to spring.
Summoning spirits (evocation) does not have the best reputation ... as long as they are not called "apparitions of Mary", "cult of the dead", "invocations of gods", "spiritualism" or "family constellations" ... What is so scary about contact with spirits? In dream journeys one also meets all kinds of spirits - and poltergeists always come quite unasked. The problem is mainly the fear of death, of the spirits of the dead. This has not always been the case - close contact with the dead was first demonized by the Christian missionaries: They put the one God Father in place of the deceased physical father of every human being - and formed the devil from the archetype of the ancestor spirit. There is hardly an early culture in which spirits were not conjured up. Examples of this can be found in the Neolithic Age, in Egypt, Sumer, among the Hittites, the Romans, in Africa, in the Old and New Testaments, among the Germanic peoples, the Celts, in Islam, and so on. There is a great variety in the methods of evocation, in the reasons for them, in their procedure and in their place in the culture - but the basic principle is very simple.
The Poetry of the Self-Taught demonstrates the characteristic strengths of self-taught poetry and analyzes the factors that have caused most selftaught poets to disappear from anthologies and from literary history. Raising the question of whether or not their work should be read today and taken seriously - instead of being relegated to separate and unequal categories like women's or «peasant» poetry - the book highlights interesting contrasts between the poetry of eighteenth-century autodidacts such as Robert Burns, Mary Leapor, C.D.F. Schubart, and Anna Louise Karsch and the work of their contemporaries, mainstream poets like Alexander Pope, James Thomson, C.F. Gellert, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes. Self-taught poetry is often treated as an index to the lives and times of the poets, but this book explores it with a different purpose: to understand and illustrate the commonalities in autodidactic poetics, imagery, rhetorical strategies, and themes. Concurrent with a recent upturn of interest in «laboring» or self-taught poets both in England and in Germany, The Poetry of the Self-Taught will be useful for courses focusing on such poets or those dealing with eighteenth-century literature.
The Superhero Multiverse focuses on the evolving meanings of the superhero icon in 21st-century film and popular media, with an emphasis on re-adapting, re-imagining, and re-making. With its focus on multimedia and transmedia transformations, The Superhero Multiverse pivots on two important points: firstly, it reflects on the core concerns of the superhero narrative—including the relationship between ‘superhero comics’ and ‘superhero films’, the comics roots of superhero media, matters of canon and hybridity, and issues of recycling and stereotyping in superhero films and media texts. Secondly, it considers how these intersecting textual and cultural preoccupations are intrinsic to the process of remaking and re-adapting superheroes, and brings attention to multiple ways of materializing these iconic figures in our contemporary context.
Here is a book showing how to work with the various Grimoire Daemons (most especially the ones from the Lemegeton Goetia. Either by using the methods outlined in the actual grimoire, or some alternate methods which which quite well. The original manuscripts are quite confusing, so here I discuss step by step how they mean the workings to be carried out.
On a Ghostly Winter's Night, is a compilation of articles written by Winter Balefire over the span of 8 years and featured as a monthly column within two different magazines. These articles cover four main genres, Lore, Occult, Urban Legends and the Paranormal. Within this book are sixty selections ranging from the history of Halloween, candle magic, ghost hunting for beginners, superstitions, as well as taboo topics such as Necromancy, blood magic, new summoning rituals, and curses.
Authors not only create artworks. In the process of creating, they simultaneously bring to life their author personae. Approaching this phenomenon from an interdisciplinary point of view, Sonja Longolius develops a concept of »performative authorship« by examining different strategies of becoming an author. In regard to the notion of her concept, this work offers a critical and comparative analysis of the works of Paul Auster, Candice Breitz, Sophie Calle, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Specifically, Auster/Calle and Breitz/Foer form a generational pair of opposites, enabling a discussion of postmodern and post-postmodern artistic strategies of »performative authorship«.