Tethered To An Appalachian Curse

A unique book about a unique life chronicles a persistent journey from an isolated Appalachian area mired in deep poverty. Illegal bootleggers and nasty mountain villains haunt the young man's family. A fundamentalist preacher condemns the young man to hell. As a four-year-old first-grader, he perseveres to academic excellence. Numerous episodes in his misspent youth ring outrageous with an abundance of original sin. The young man frantically struggles to find acceptance and eventually receives a surprise calling. Driven to find meaning in life, he battles against a social anxiety disorder and eventually speaks to audiences of thousands. He is the founder of a first-of-its kind publication for clergy and a clergy conference that renowned theologian Walter Brueggemann calls “a major piece of work that will stand when the history of the U.S. church is written. It must be providential that you were led from your start to that great work." Experience the epic travels from hillbilly obscurity to encounters with fame and the sacred. Paths cross with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, civil rights activists, U.S. senators, and world-famous musicians.

A unique book about a unique life chronicles a persistent journey from an isolated Appalachian area mired in deep poverty. Illegal bootleggers and nasty mountain villains haunt the young man's family. A fundamentalist preacher condemns the young man to hell. As a four-year-old first-grader, he perseveres to academic excellence. Numerous episodes in his misspent youth ring outrageous with an abundance of original sin. The young man frantically struggles to find acceptance and eventually receives a surprise calling. Driven to find meaning in life, he battles against a social anxiety disorder and eventually speaks to audiences of thousands. He is the founder of a first-of-its kind publication for clergy and a clergy conference that renowned theologian Walter Brueggemann calls "a major piece of work that will stand when the history of the U.S. church is written. It must be providential that you were led from your start to that great work." Experience the epic travels from hillbilly obscurity to encounters with fame and the sacred. Paths cross with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, civil rights activists, U.S. senators, and world-famous musicians.

In 1847, Samantha waits tables and serves grog at Logan’s Tavern in Campbeltown, Scotland. She joins the love of her life, the local Presbyterian minister, on an ill-fated voyage. The Reverend Charles Stuart is forced into exile (because of his zealous passion for the poor) and placed on an overloaded sailing ship to Wilmington, North Carolina. The ship barely survives the storm of the decade and runs aground near Kilmarnock, Virginia. Samantha and Charles join the efforts of the Underground Railroad. They live under the threat of death by hanging from plantation owners and their hired assassins. Inspired by Samantha, a great-granddaughter and a minister, who is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, uncover a conspiracy near Charlottesville, Virginia, that threatens democracy in the United States of America in the twenty-first century.

Amil Young was born into poverty and disadvantage. His hometown, Fog Lake, was gripped deep within the dark shadows of the Appalachian Mountains. The ridges and thick woods encircled the moribund town like a prison built of stone and bark. But a charmed turn of fate saw fit to deliver Amil from the mud and misery of Fog Lake. Fleeting though it was, success was found in the game of baseball. His fame lasted barely the fifteen minutes all are promised, but it proved enough time to unfetter him from the shackles of Fog Lake. He left the mountains behind, settled down, and started life anew. Happiness and domestic security showered their gifts over Amil and his girlfriend, Ali. Two individuals, once broken, came together to form one life, a full and vibrant companionship that seemed destined to endure into the reaches of old age. With the passing of the years, old ghosts resurfaced to haunt the couple. The knives of the past tore at the union of Amil and Ali until their bond was severed. Black days descended over the pair, and the guilt of his many failures grafted itself to Amil. A great many things cast shame over him, but it was his violent betrayal of Ali that he could no longer carry. At thirty-seven years of age, Amil took his life. Lost among the desolation of the afterlife, Amil encountered horrors he could have never imagined while alive. He learned of a new world cut to ribbons by treason, and a pantheon of gods, now feckless, undone by one of their own. However, it was the myriad arrows of time that would serve to most torment him. He found Ali there among the ruin. It seemed cruelly impossible. When Amil elected to take his leave of mortality, Ali was young, decades of life ahead of her. Suicide was an exercise designed to rid his mind of vexation. Instead, it had dropped Amil into a challenge, so vast that none before had ever known victory. To free Ali from her suffering, for the chance to set right all he had destroyed, Amil made a deal with the Goddess of death, Aphelianna. With fragile promises of a second chance, she offered Amil a quest. Her challenge would send him deep into the land of the dead and back through the fragmented halls of a history nearly forgotten. His target was a key, the sole treasure of Aphelianna's sister, Isadora, the Goddess of life. Amil knew better than to trust the words of Death, but, for Ali, he was willing to forsake anything. However, if he were to succeed and place the key of life into the hands of wicked Aphelianna, everything would prove to be the price. And Amil, a mere man, would come to learn the truth of what everything and evermore come to mean when viewed through the eyes of an immortal.

New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world? With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best—a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

An enchanting, riotous, and playfully illustrated debut graphic novel following a young goblin trying to save her best friend from the haunted mall—perfect for fans of Steven Universe and Adventure Time. In the eerie town of ‘Allows, some people get to be magical sorceresses, while other people have their spirits trapped in the mall for all ghastly eternity. Then there’s twelve-year-old goblin-witch Beetle, who’s caught in between. She’d rather skip being homeschooled completely and spend time with her best friend, Blob Glost. But the mall is getting boring, and B.G. is cursed to haunt it, tethered there by some unseen force. And now Beetle’s old best friend, Kat, is back in town for a sorcery apprenticeship with her Aunt Hollowbone. Kat is everything Beetle wants to be: beautiful, cool, great at magic, and kind of famous online. Beetle’s quickly being left in the dust. But Kat’s mentor has set her own vile scheme in motion. If Blob Ghost doesn’t escape the mall soon, their afterlife might be coming to a very sticky end. Now, Beetle has less than a week to rescue her best ghost, encourage Kat to stand up for herself, and confront the magic she’s been avoiding for far too long. And hopefully ride a broom without crashing.

Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.

BOOK ONE IN THE GROUNDBREAKING SERIES, THE WARS OF LIGHT AND SHADOW A powerful, layered weaving of myth, prose and pure imagination – Curse of the Mistwraith opens an epic fantasy series perfect for fans of The Dark Tower and Earthsea.