The Darkest Period

Before their relocation to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, the Kanza Indians spent twenty-seven years on a reservation near Council Grove, Kansas, on the Santa Fe Trail. In The Darkest Period, Ronald D. Parks tells the story of those years of decline in Kanza history following the loss of the tribe’s original homeland in northeastern and central Kansas. Parks makes use of accounts by agents, missionaries, journalists, and ethnographers in crafting this tale. He addresses both the big picture—the effects of Manifest Destiny—and local particulars such as the devastating impact on the tribe of the Santa Fe Trail. The result is a story of human beings rather than historical abstractions. The Kanzas confronted powerful Euro-American forces during their last years in Kansas. Government officials and their policies, Protestant educators, predatory economic interests, and a host of continent-wide events affected the tribe profoundly. As Anglo-Americans invaded the Kanza homeland, the prairie was plowed and game disappeared. The Kanzas’ holy sites were desecrated and the tribe was increasingly confined to the reservation. During this “darkest period,” as chief Allegawaho called it in 1871, the Kanzas’ Neosho reservation population diminished by more than 60 percent. As one survivor put it, “They died of a broken heart, they died of a broken spirit.” But despite this adversity, as Parks’s narrative portrays, the Kanza people continued their relationship with the land—its weather, plants, animals, water, and landforms. Parks does not reduce the Kanzas’ story to one of hapless Indian victims traduced by the American government. For, while encroachment, disease, and environmental deterioration exerted enormous pressure on tribal cohesion, the Kanzas persisted in their struggle to exercise political autonomy while maintaining traditional social customs up to the time of removal in 1873 and beyond.

“X-Files fans will eat up this TV reporter’s book: It’s out there.” —People When the seven-year-old grandson of U.S. Senator vanishes in the woods behind his home, the only witness is his older brother. “The lights took him,” he says—and never utters another word again. As the FBI and National Guard launch a massive search, the boys’ grandmother, Lynn, comes to realize that her greatest fear has come back to haunt her and her family. In the late 1960s, before she became the devoted wife of a politician, Lynn worked in the astronomy department at the University of Illinois. As secretary for a prominent professor, Lynn took messages from people desperate to find their missing loved ones who had vanished into beams of light. Now, determined to find her grandson, Lynn must return to the work she once abandoned to unravel the existence of a place long forgotten by the world. It is there, buried deep beneath the bitter snow and the absent memories of its inhabitants, where the darkest secrets may finally come to light. But there are forces that wish to silence her. And Lynn will find how far they will go to stop her...and how the truth about her own forgotten childhood could reveal the greatest mystery of all time. “A must-read.”—New York Post “Outstanding.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Hugely satisfying, while still mystifying.” —NPR

Acclaimed poet Hafizah Augustus Geter reclaims her origin story in this “lyrical memoir” (The New Yorker)—combining biting criticism and haunting visuals. “Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Winner of the PEN Open Book Award • Winner of the Lambda Literary Award • A New Yorker Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Brittle Paper Notable African Book of the Year • Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize “I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” A book of great hope, Hafizah Augustus Geter’s The Black Period creates a map for how to survive: a country, a closet, a mother’s death, and the terror of becoming who we are in a world not built to accommodate diverse identities. At nineteen, she suddenly lost her mother to a stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. Amid the crumbling of her world, Hafizah struggled to know how to mourn a Muslim woman in a freshly post-9/11 America. Weaving through a childhood populated with southern and Nigerian relatives, her days in a small Catholic school, and learning to accept her own sexuality, and in the face of a chronic pain disability that sends her pinballing through the grind that is the American Dream, Hafizah discovers that grief is a political condition. In confronting the many layers of existence that the world tries to deny, it becomes clear that in order to emerge from erasure, she must map out her own narrative. Through a unique combination of gripping memoir, history, political analysis, cultural criticism, and Afrofuturist thought—alongside stunning original artwork created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter—Hafizah leans into her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision to create a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish. As exquisitely told as it is innovative, and with a lyricism that dazzles, The Black Period is a reminder that joy and tenderness require courage, too.

After their first contacts with whites in the seventeenth century, the Kansa Indians began migrating from the eastern United States to what is now eastern Kansas, by way of the Missouri Valley. Settling in villages mostly along the Kansas River, they led a semi-sedentary life, raising corn and a few vegetables and hunting buffalo in the spring and fall. It was an idyllic existence-until bad, and then worse, things began to happen. William E. Unrau tells how the Kansa Indians were reduced from a proud people with a strong cultural heritage to a remnant forced against their will to take up the whites' ways. He gives a balanced but hard-hitting account of an important and tragic chapter in American history.

The Nightshade Guild: Chapter Three - The year the Guild was lost in time. As if the threat of the Time Scythe isn’t enough, the destruction of it certainly throws the Guild for a loop. Or rather through time. Charlie wakes up in an unknown location and, as she quickly realizes, an unknown time period. The Dark Ages is not where she planned to spend her pregnancy, but it seems she has no other choice. While Ameira works in the future to bring the mages back, Charlie puts her focus on finding her fragment of the Time Scythe along with a pure energy source to boost the spell. The problem is she has no idea where to look. She feels herself being drawn to the nearby mountains and the magic they radiate. Rumors circle the town of demons and other beings haunting the caverns, but Charlie knows better than to believe human superstition. However, since her arrival, something sinister has begun to stir deep in the pits of the caverns. Would working with the creatures within the caves help her get home to aid the Guild and the Elvin queen in protecting the future, or will it cause her to be lost forever in the darkest of times? Darkest Time is Book 5 of The Nightshade Guild Chapter Three. The reading order for this chapter is: Rocking Time by Lia Davis and Kerry Adrienne Defying Time by Mandy Rosko Illuminating Time by Renee Hewett Dueling Time by Sheri Lyn Darkest Time by Cherron Riser Losing Time by Jennifer Wedmore Time After Time by Louisa Bacio Swing Time by Cassidy K. O'Connor Time Maverick by Gracen Miller Crucible Time by Landra Graf Restoring Time by Lia Davis and Kerry Adrienne The Mages of the Guild encourage you to read Chapter One and Two which should be read in this order: Chapter One Mated to a Mage by Cassidy K. O'Connor Mage you Blink by Gracen Miller Mage you Look by Abigail Kade Shadow Mage by Lia Davis Mage Crafted by Cherron Riser Mage of Misfortune by Lily Winter Mage in Hell by Sheri Lyn Sunny Mage by Jessica Ripley Half-Blood Mage by Landra Graf Sea Mage by Louisa Bacio You Mage Me by Jennifer Wedmore Midwinter Mage by Kerry Adrienne Mage to Disobey by Mandy Rosko Chapter Two Magic Mishap by Lily Winter Magic Confined by Mandy Rosko Magic Clouded by Renee Hewett Magic Mayhem by Louisa Bacio Magic Mourning by Cherron Riser Magic Flawed by Jennifer Wedmore Magic Deadfall by Gracen Miller Magic Exposed by Lia Davis Magic Reflected by Sheri Lyn Magic Masque by Kerry Adrienne Magic Malfunction by Abigail Kade Magic Burned by Cassidy K. O'Connor

Finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation A vivid, "mesmerizing" (New York Times Magazine) portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a captivating, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise. Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. "This time," a disembodied voice commands, "send us a prophet who only listens."

Winner of the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the Best Work of History. "If you only read one book about the First World War in this anniversary year, read The Long Shadow. David Reynolds writes superbly and his analysis is compelling and original." —Anne Chisolm, Chair of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Committee, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century—particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism—shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914–18. By exploring big themes such as democracy and empire, nationalism and capitalism, as well as art and poetry, The Long Shadow is stunningly broad in its historical perspective. Reynolds throws light on the vast expanse of the last century and explains why 1914–18 is a conflict that America is still struggling to comprehend. Forging connections between people, places, and ideas, The Long Shadow ventures across the traditional subcultures of historical scholarship to offer a rich and layered examination not only of politics, diplomacy, and security but also of economics, art, and literature. The result is a magisterial reinterpretation of the place of the Great War in modern history.

Exploring the universal nature of suffering, this book uses personal anecdotes and biblical examples to illustrate the strength that God offers to those with trouble of any kind--reminding sufferers that they are never alone.