Murder By Reflection

A couple’s bizarre fantasy life goes awry in this electric psychological thriller for fans of The Talented Mr. Ripley. ​ The modern world holds no wonder for Arnoldo Signori. A man born in the wrong age, he yearns to escape the chaos of present-day New York and slip back into the glorious eighteenth century, when culture reigned, art was plentiful, and people lived with effortless grace. He’d do anything to be part of that bygone era. Eccentric millionaire Irene Ibis is the only person Arnoldo has ever felt a true kinship with. So when she offers to help him realize his dream, he eagerly accepts. The only condition: He must hand over every aspect of his life to her. Soon, he finds himself installed in a sumptuous palace, surrounded by magnificent beauty, with his every need taken care of. It’s heaven on earth. But it’s not perfect. And when the veil of fantasy drawn around the couple slips, cruel reality insinuates itself into their all-too-fragile existence. Now they may lose their paradise—and their lives. . . . A true renaissance man, H. F. Heard was a historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher who infused his novels—including his popular Mycroft Holmes Mysteries—with a stark, unflinching view of humanity that proved both disturbing and irresistible. Hailed by the New York Times as a “psychological horror story . . . of spine-tingling originality and excellence,” Murder by Reflection remains utterly unique and deeply chilling.

A woman sits in prayerful meditation, waiting to offer her first confession in more than thirty years. She holds a small book on her lap, one that she's made, and tells herself again the Bible stories it contains, the ones she has written anew, for herself, each story told aslant, from Jonah to Jesus, Moses to Mary Magdalen. Woven together and stitched by hand, they provide a new version, virtually a new translation, of the heart of this ancient and sacred text. Rakow's Bernadette traces, through each brief and familiar story, a line where belief and disbelief touch, the line that has been her home, ragged and neglected, that hidden seam. The result is an amazing book of extraordinary beauty, so human and humorous, and yet so holy it becomes a work of poetry, a canticle, a song of lament and praise. In the private terrain of silence and devotion, shared with us by a writer of power and grace, Rakow offers, through Bernadette, her own lectio divina for the modern world. No reader will forget this book or be able to read the Bible itself without a new perspective on this text that remains, arguably, Western civilization's greatest literary achievement.

A book-length poem evokes the horror, anguish, and brutality of 20th century history.

From acclaimed Israeli author Batya Gur, the fifth installment in the Michael Ohayan mystery series set in a politically charged Arab quarter south of West Jerusalem The body of a young woman with her face smashed in is discovered in the attic of a house on Bethlehem Street, in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem. Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon is called to the scene of the crime where, beyond the usual horror, an old love and an unfinished romance await him. As in her previous novels, Batya Gur has spun a complex and fascinating murder investigation that serves as a means for entering a closed world with rules and a logic of its own. But here, the closed world is a Jerusalem neighborhood that enfolds the entire Israeli experience in miniature. Gur wonderfully draws the fissures in this complex world and makes it, like the murder investigation, worthy of further examination. The criminal investigation is set against the background of tensions between Ashkenazis and Mizrahis, hostility between Jews and Arabs, the affair of the kidnapped Yemenite children of the 1950s, and the al Aqsa Intifada in 2000.

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex examines the progressive construction of the notion of paternal function and its central relevance in psychoanalysis. The distinction between the murdered (narcissistic) father and the dead father is seen as providing a paradigm for the understanding of different types of psychopathologies, as well as works of literature, anthropology and historical events. New concepts are introduced, such as "a father is being beaten", and a distinction between the descriptive après coup and the dynamic après coup that provides a model for a psychoanalytic understanding of temporality. The book includes a reflection on how the concepts of the death instinct and the negative, in their connection with that which is at the limits of representability, are an aid to an understanding of Auschwitz, a moment of rupture in European culture that the author characterizes as " the murder of the dead father". Perelberg’s book is an important clinical and intellectual marker, and will be required reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as students in all these disciplines.