Fractured Truth

In The House on Sprucewood Lane, Caroline Slate established herself as a distinctive new voice in psychological suspense, a writer who creates characters so rounded the reader can hear their ragged breathing (Publishers Weekly). Now, in this highly charged story of love and trust turned inside out, she crafts a tale of passion and intrigue, murder and betrayal -- friendship and love. One moment is all it takes to change the course of a life. An instant in time, and a world is forever altered. For successful young jewelry designer Grace Leshansky that moment came when she shot and killed her charismatic con-man husband, Paul Boudreau. Grace never denied the act, never spoke about the moments just before, when her finger tightened around the trigger -- when Paul ripped her world apart with one more lie. Or was it a truth? Manslaughter: to Grace's ear the slaughter of a man sounded worse than murder. It still does seven years later when she's released from prison -- a woman indelibly changed. She returns to New York City, where she finds everything that mattered to her gone. She fiercely misses her father, George, a charming, hapless gambler with a taste for the company of gangsters. But George Leshansky's dead now, killed to prevent his turning FBI witness -- or perhaps, just perhaps, he is alive. As she searches for a way to live with the past and in the present, Grace confronts more memories than she can bear and a few questions she may no longer be brave enough to ask. Almost immediately, risks begin to surface from every direction: Gabriel McCail, a reporter bent on exposing Paul's treacherous life in an insider biography, threatens to stir up the past; and Michael Pyatt, the beautiful boy who loved and left her at seventeen, is back, possibly with information about her father. Will Grace have the courage to face the answers to her questions, or will her quest for the truth jeopardize her newly won freedom, and the lives of those she holds most dear?

When the mutilated remains of a young woman are found in an Appalachian Mountain cave, newly sworn-in deputy sheriff Brynn Callahan is forced to track down a killer driven by twisted motives . . . Not long after donning the uniform of the McCreary County Sheriff's department in Bone Gap, Tennessee, ex-Marine Brynn Callahan faces her first official homicide. On a cold February morning, a lone cross-country skier stumbles across the mutilated body of a young woman. Sent to investigate, Brynn is shocked when she recognizes the victim as a fellow Traveller, Maura Keene. Maura held a solid standing both within the Travellers’ insular community and among the settled townspeople—a fact that makes her murder all the more disturbing to Brynn, who also straddles the two worlds. After her trained K-9, Wilco, digs up human bones, and then a scrap of paper scrawled with arcane Latin phrases is uncovered, Brynn finds evidence leading her to question those closest to her—and closing the case becomes a deeply personal matter. While trying to suppress local superstitions and prejudices, Brynn discovers that Maura was keeping a dangerous secret. And as the bones Wilco found are analyzed by forensics, Brynn harbors the troubling suspicion that she knows who they belong to. Still struggling with PTSD, Brynn must put her career on the line and her life at risk to find justice for a woman not unlike herself—haunted by her past, and caught in a vicious cycle she may never escape . . .

About the Book Fractures and Echoes is a project based simply on the author’s story of learning and growing. This project has been about the nudges to share with others the author’s own hard-learned lessons. It is written through the lens of conversations between a student and his teacher. The student is young and highly inexperienced. His reliance upon his teacher’s guidance brings him to moments of deep reflection of his motives and intentions. The student is consistently challenged to prove his resolve in his commitments. In the face of the wisdom of his teacher, the student’s true heart is revealed. Each conversation is designed to stand alone and allow the reader the opportunity to reflect through his own experience. Each entry is a one page spread, with intention, to cater to a reader that may have limited time for leisure. In this way, the reader is provided with thoughtful seeds to consider that are elicited by new perspectives, emotional responses, or a combination therein. The reader is invited to actively participate with the entries. The meditative format presented provides guidance in the creation of a space that allows the reader to attune to the lessons and awareness that may be received. Whether the reader chooses to read one page to the next or simply a single entry as so moved, there are guiding questions to prompt deeper reflections. The motivation is to allow the reader to open to the ways and nuances that each entry's lessons have operated in the reader's own life. As an adjunct, the reader will be provided with conscious language to give expression to insights that the reader might not otherwise have had access to. Fractures and Echoes is intended to be the first installment of fifty entries with four additional volumes to follow. Each volume will build to capture a progression in the quality of the student’s questions. Through the course of this series, the student is offered the opportunity to become the teacher, passing along all that has been learned to another generation. About the Author Coninyah was born in Chicago in 1974 to a family that valued education and service. Though he was raised by a single mom, alongside his sister, Coninyah learned at an early age to question why he felt disconnected from his family and from himself. His formative years were shaped by his affinity for poetry, science, and athletic competition. After graduating high school in Wheaton, Maryland in 1992, he graduated in 1996 from the United States Military Academy at West Point with a Bachelor of Science degree in General Engineering. Coninyah then spent 5 years as a military police officer in the US Army, which challenged his perspective of who he thought himself to be. Resigning from the military left Coninyah questioning who he was outside of the context of the army. Traveling from job to job, he found his way to New Mexico where he earned a Master of Science in Oriental Medicine in 2006. Coninyah, along the way, also found teachers who would be instrumental in his course corrections. He would work to lay down dysfunctional habits of distraction and engage what would be his life’s work that continues to unfold. Coninyah now teaches meditation and is a practitioner of the healing arts.

"An investigation Walter Benjamin's conception of the subject as fractured, via a reading of Benjamin's use of Freud; the topics cover gender, dreams, memory, childhood and mental illness"--

In 1989, Robert B. Oxnam, the successful China scholar and president of the Asia Society, faced up to what he thought was his biggest personal challenge: alcoholism. But this dependency masked a problem far more serious: Multiple Personality Disorder. At the peak of his professional career, after having led the Asia Society for nearly a decade, Oxnam was haunted by periodic blackouts and episodic rages. After his family and friends intervened, Oxnam received help from a psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Smith, and entered a rehab center. It wasn't until 1990 during a session with Dr. Smith that the first of Oxnam's eleven alternate personalities--an angry young boy named Tommy--suddenly emerged. With Dr. Smith's help, Oxnam began the exhausting and fascinating process of uncovering his many personalities and the childhood trauma that caused his condition. This is the powerful and moving story of one person's struggle with this terrifying illness. The book includes an epilogue by Dr. Smith in which he describes Robert's case, the treatment, and the nature of multiple personality disorder. Robert's courage in facing his situation and overcoming his painful past makes for a dramatic and inspiring book.

Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen teaches you how to use your dreams, content, form, and structure, to write surprisingly unique new drama for film and stage. It is an exciting departure from traditional linear, dramatic technique, and addresses both playwriting and screenwriting, as the profession is increasingly populated by writers who work in both stage and screen. Developed through 25 years of teaching award-winning playwrights in the University of Missouri’s Writing for Performance Program, and based upon the phenomenological research of renowned performance theorist Bert O. States, this book offers a foundational, step-by-step organic guide to non-traditional, non-linear technique that will help writers beat clichéd, tired dramatic writing and provides stimulating new exercises to transform their work.

What Cold War-era superheroes reveal about American society and foreign policy Physicist Bruce Banner, caught in the nuclear explosion of his experimental gamma bomb, is transformed into the rampaging green monster, the Hulk. High school student Peter Parker, bitten by an irradiated spider, gains its powers and becomes Spiderman. Reed Richards and his friends are caught in a belt of cosmic radiation while orbiting the Earth in a spacecraft and are transformed into the Fantastic Four. While Stan Lee suggests he clung to the hackneyed idea of radioactivity in creating Marvel's stable of superheroes because of his limited imagination, radiation and the bomb are nonetheless the big bang that spawned the Marvel universe. The Marvel superheroes that came to dominate the comic book industry for most of the last five decades were born under the mushroom cloud of potential nuclear war that was a cornerstone of the four-decade bipolar division of the world between the US and USSR. These stories were consciously set in this world and reflect the changing culture of cold War (and post-cold War) America. Like other forms of popular entertainment, comic books tend to be very receptive to cultural trends, reflect them, comment on them, and sometimes inaugurate them. Secret Identity Crisis follows the trajectory of the breakdown of the cold War consensus after 1960 through the lens of superhero comic books. Those developed by Marvel, because of their conscious setting in the contemporary world, and because of attempts to maintain a continuous story line across and within books, constitute a system of signs that reflect, comment upon, and interact with the American political economy. This groundbreaking new study focuses on a handful of titles and signs that specifically involve political economic codes, including Captain America, the Invincible Iron Man, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, the Incredible Hulk to reveal how the American self was transformed and/or reproduced during the late Cold War and after.