Portents And Oddities

After defeating a Fae fanatic set on closing the portal between earth and the magic realm, things are looking up for Sophie Feegle. She can finally relax, drink whiskey at her favorite ogre pub, and get back to the autopsy assistant job she loves. Maybe she'll even go on a romantic date with a certain sexy fox shifter. Yeah, right. Things never seem to work out quite the way Sophie wants. When Sophie recognizes the body on her autopsy table from a dream, her world is shaken again. As more bodies end up in the morgue, Sophie realizes a serial killer is hunting San Francisco's Mythicals. But why? And why does Sophie see the victims in her dreams? Hot on the trail of the killer, Sophie and her crew encounter Mythicals with strange powers. But as they wade through these dangerous waters, the question becomes: are Sophie and her friends the hunters, or are they the ones being hunted? Welcome back to Sophie's San Francisco, where being in a serial killer's sights may be new but being odd is still the norm.

This novel of the trilogy finds Claudette Monet, having traveled from New York City to Boston. Boston was known to her as the premier American center for elite institutions of all kinds. It is here in Boston that Claudette invents and proves The Painter’s Dream Machine with her painterly novelesque fantasmagoria and short painterly dreams. Readers can imagine for themselves what all the people in this trilogy looked like.

This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance and hagiography. In Middle English Marvels, Tara Williams explores the didactic and affective potential of secular representations of magic and shows how fourteenth-century English writers tested the limits of that potential. Drawing on works by Augustine, Gervase of Tilbury, Chaucer, and the anonymous poets of Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others, Williams examines how such marvels might convey moral messages within and beyond the narrative. She analyzes examples from both highly canonical and more esoteric texts and examines marvels that involve magic and transformation, invoke visual spectacle, and invite moral reflection on how one should relate to others. Within this shared framework, Williams finds distinct concerns—chivalry, identity, agency, and language—that intersect with the marvelous in significant ways. Integrating literary and historical approaches to the study of magic, this volume convincingly shows how certain fourteenth-century texts eschewed the predominant trends and developed a new theory of the marvelous. Williams’s engaging, erudite study will be of special interest to scholars of the occult, the medieval and early modern eras, and literature.

Does the discipline of history need a reformation? How should Christian faith shape the ways historians do their work? This book, written for students, considers the "how" of doing history. The authors first examine the current "liturgies" of the historical profession and suggest that the discipline is in crisis. They argue for "re-formed" Christian practices and methodologies for history. The book asks important questions: why do we do history, and for whom? How should faith shape how we do our research and tell stories? What do we owe the dead? How should Christian historians practice "dangerous memory"? And how can Christian historians do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? How might we rethink, reform, renew, reimagine, and re-practice the study of the past? Christian historians must be sentinels of hope against the world's forgetfulness, the authors argue, and this book offers some pathways for rethinking our practices from a Christian perspective.

"""Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos"", the first book focusing on premortem shrines in any era of Chinese history, places the institution at the intersection of politics and religion. When a local official left his post, grateful subjects housed an image of him in a temple, requiting his grace: that was the ideal model. By Ming times, the “living shrine” was legal, old, and justified by readings of the classics.Sarah Schneewind argues that the institution could invite and pressure officials to serve local interests; the policies that had earned a man commemoration were carved into stone beside the shrine. Since everyone recognized that elite men might honor living officials just to further their own careers, premortem shrine rhetoric stressed the role of commoners, who embraced the opportunity by initiating many living shrines. This legitimate, institutionalized political voice for commoners expands a scholarly understanding of “public opinion” in late imperial China, aligning it with the efficacy of deities to create a nascent political conception Schneewind calls the “minor Mandate of Heaven.” Her exploration of premortem shrine theory and practice illuminates Ming thought and politics, including the Donglin Party’s battle with eunuch dictator Wei Zhongxian and Gu Yanwu’s theories."