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Out of Body
Jeffrey Ford
Out of Body is a dark fantasy thriller from multi-award-winning author Jeffrey Ford.
A small-town librarian witnesses a murder at his local deli, and what had been routine sleep paralysis begins to transform into something far more disturbing. The trauma of holding a dying girl in his arms drives him out of his own body. The town he knows so well is suddenly revealed to him from a whole new perspective. Secrets are everywhere and demons fester behind closed doors.
Worst of all, he discovers a serial killer who has been preying on the area for over a century, one capable of traveling with him through his dreams.
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The Best of Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford
These are Jeffrey Ford’s personal selections spanning the decades of his career and representing his many styles—genre hybrids, literary approaches to SF/F/H tropes, forays into the New Weird as one of its early practitioners, realist-auto-biographical/fantastic/ horror mash-ups, and straight-on fantasy stories. Ford is at home across the map of speculative fiction but is tied to, and claims allegiance to, no country.
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Second Coming
D.B. Borton
Hank Jones isn't your typical alien abductee. There were no tractor beams, probes, or government conspiracies involved-no, Hank met his kidnappers at a bar. They weren't exactly hard to miss-Elvis, a seven-foot tall Elvis clone, and Lawrence, a grounded European gent, were the only UCLA supporters in a bar full of Hoosiers. Still, Hank has nothing better to do. It's spring break, there's a pile of freshman essays on his desk, and his thesis is going nowhere. Worse, his ex is sleeping with his dissertation director. He needs a friend, and these aliens will do. Besides, Elvis and Lawrence could really use a hand-they haven't visited Earth since the 1950s, and now they're lost in Indiana, not realizing that things have changed. They need to get to Washington: if they don't warn the president about a coming nuclear arms race, the planet will be destroyed. But the American public don't seem too worried. Aliens? And one of them looks like Elvis? Facebook and Twitter are aflame. Oprah and The Tonight Show hang on the phone. The apocalypse will have to wait. Second Coming is the hilarious new novel by D.B. Borton , author of the Cat Caliban and Gilda Liberty series. Taking aim at consumerism, the cult of celebrity, and the self-destructiveness of humanity, it nonetheless finds joy in the pleasures of basketball, dogs, and rock 'n' roll.
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On Rhyme
David Caplan
Edited by David Caplan
On Rhyme collects essays by leading scholars from America and the United Kingdom. Like its subject, the essays on rhyme range broadly. They consider an array of topics and employ a number of approaches. Surveying the field, the authors examine rhyme in various historical periods (including the Renaissance, Augustan, Romantic, Modern and Contemporary eras) and in different genres (including poetry and song). Several consider how particular artists (such as the poets Robert Creeley, Emily Dickinson, and Edmund Spenser, and the Somali-born hip-hop artist K?naan) utilize rhyme. Others analyze the shifting attitudes toward rhyme that characterize particular historical periods. Close readings extend insights from linguistics, philosophy, and literary criticism. A selection of poems adds to the interdisciplinary approach as poets offer their own perspectives on the technique.
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Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder
Amy Butcher
"A gripping and poignant memoir." -Kirkus In this powerful and unforgettable memoir, award-winning writer Amy Butcher examines the shattering consequences of failing a friend when she felt he needed one most. Four weeks before their college graduation, twenty-one-year-old Kevin Schaeffer walked Amy Butcher to her home in their college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Hours after parting ways with Amy, he fatally stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Emily Silverstein. While he was awaiting trial, psychiatrists concluded that he had suffered an acute psychotic break. Although severely affected by Kevin's crime, Amy remained devoted to him as a friend, believing that his actions were the direct result of his untreated illness. Over time, she became obsessed--determined to discover the narrative that explained what Kevin had done. The tragedy deeply shook her concept of reality, disrupted her sense of right and wrong, and dismantled every conceivable notion she'd established about herself and her relation to the world. Eventually realizing that she would never have the answers, or find personal peace, unless she went after it herself, Amy returned to Gettysburg--the first time in three years since graduation--to sift through hundreds of pages of public records: mental health evaluations, detectives' notes, inventories of evidence, search warrants, testimonies, and even Kevin's own confession. Visiting Hours is Amy Butcher's deeply personal, heart-wrenching exploration of how trauma affects memory and the way a friendship changes and often strengthens through seemingly insurmountable challenges. Ultimately, it's a testament to the bonds we share with others and the profound resilience and strength of the human spirit.
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Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture
David Caplan
Rhyme's Challenge offers a concise, pithy primer to hip-hop poetics while presenting a spirited defense of rhyme in contemporary American poetry. David Caplan's stylish study examines hip-hop's central but supposedly outmoded verbal technique: rhyme. At a time when print-based poets generallydismiss formal rhyme as old-fashioned and bookish, hip-hop artists deftly deploy it as a way to capture the contemporary moment. Rhyme accommodates and colorfully chronicles the most conspicuous conditions and symbols of contemporary society: its products, technologies, and personalities. Ranging from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Eminem and Jay-Z, David Caplan's study demonstrates the continuing relevance of rhyme to poetry- and everyday life.
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![[BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography by Michelle Disler](https://digitalcommons.owu.edu/eng_books/1009/thumbnail.jpg "[BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography by Michelle Disler")
[BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography
Michelle Disler
Invokes a narrative and intimate distance through the imbalance of power between men & detectives and women & wives, leaving a risky proposition like an alphabet or the simple complexity of memoir and writing about memory. A sobering examination of the ultimate spy-styled popular thriller, a nuanced deconstruction of model masculinity in mass culture.
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Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925
Martin Hipsky
Today's mass-market romances have their precursors in late Victorian popular novels written by and for women. In Modernism and the Women's Popular Romance Martin Hipsky scrutinizes some of the best-selling British fiction from the period 1885 to 1925, the era when romances, especially those by British women, were sold and read more widely than ever before or since. Recent scholarship has explored the desires and anxieties addressed by both "low modern" and "high modernist" British culture in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In keeping with these new studies, Hipsky offers a nuanced portrait of an important phenomenon in the history of modern fiction. He puts popular romances by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, the Baroness Orczy, Florence Barclay, Elinor Glyn, Victoria Cross, Ethel Dell, and E. M. Hull into direct relationship with the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, among other modernist greats.
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Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions
Martine L. Stephens and Martha C. Sims
2nd edition Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation--from the field's history and major terms to theories and interpretive approaches. Living Folklore moves beyond genres and classifications, and encourages students who are new to the field to see the study of folklore as a unique approach to understanding people, communities, and day-to-day artistic communication. This revised edition incorporates new examples, research, and theory along with added discussion of digital and online folklore.
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In the World He Created According to His Will
David Caplan
Caplan's lyrics seek to understand the world in its fullness, both the suffering that history imposes on individual experience and the sacredness that underpins it. This is a meditation on love and faith built out of language as spare and direct as prayer. Some poems deal with issues of statehood and Jewish identity; increasingly the poems grapple with the demands of traditional Jewish practice, moving from a Christianized American landscape to a sequence set in Jerusalem. Equally attuned to contemporary life and Biblical exigency, In the World He Created According to His Will vividly explores the experience of living in a world marked by terror and joy.
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Poetic Form: An Introduction
David Caplan
Poetic Form offers a clear, compact, and entertaining introduction to the history, structure, and practice of the language's most popular verse forms. Written with humor and wit, this guide aims to convey the pleasures of poetry -- a sestina's delightful gamesmanship, an epigram's barbed wit, a haiku's deceptive simplicity -- and the fun of exploring the poetic forms. Each chapter defines a particular verse form, briefly describes its history, and offers examples. Writing exercises challenge students to utilize the forms in creative expression. Covering a wider range of forms in greater detail and with more poetic examples than similar guides on the market, it provides enough material to thoroughly introduce the language's major forms while allowing flexibility in the classroom.
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Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form
David Caplan
Questions of Possibility examines the particular forms that contemporary American poets favor and those they neglect. The poets' choices reveal both their ambitions and their limitations, the new possibilities they discover and the traditions they find unimaginable. By means of close attention to the sestina, ghazal, love sonnet, ballad, and heroic couplet, this study advances a new understanding of contemporary American poetry. Rather than pitting "closed" verse against "open" and "traditional" poetry against "experimental," Questions of Possibility exploreshow poets associated with different movements inspire and inform each other's work. Discussing a range of authors, from Charles Bernstein, Derek Walcott, and Marilyn Hacker to Agha Shahid Ali, David Caplan treats these poets as contemporaries who share the language, not as partisans assigned torival camps. The most interesting contemporary poetry crosses the boundaries that literary criticism draws, synthesizing diverse influences and establishing surprising affinities. In a series of lively readings, Caplan charts the diverse characteristics and accomplishments of modern poetry, from thegay and lesbian love sonnet to the currently popular sestina.
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Roads to Reconciliation: Conflict and Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century
Karen Poremski and Amy Benson Brown
Unlike other books on conflict resolution that focus on particular places and moments in history, this original work attempts to understand the process from many different perspectives and in many different contexts - from international political conflicts, to racial and religious struggles within one culture, to the internal conflicts of individuals struggling with the desire for revenge in the wake of 9/11. Designed as a starting point for meaningful dialogue on the elusive concept of reconciliation, the book includes views from Christians and Muslims, scholars and politicians, and draws on religion, psychology, cultural studies, education theory, history, and law.
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Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women's Film and Literature
Judylyn S. Ryan
Given the ways in which spirituality functions in the work of such Black women writers and filmmakers as Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Julie Dash, and Euzhan Palcy, Judylyn Ryan proposes in this challenging new study that what these women embrace in their narrative construction and characterization is the role and responsibility of the priestess, bearing and distributing "life-force" to sustain the community of people who read and view their work. Central to these women's vision of transformation is what Ryan calls a paradigm of growth and an ethos of interconnectedness, which provide interpretive models for examining and teaching a broad range of artistic, cultural, and social texts. The focus on theology provides a new way of viewing the connections among New World African diaspora religious traditions, challenging the widespread and reductive assumption that Afro-Christianity shares no philosophical commonalities with Santería, Candomblé, Voodun, and other traditions that are not christological. In addition to exploring spirituality as epistemology, the book also provides an intertextual reading of Black women's literary and film texts that examines the ways in which these works expose, mediate, and interpret the cultural, social, and historical conditions surrounding their production. While most discussions of lack women's engagement with, and contribution to, the discursive space of the culture assume an oppositional or reactive stance, Ryan argues that the disposition reflected in the texts she examines tends to be relational and proactive, conferring an autonomy that the gravitational pull between opposites lacks. This intertextual reading constitutes a multimedia auteur criticism of a collective artistic vision.
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Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions
Martine L. Stephens and Martha C. Sims
Living Folklore is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to folklore as it is lived, shared and practiced in contemporary settings. Drawing on examples from diverse American groups and experiences, this text gives the student a strong foundation--from the field's history and major terms to theories, interpretive approaches, and fieldwork. Many teachers of undergraduates find the available folklore textbooks too complex or unwieldy for an introductory level course. It is precisely this criticism that Living Folklore addresses; while comprehensive and rigorous, the book is specifically intended to meet the needs of those students who are just beginning their study of the discipline. Its real strength lies in how it combines carefully articulated foundational concepts with relevant examples and a student-oriented teaching philosophy.
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Seventh Deadly Sin
D.B. Borton
It's Valentine's Day and in the latest Cat Caliban mystery (7th in the series) love is in the air, especially around the tenants at Cat's apartment building. But things take a more serious turn when a new client, an eccentric old lady in a blue flowered dress, asks Cat to find out why her grandson was murdered. After a long hiatus, Cat and her crew are back!
