Bleeding Tree

Big Jim Collins dies, and his family rejoices. After decades of abuse, his wife and sons are finally free from his tyranny. One son follows in his fathers footsteps, while the other son takes a different path. But the brothers never really escape their painful childhood. It defines each of them and leads them to a final, terrifying destiny. Death comes again at the Collins farm on a quiet, starless October night. Both brothers will pay for the sins of their father in the shadow of the bleeding tree.

It was the last of the ebbing days, the brink of the new season. It was the murky hours, the clove between sunset and sunrise. It was a tall tree with deep roots and it had been bleeding for a long while. As summer falls into autumn, Hollie Starling is hit by the heart-stopping news that her father has died by suicide. Thrust into a state of 'grief on hard mode', Hollie feels underserved by current attitudes toward grief and so seeks another way through the dark. Following her first year without her father, Hollie embraces her lifelong interest in folklore and turns to the healing power of nature, the changing seasons and the rituals of ancient communities. The Bleeding Tree is an unflinching year-zero guidebook to grief that shows us that by looking back to past traditions of bereavement we can all find our own way forward. 'Starling's account of family life is riveting and narrated with grace and honesty, counterpointing the personal with the mythic.' - Irish Times

"Girls, I think your father's dead. I knocked his knees out. I conked his head. I shot that house clown in the neck". In a dirt-dry town in rural Australia, a shot shatters the still night. A mother and her daughters have just welcomed home the man of the house -- with a crack in the shins and a bullet in the neck. The only issue now is disposing of the body. Triggered into thrilling motion by an act of revenge, The Bleeding Tree is rude, rhythmical and irreverently funny. Imagine a murder ballad blown up for the stage, set against a deceptively deadly Aussie backdrop, with three fierce females fighting back. (1 act, 3 female).

In late medieval and early modern Europe, definitions of blood in medical writing were slippery and changeable: blood was at once the red fluid in human veins, a humor, a substance governing crucial Galenic models of bodily change, a waste product, a cause of corruption, a source of life, a medical cure, a serum appearing under the guise of all other bodily secretions, and—after William Harvey's discovery of its circulation—the cause of one of the greatest medical controversies of the premodern period. Figurative uses of "blood" are even more difficult to pin down. The term appeared in almost every sphere of life and thought, running through political, theological, and familial discourses. Blood Matters explores blood as a distinct category of inquiry and draws together scholars who might not otherwise be in conversation. Theatrical and medical practice are found to converge in their approaches to the regulation of blood as a source of identity and truth; medieval civic life intersects with seventeenth-century science and philosophy; the concepts of class, race, gender, and sexuality find in the language of blood as many mechanisms for differentiation as for homogeneity; and fields as disparate as pedagogical theory, alchemy, phlebotomy, wet-nursing, and wine production emerge as historically and intellectually analogous. The volume's essays are organized within categories derived from medieval and early modern understanding of blood behaviors—Circulation, Wounds, Corruption, Proof, and Signs and Substances—thereby providing the terms through which interdisciplinary and cross-period conversations can take place. Contributors: Helen Barr, Katharine Craik, Lesel Dawson, Eleanor Decamp, Frances E. Dolan, Elisabeth Dutton, Margaret Healy, Dolly Jørgensen, Helen King, Bonnie Lander Johnson, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Joe Moshenska, Tara Nummedal, Patricia Parker, Ben Parsons, Heather Webb, Gabriella Zuccolin.

"It reveals social and cultural aspects of life in rural China - something that most North Americans ... don't have a clue about," said Ms. K. Green. "It has been the first time for me to read a novel so sincere, simple and so fully detailed about China," a female reader from Vancouver commented. "This story give insight into the political, educational and economic climate in China in 1970s," Ms. Henriette Toth said. Meinia was a pretty village girl living in Xishuangbanna, China. Just after her graduation from high school, she was appointed accountant of her village. Responding to Chairman Mao's call, five members of Zhiqing (city high school graduates) came to her village. She and other villagers did their best to help the Zhiqing. But these Zhiqing inflicted huge and lasting hurt and pains on her and the villagers, ...... Filling with songs, and full of wisdom of an oriental culture, this is a bright love story for all readers.

In Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica, Amos Megged uncovers the missing links in Mesoamerican peoples' quest for their collective past. Analyzing ancient repositories of knowledge, as well as social and religious practices, he uncovers the unique procedures and formulas by which social memory was communicated and how it operated in Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish conquest. Megged's volume also suggests how social and cultural historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists can rethink indigenous representations of the past while taking into account the deep transformations in Mexican society during the colonial era.

Tasso's masterpiece finally emerges as an English masterpiece.

Tales of terror and the supernatural hold an honored position in the Jewish folkloric tradition. Howard Schwartz has superbly translated and retold fifty of the best of these folktales. Gathered from countless sources ranging from the ancient Middle East to twelfth-century Germany and later Eastern European oral tradition, these captivating stories include Jewish variants of the Pandora and Persephone myths.