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...

About this Book...From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship.Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh de...

In this companion volume to Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser brings together leading experts who explore the integral role animals play in American poetry. The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America’s best-known and most beloved poets.The book highligh...

Emerging from an era of changing mental health and addiction services, Different Diagnoses, Similar Experiences is the first work in its field to gather narratives of mental health, addiction and dual diagnoses into one publication, as well as to critically examine the differences and similarities of these experiences.Documenting their own personal narratives, contributors share their unique journey to recovery, while Michael John Norton and Oliver John Cullen construct a ...

Abram Singer is a Catholic priest with an unusual name and a dark secret. Against the backdrop of gritty 1970s New York, in a simple, straightforward style, he tells us his story. The son of an absent Jewish father and a devout Italian mother, Abram was drawn to the meaningful structure of the seminary, eventually becoming a parish priest in Manhattan. His sincerest wish is to do God’s work, but he is not without human failings: he is irresistibly attracted to women and has a secret lover ...

A prescient political and psychological thriller ripped from tomorrow's headlines, by one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary novelistsA few short years from now, the world is an even more uncertain place than it is today, and politics everywhere is marching rightward: Trump is gone, but Brexit is complete, as is Frexit. There's a global financial crisis, armed conflict, and mass migration, and an ultrapopulist movement governs in Germany. With their democrac...

Two young princesses navigate the court intrigues of 18th-century France and Spain in this stunning historical fiction novel based on a true story.“Vivid, engrossing . . . one of the most fascinating historical narratives I’ve ever read.” —Diana Gabaldon, author of OutlanderPhilippe d’Orléans, the regent of France, has a gangrenous heart—the result of a life of debauchery, alcohol, power, and flattery. One morning in 1721, he decid...

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain themHappy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. —Jorge Luis BorgesSchnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect w...

Inspired by true events, this gorgeous, haunting novel intertwines the lives of two Black female artists more than a century apart, both outsiders in Italy.It was the middle of the nineteenth century when Lafanu Brown audaciously decided to become an artist. In the wake of the American Civil War, life was especially tough for Black women, but she didn’t let that stop her. The daughter of a Native American woman and an African-Haitian man, Lafanu had the rare opport...

As defined by conservation biologist Thomas Fleishner, natural history is “a practice of intentional, focused receptivity to the more-than-human world . . . one of the oldest continuous human traditions.” Seldom is this idea so clearly reflected as in classic works of American fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.John Cullen Gruesser’s edited volume Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction features essays by prominent litera...

Dissecting a midlife affair, this perceptive, slyly comical debut explores how the spaces that limit our movements can be more exciting than the person we think we want.Ema and Paul are lovers. Like so many others before them, they met through work. Both are married with children, and they arrange hurried meetings away from prying eyes. Paul’s car, a corner of Ema’s house, a hotel room…But their relationship soon suffers from this too-restricted sphere, and Ema dec...

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work.JoAnn P...