Damian

When Anne's friend Kevin asks her to spend the summer at Grayhaven, his parents' new home in Pennsylvania, it seems like the ideal way to complete the book on contemporary literature they have been working on. And Grayhaven, an authentic medieval manor, proves to be nothing short of miraculous. But at the end of three weeks Anne realizes that she and Kevin have not added one new sentence to their book. What is it about this house that is so disturbing?

Combining on-the-ground reporting and in-depth discussions with people on the frontlines of Mexico's drug war, To Die in Mexico tells behind-the-scenes stories that address the causes and consequences of Mexico's multibillion dollar drug trafficking business. John Gibler looks beyond the myths that pervade government and media portrayals of the unprecedented wave of violence now pushing Mexico to the breaking point.

Newly single Knight is done with relationships. All he's interested in is bringing down the Count, an internet personality who is tarnishing his family name. An opportunity to crush him comes when the audacious clown shows up at the Kings of Hell MC clubhouse to film for his YouTube channel. But when Knight meets Elliot, the man behind the Count, he no longer knows what to do with him. No matter how much Knight hates Elliot's alter ego, under the makeup and theatrics hides a fragile young guy with a passion for history, and Knight can't help but catch Elliot every time he falls.

Gideon Frayne has spent his whole working life as a policeman in the village of Dark on Bodmin Moor. His first missing-child case is eating him alive. When his own boss sends in a psychic to help with the case, he's gutted - he's a level-headed copper who doesn't believe in such things, and he can't help but think that the arrival of clairvoyant Lee Tyack is a comment on his failure to find the little girl. But Lee is hard to hate, no matter how Gideon tries. At first Lee's insights into the case make no sense, but he seems to have a window straight into Gideon's heart.

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between conflict and abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning.

On a tour through history that's both whimsical and startling, we'll encounter 17th-century children flying around inside their New England home "like geese". We'll meet a father-son team of pious Puritans who embarked on a mission that involved undressing ladies and overseeing hangings. And on the eve of the Civil War, we'll accompany a reporter as he dons a dress and goes searching for witches in New York City's most dangerous neighborhoods.

In this timely and explosive book, philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Čeika (a.k.a. Cuck Philosophy) reinvigorates socialism for the 21st century. Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and its lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Čeika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals.

First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of 19 women in 20th-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence. They are wives, widows, and daughters of coal miners; factory hands, tobacco graders, cotton mill workers, and farmers; and women who value honest labor, self-esteem, and dignity.

The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the biblical Song of Songs to Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male-female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multimillion-dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars.