A Fierce And Subtle Poison

Legends collide with reality when a boy is swept into the magical, dangerous world of a girl filled with poison. Everyone knows the legends about the cursed girl—Isabel, the one the señoras whisper about. They say she has green skin and grass for hair, and she feeds on the poisonous plants that fill her family’s lush Caribbean island garden. Some say she can grant wishes; some say her touch can kill. Seventeen-year-old Lucas spends summers with his hotel-developer father in Puerto Rico, and he’s grown up hearing the stories. When letters from the cursed girl mysteriously appear in his room the same day his girlfriend disappears, Lucas turns to Isabel for answers—and finds himself lured into her strange and enchanted world. But the more entangled Lucas becomes with Isabel, the less certain he is of escaping with his own life. “A breathtaking story in which myths come to frightening life and buried wishes might actually come true.” —Nova Ren Suma, author of The Walls Around Us and Imaginary Girls “Samantha Mabry’s magical debut is both a chilling mystery and a heartbreaking meditation on love, longing, and sacrifice . . . A Fierce and Subtle Poison will get into your blood.” —Laura Ruby, author of Bone Gap “With its sparklingly sinister blend of natural history and magic, of themes that seem both modern and timeless, A Fierce and Subtle Poison gets under the skin.”—Chicago Tribune

In a stunning follow-up to her National Book Award–longlisted novel All the Wind in the World, Samantha Mabry weaves a magical, romantic, own-voices novel about three sisters shadowed by guilt and grief over the loss of their oldest sister, who still haunts their house.

This book aims both to demystify and to reconstitute 'Hawthorne' as an object of study by rereading Hawthorne's fictions, mainly those from the early 1840's to 1860, in the context of the emergence of a distinctively middle-class personal life (the domestic emotional revolution that accompanied the industrial revolution. Recent histories of middle-class private life, gender, the body, and sexuality now enable us to bring a more encompassing grasp of history to our reading of the 'psychological' in Hawthorne's writing. Rather than taking the conventional view that Freud explains Hawthorne's psychological themes, the author draws on the history of personal life to suggest that mid-century psychological fictions help, historically, to account for the surfacing of a bourgeois Freudian discourse later in the century. The production of Personal Life also asks why it was that women in mid-century fiction, especially that written by men, were represented as psychological targets of male monomaniacs in the home. By connecting the enforcement of middle-class 'feminine' roles to psychological tension between the sexes, Hawthorne's fiction at times implicitly critiques the sentimental construction of gender roles on which the economic and cultural ascendancy of his class relied.

This work offers a new perspective on Gothic fiction and reassesses its place in literary history. After defining his concept of "affective form" and summarizing the problematic assumptions behind recent critical approaches to the Gothic, George Haggerty introduces a startling theoretical discussion of the Gothic Tale, and he explains in what ways the tale, as a form with identifiable affective properties, is ideally suited to Gothic concerns. Having established a direct relation between this study and recent discussions of narratology and generic identity, Haggerty develops his argument as it applies to major Gothic works in both England and America, including works by Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Shelley, Bronte, Poe, Hawthorne, and James. He examines the Gothic Tale as a form that resolves the inconsistency and incoherence of many Gothic novels and offers even the best of them a center of focus and a way of achieving their fullest affective power. In this study, the Gothic Tale emerges as a means of heightening the emotional intelligibility of Gothic fiction and answering Walpole's confused desire to unite "two kinds of romance" in the Gothic. It is a form that can answer the ontological and epistemological, as well as the structural, challenge of the Gothic writers. From its first hints within the Gothic novel as an alternative literary mode offering the Gothicists various expressive advantages to its eerie success in a work such as James's "The Jolly Corner," the Gothic Tale offers insight into generic distinction and literary expression. This is a major statement about an important literary form.

This book takes issue with the tendency in twentieth-century Hawthorne-criticism to blur the distinction between symbolism and allegory. Rejecting the long-standing notion that Hawthorne is a symbolist in allegorical disguise, Ullén argues that allegory is the key to understanding how religion, sexuality, aesthetics and politics are interwoven in Hawthorne's writings. The study presents a model for allegorical interpretation of general applicability, which is brought to bear on each of Hawthorne's mature romances, and on the oft-neglected Wonder Books written for children. An unparalleled analysis of the formal intricacies of Hawthorne's writings, this book is an eloquent plea for the necessity of grounding ideological analysis in aesthetical considerations.

This edition includes: Introduction: Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of the Seven Gables (A Novel) The Minister's Black Veil The Hollow of the Three Hills The White Old Maid Dr. Heidegger's Experiment The Birth-mark Young Goodman Brown Rappaccini's Daughter Roger Malvin's Burial The Artist of the Beautiful John Inglefield's Thanksgiving Wives of the Dead An Old Woman's Tale Antique Ring Graves and Goblins The Ghost of Doctor Harris Apparitions

This carefully crafted ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Table of Contents: Novels: Fanshawe The Scarlet Letter The House of the Seven Gables The Blithedale Romance The Marble Faun The Dolliver Romance Septimius Felton Doctor Grimshawe's Secret Collections of Short Stories: Twice-Told Tales The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair Biographical Stories Mosses from an Old Manse Wonder Book For Girls and Boys The Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales Tanglewood Tales For Girls and Boys The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces, Tales and Sketches The Story Teller Sketches in Magazines Poems: Address to the Moon The Darken'd Veil Earthly Pomp Forms of Heroes Go to the Grave My Low and Humble Home The Ocean Essays: The British Matron: A Satire The Ancestral Footstep: Outlines of an English Romance Life Of Franklin Pierce Chiefly About War Matters Our Old Home Autobiographical Writings: Browne's Folly Love Letters (To Miss Sophia Peabody) Letter to the Editor of the Literary Review American Notebooks English Notebooks French and Italian Notebooks Biographies and Reminiscences of Hawthorne: Biography The Life and Genius of Hawthorne by Frank Preston Stearns Hawthorne and His Circle by Julian Hawthorne Memories of Hawthorne by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop Hawthorne and His Moses by Herman Melville Fifty Years of Hawthorne My Literary Passions by W. D. Howell Life of Great Authors by H. T. Griswold Yesterday With Authors by J. T. Field Hawthorne and Brook Farm by G. W. Curtis Short Biography Essays and Criticisms on Hawthorne and His Works: Hawthorne by Henry James Jr. Nathaniel Hawthorne by Andrew Lang Nathaniel Hawthorne by G. E. Woodberry A Study of Hawthorne by G. P. Lathrop ...