Winner of the 2019 Patrick F. Quinn Award for the best book on Poe (awarded by the Poe Studies Association)Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts addresses Poe's connections with, critical assessments of, borrowings from, and effect on his literary peers. It situates Poe within his own time and place, paying particular attention to his interactions with, and impact on, figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melv...

John Cullen was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2015 at age 56. As the son of a U.S. Marine Corps colonel, Cullen maintains a warrior mindset and faces his adversity with grit, courage, and humor. In 2019 he created his mantra, "It's Just Parkinson's"(IJP), the philosophy he uses as he battles this incurable disease. This mindset later led to the feature-length documentary It's Just Parkinson's.In Unbreakable, Cullen pulls no punches as he l...

Drawing on author John Cullen’s years of experience as both a stand-up comic and an elite curler, Curling Rocks! offers a lighthearted, expertly detailed look at a unique sport and its history, from the most absurd curling fashions to the most sublime matches ever played.The sport of curling continues to expand its global reach, attracting new players and fans far beyond traditional strongholds. Yet, even in Canada—a country with a long curling history and...

Born Heinrich Hilgard in Bavaria, Henry Villard (1835-1900) emigrated to the United States at age 18 after a disagreement with his father, penniless, not speaking a word of English and without his parents’ knowledge.Within five years, he had mastered the English language and was covering the events of the day for the nation’s top newspapers. Villard reported firsthand on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and from the front lines of the Civil War, filed graphic, hard-hitting reports that ...

This book highlights detection's malleability by analyzing the works of particular groups of authors from specific time periods written in response to other texts.It traces the roles that gender, race and empire have played in American detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's works through the myriad variations upon them published before 1920 to hard-boiled fiction (the origins of which derive in part from turn-of-the-20th-century notions about gender, race and nationality), and it...

The Stations of the Cross unfold for us a story of the passion and pain – where all sources of evil are connected: jealousy, betrayal, cowardice, injustice, cruelty and weakness. Jesus takes everything on himself and assumes all human suffering.The Stations of the Cross are in the present tense: Jesus is condemned, Jesus takes his Cross, Jesus meets, Simon carries, Veronica wipes and Jesus is stripped. It is our tears that flow down his cheek, our pain that is felt in his bruised, ...

Imperium in Imperio (1899) was the first black novel to countenance openly the possibility of organized black violence against Jim Crow segregation. Its author, a Baptist minister and newspaper editor from Texas, Sutton E. Griggs (1872–1933), would go on to publish four more novels; establish his own publishing company, one of the first secular publishing houses owned and operated by an African American in the United States; and help to found the American Baptist Theological Semin...

Black on Black provides the first comprehensive analysis of the modern African American literary response to Africa, from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk to Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Combining cutting-edge theory, extensive historical and archival research, and close readings of individual texts, Gruesser reveals the diversity of the African American response to Countee Cullen's question, "What is Africa to Me?"John Gruesser uses the conce...

We often find it hard to believe that we have a unique voice. Advent begins with a voice crying in the wilderness. Every voice matters – especially voices in the wilderness that are stifled and silenced by alienation and apathy. This book dares you to take the time to listen to Advent voices in the wilderness that persist with calls to be heard and respected.December is a month when we fill the winter days and nights with a new busyness. This book is a chance to p...

Writing, publishing, and marketing five politically engaged novels that appeared between 1899 and 1908, Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) was among the most prolific African American authors at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to his Northern contemporaries Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, Griggs, as W. E. B. Du Bois remarked, "spoke primarily to the Negro race," using his own Nashville-based publishing company to produce four of his novels. Griggs pastored Baptist churc...

In The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home, John Cullen Gruesser establishes that African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded extensively and idiosyncratically to overseas expansion and its implications for domestic race relations. He contends that the work of these writers significantly informs not only African American literary studies but also U.S. political history.Focusing on authors who explicitly connect the empire abroad and the empire ...

The sport of curling continues to expand its global reach, attracting new players and fans far beyond traditional strongholds. Yet, even in Canada—a country with a long curling history and fifteen hundred clubs of its own—the game is often dismissed as an eccentric pastime.According to author John Cullen, this is because curling is both inherently funny and chronically underestimated as a battle of skill and strategy. And Cullen is perfectly qualified to make this double-edged clai...