Sometimes life conspires to keep us from the ones we love. While always painful, it can hurt more at Christmas than any other time of the year. Having recently lost his parents, Peter Taylor is especially grateful he’ll be able to spend one final Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in his childhood home, and then Christmas Day with his girlfriend Christine. When everything goes wrong, he still tries to find a way to make this Christmas his best ever.You’ll Be Home For Christmas...

Have you ever wished you were dead? Do you understand that hopelessness? Is it lonely? In severe depression, you know how it feels when nobody else really understands. It's obvious from what "they" do and say that they've never felt what you feel. This book is not for them. If you do know what "they don't understand" means without my even explaining it, then this book is for you. I will say the uncomfortable, quiet parts out loud, even though we're not supposed to say what we really think....

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of coloni...

Penelope Lemon is a recent divorcée, closet Metallica fan, and accidental subversive to all the expectations of suburban motherhood. After ending her marriage with James, a woodsy intellectual who favors silky kimonos too short for his knobby knees, Penelope finds herself, at forty, living with her randy mother in her childhood home. Broke and desperate for work, she waitresses at Coonskins, a frontier-themed restaurant where the decor is heavy on stuffed mammals and discarded peanut shell...

It’s Father’s Day 1972 and a young boy’s dad takes him to visit a string of unimpressive ex-girlfriends that could have been his mother; the unconventional detective work of a koan-speaking, Kung Fu–loving uncle solves a case of arson during a pancake breakfast; and a former geology professor, recovering from addiction, finds himself sharing a taxicab with specters from a Jim Crow–era lynching. Set in and around the fictional town of Steepleburg, South Carolina, the loosely tied stories in...

The fascinating untold story of one scientist’s pursuit of a legendary surfer in his quest to define human nature, written with the compelling drama and narrative insight of Why Fish Don’t Exist and The Lost City of Z.Deep in the archives of New York’s American Museum of Natural History sits a wardrobe filled with fifty plaster casts of human heads and faces that are a century old. How they came to be is the story of one of the most consequential,...

This discussion with a remarkable Benedictine monk who founded an ashram in South India is a beautiful, stirring exploration of human spirituality. In a rare synthesis of Christian, Hindu and modern scientific thought, the late Father Bede discusses the infusing of gross matter and daily life with spirit and much more.

By some estimates, there are as many as twelve million psychopaths in the United States alone. Cold-blooded, remorseless, and strangely charismatic, they commit at least half of all serious and violent crimes. Supposedly, most serial killers are psychopaths, as, surprisngly, are large numbers of corporate executives. They seem to be an inescapable, and fascinating, threat in our midst.But is psychopathy a brain disorder, as many scientists now claim? Or is it just a reflection of m...

This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational forms have influenced and helped implement the project of human rights across the world, and seeks to show how public discourses on law and politics grow out of and are influenced by the imaginative representations of human rights. It draws on a multi-disciplinary approach, using historical, literary, anthropological, visual arts, and media studies methods and readings, and covers a wider range of geographic areas than has p...

**Longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize“Delivered with such conviction and grace … fresh … essential.” —The New York Times Book ReviewWhen outsiders on a mission arrive to change a small town’s attitudes, residents and newcomers alike end up transformed.**Big Burr, Kansas is the kind of place where everyone seems to know everyone—or so they think. But when a national nonprofit labels Big Burr “the most homophobic town in the U.S.” and se...

Is pain a test for untested men? Can it tap unseen reserves of strength and courage? Such are the raw truths exposed in this short but immensely moving collection of poems.

Michael A. Griffith is at his finest when such penetrating poetic verse reaches the present tense by uplifting the spirit and elevating the mind. In the best tradition of literature this passionate work is both accessible and admirable. (The ebook edition is an expanded version of the print copy. Including artwork and additional poems.)