Against Heaven

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine. Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest. Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.

Hell-bent on confronting God after the death of wife Kate, Paul gate-crashes Heaven. With immigration problems and a wall, Heaven turns out to be nowhere near as welcoming as expected. Both Heaven and Hell are modern and militarized, and the cold war that exists between them is about to heat up, with him in the middle of it. Caught on the wrong side of Heaven, Paul faces an impossible choice if he's to have any hope of seeing his wife again. *** “Mark Kirkbride’s The Plot Against Heaven is a slick and cunning tale that moves with the speed of a smart, classy thriller; brimming with invention, it conjures up a vision of the afterlife uniquely its own with a smooth economy that never slows its pace.” -Simon Bestwick, author of And Cannot Come Again: Tales of Childhood, Regret, and Innocence Lost

On a hotter and more volatile earth in the twenty-third century, humans like Clare and Jon live in utopia, hunting and gathering in small tribal bands, engaged in daily art and ritual, reunited with old friends like the shaggy mammoth and giant ground sloth. Even better, they still have solar- powered laptops and can communicate with each other around the world. The understanding of physics has also advanced. When scientists first cloned extinct species from the Pleistocene, they discovered that many of them were telepathic—that consciousness travels in waves. For most people, animism has become the preferred religion, a panpsychism compatible with the laws of a fractal holographic universe. As Clare tells one of her students, the return to an older, Paleolithic lifestyle is “one of humanity’s greatest achievements.” It’s too bad that utopia had to come at such a cost: a genetically engineered super-virus that wiped out most of earth’s human population. Humanity was shaken by that event, and humanity vowed to change. Now, on the 150th anniversary of that catastrophe, a small group of men and women—as well as a smarter-than-average dire wolf and saber-toothed cat—are suddenly faced with decisions in which the stakes are higher than ever before. Will earth repeat the cycle of unbridled hubris? Or is humanity’s destiny even stranger than that? Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

As a senior in high school, Nick Ramsay should be focusing on his college choices, but instead, he's dealing with a tear between his world and Purgatory. Leviathan and a dozen demons are running amok in central Florida and Nick must herd them back into the underworld before Heaven opens its gates and sends down a pack of angry angels to clean up the mess.

It's obvious from the bookshelves and the big screen that heaven is on everyone's mind. All of us long to know what life after death will be like. Bestselling author John Burke is no exception. For decades, he has been studying accounts of people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs). While not every detail of individual NDEs correlate with Scripture, Burke shows how the common experiences shared by thousands of survivors clearly point to the God of the Bible and the exhilarating picture of heaven he promises. Imagine Heaven is an inspirational journey through the Bible's picture of heaven, colored in with the real-life stories of heaven's wonders. Burke compares gripping stories of NDEs to what Scripture says about our biggest questions of heaven: Will I be myself? Will I see friends and loved ones? What will it look like? What is God like? What will we do forever? What about children and pets? This book will propel readers into an experience that will forever change their view of the life to come and the way they live life today. It also tackles the tough questions of heavenly reward and hellish NDEs. Anyone interested in NDEs or longing to imagine heaven more clearly will enjoy this fascinating and hope-filled book.

Truthfully and accurately, this book attempts to elucidate the nature and forms of China’s ancient wisdom and reinterpret its ideological significance, thereby activating its inherent vitality and promoting the construction of contemporary Chinese thought. The wisdom of China, with its own discourse system, gives unique stipulations to existence, thought and language. Confucianism, Taoism and Chan Buddhism, as the historical manifestations of Chinese wisdom, respectively express the thoughts between man and man, between man and nature, and between man and mind. In fact, these three aspects exactly constitute the whole of man’s life world. The thoughts of Confucianism, Taoism and Chan Buddhism are mainly and respectively represented in The Four Books and Five Classics, Lao-Zi and Zhuang-Zi, and Tan-Jing (The Sutra of Hui Neng). The wisdom of China, different from the non-natural wisdom of the West, is fundamentally a natural wisdom, according to which nature is the basis of human existence, thought and language. However, in early modern times, the natural history of China was confronted with an unprecedented crisis. Ever since then, China has entered the post natural era. The coexistence of Heaven and man, as the new wisdom of China, can be created in the age of globalization through preserving the living elements and eliminating the dead parts in the traditional Chinese wisdom.

Liu Xuefeng was a normal boy who had it all planned: get to the same university as his best friend Tianshi and win her love, spending the rest of his life with her. Too bad, even though she liked him too, her rich parents opposed their relationship. The school trip to the mountains was supposed to deepen their relationship, but... An accident broke them apart. He saved her from falling down the cliff but ended up falling to his death himself and ended up reincarnating into a Cultivation World, full of dangers and mysteries. He didn't know though that Tianshi died as well and followed after him, entering the same world. Will the two meet again and share their love without any restrictions? Or will he succumb to the world's temptations, thinking he will never meet her again? .......................... This is my first book ever written so please excuse the poor writing. I'm slowly editing it but it takes time. Once you reach later chapters, the quality gets much better. Book 2 of SC called Against Heaven's Will is the continuation of this book so make sure to check it out after you finish this one.