Illusions Of Fire

In an historical novel based on the 1944 Barnum & Bailey's circus tent fire that killed hundreds, two survivors reexamine their lives and marriage while seeking the fire's true cause. By the author of The Port of Missing Men.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography" by Albert A. Hopkins. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Taking us back to a time that is half history, half myth and wholly magical, bestselling author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni gives voice to Panchaali, the fire-born heroine of the Mahabharata, as she weaves a vibrant retelling of an ancient epic saga. Married to five royal husbands who have been cheated out of their father's kingdom, Panchaali aids their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war. But she cannot deny her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna—or her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands' most dangerous enemy—as she is caught up in the ever-manipulating hands of fate.

Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --

Eighteen-year-old Ava Perry leaves the safety of her foster care home and joins a troupe of vampire-hunting magicians, believing that she finally has her chance to discover the truth behind her mother's death.

Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.