American Midnight

A collection of chilling tales from the dark heart of American literature A masquerade ball cut short by a mysterious plague; a strange nocturnal ritual in the woods; a black bobcat howling in the night: these ten tales are some of the most strange and unsettling in all of American literature, filled with unforgettable imagery and simmering with tension. From Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Zora Neale Hurston, the authors of these classics of supernatural suspense have inspired generations of writers to explore the dark heart of the land of the free. The stories in this collection have been selected and introduced by Laird Hunt, an author of seven acclaimed novels which explore the shadowy corners of American history. Contains: 'The Masque of the Red Death', Edgar Allan Poe'Young Goodman Brown', Nathaniel Hawthorne'The Eyes', Edith Wharton'The Mask', Robert Chambers'Home', Shirley Jackson'A Ghost Story', Mark Twain'Spunk', Zora Neale Hurston'The Yellow Wallpaper', Charlotte Perkins Gilman'An Itinerant House', Emma Frances Dawson Laird Hunt is an American writer and translator. He has written seven novels, including Neverhome, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, an IndieNext selection, winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and The Bridge prize, and a finalist for the Prix Femina Étranger. His In the House in the Dark of the Woods is also available from Pushkin Press. A resident of Boulder, CO, he is on the faculty in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Denver.

Tania Peters had it all-a loving, supportive family, and a future that seemed all but set. But when her mother is killed in a plane crash in the jungles of Ecuador, her world comes crashing down around her. As a result, she adopts a live for today philosophy. Throwing herself into the arms of her boyfriend, Tania seeks all that society says will bring satisfaction and meaning into her life. But she soon realizes this is a lie, and begins to fall under the spell of the Unity Party, a political movement that has swept Robert Allen into the White House. But such allegiances come at a price: complete and unquestioned loyalty to the Party. Despite all the "good" the Party does for society, Tania's devotion to the movement is pushed to the limit when her own father, the Pastor of the Calvary Community Church, is arrested and jailed when he refuses to compromise his religious beliefs. Forced to decide between her past and her future, Tania rediscovers the faith she has long since abandoned, even though such a decision could cost everything she holds dear, including her life.

National Bestseller • One of the year's most acclaimed works of nonfiction A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post, Fast Company From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.

Corporate America is no longer content doing what it does best, which is making money. These business behemoths are aggressively attempting to control the entire economic, cultural and political realms of American life. They have nearly succeeded. Most Americans would agree that corporate power should be prohibited from disrupting the natural rhythm of our democratic institutions. Yet we the people are thwarted from addressing the subject of corporate power, not because we do not wish to have the conversation, but because we have nobody to address the issue. Our political representatives, hostages as they are to corporate campaign donations and government lobbyists, cannot seriously debate the question of corporate power. Indeed, their very careers depend on corporate power. Meanwhile, the media, the so-called Fourth Estate, refuses to discuss the issue of excessive corporate power because the media itself is a corporation. At the same time, the consequences of excessive corporate power are becoming acutely obvious inside of the corporate universe. Today, fewer U.S. workers are spending more time on the job to produce a greater amount of products, while not receiving fair recompense. Meanwhile, wages for American workers, adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant for the past 30 years, while U.S. vacation time in the United States is the lowest of all the industrial economies. The blatant lack of representation in the workplace is directly responsible for these shameful statistics. Just 7 percent of the American workforce today enjoys union representation, a percentage that pales in comparison with past generations. There is also the question of corporations disrupting the fabric of cultural life. Indeed, today Main Street U.S.A. is largely unrecognizable. This can be witnessed in everything from the preponderance of fast food restaurants and hyper-stores, to Corporate America's aggressive monopoly on all forms of entertainment, which is on a downward spiral to total degeneracy. Since corporate-owned cultural venues (e.g., television, film, books) have more influence over our children than do educational institutions, it should come as no surprise that violence and unsocial behavior is on the rise. History has already proven that no nation can survive for long once its moral fabric has been shredded. Finally, the symptoms of extreme levels of corporate power in our lives are becoming increasingly conspicuous in a variety of ways. From the rise of destructive behavior at home, to the sadistic treatment prisoners of war in foreign lands (read: Guantanamo Bay), to the reckless disregard for the collapse of the natural environment, something has gone awry in the heart of America (I call it 'corporate zombyism'). The nature of the problem suggests that the American psyche is being guided and influenced by less than respectable influences. Since it is Corporate America that is largely responsible for the degraded mental and physical content that we are now feeding the people, this institution must accept a large part of the blame for America's fall from grace. The time has come to tame this beast of burden; the time has come to remove corporate power from the halls of power. It is time for the American people - like their proud and independent ancestors who founded this country many years ago - to regain control of their country once again.

Essays collected from The Secret Sun. Where we are now and how we got here.

The haunting true story of a triple murder in the Ozarks, two lovers on the lam, and a death-row inmate saved by the pope. On a spring day more than ten years ago, sixty-nine-year-old Lloyd Lawrence was gunned down in rural Missouri. The shooter also turned his twelve-gauge shotgun on Lawrence’s wife and their paraplegic grandson. The crime took place in a region known mostly for Pentecostal fervor, country music, and family-friendly tourism. But soon the murders would expose a dark underbelly in the Ozarks: Lloyd Lawrence was a notoriously violent crystal-meth kingpin, killed by an aspiring drug dealer named Darrell Mease.Capturing the raw circumstances that took Mease from his clean-cut youth to the front lines of Vietnam and an aftermath of drug use, Almost Midnight unites an unforgettable range of characters in some of America’s most peculiar locales. When Mease and his girlfriend fled to the Southwest on a hair-raising road trip, this only brought Mease closer to death row. After his conviction, he claimed to receive a religious revelation guaranteeing that his life would be saved by miraculous intervention, a long-shot prediction that came true. A bizarre twist of fate brought Pope John Paul II to Saint Louis, where he pleaded with Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan to commute the sentence just months before Carnahan’s fatal plane crash. In a triumph of investigative journalism, Michael Cuneo gained unprecedented access to Mease and immersed himself in the culture of the Ozarks, exploring its bucolic farms and seedy strip joints, and the lives of its preachers, cockfighters, and outlaws. By turns chilling and riveting, Almost Midnight brilliantly evokes the life of controversial renegade Mease, and the stranger-than-fiction world he still inhabits.

On the night of December 1,1900, Iowa farmer John Hossack was attacked and killed while he slept at home beside his wife, Margaret. On April 11, 1901, after five days of testimony before an all-male jury, Margaret Hossack was found guilty of his murder and sentenced to life in prison. One year later, she was released on bail to await a retrial; jurors at this second trial could not reach a decision, and she was freed. She died August 25, 1916, leaving the mystery of her husband's death unsolved. The Hossack tragedy is a compelling one and the issues surrounding their domestic problems are still relevant today, Margaret's composure and stoicism, developed during years of spousal abuse, were seen as evidence of unfeminine behavior, while John Hossack--known to be a cruel and dangerous man--was hailed as a respectable husband and father. Midnight Assassin also introduces us to Susan Glaspell, a journalist who reported on the Hossack murder for the Des Moines Daily, who used these events as the basis for her classic short story, " A Jury of Her Peers", and the famous play Trifles. Based on almost a decade of research, Midnight Assassin is a riveting story of loneliness, fear, and suffering in the rural Midwest.

Dean Koontz, the bestselling master of suspense, invites you into the shocking world of Moonlight Cove—where four unlikely survivors confront the darkest realms of human nature. The citizens of Moonlight Cove, California, are changing. Some are losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely terrified—if not brutally murdered in the dead of night...