The Daughter Of The Puppet King

This vivid novel views Gettysburg and the climax of Pickett's Charge through the eyes of the men in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and most of all through the eyes of their commander, Robert E. Lee. It is dramatic, at times cinematic, and compelling. It also is quiet, reflective, and moving. The author's intensely personal musings on his own history and on the grand and awful sweep and meaning of American history remind us that neither history nor historical fiction are anything like simple stories about what happened long ago but rather, continuous dialogues with the people who inhabited that past. I admire Rich Fritzky's creativity and his desire to share this story with everyone interested in examining some of the deeper truths of the Civil War. -J. Tracy Power Author of Lee's Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox Richard Fritzky, writing with a love and passion for-and knowledge of-his subject, has crafted in this novel about Lee at Gettysburg a hybrid mix of events anchored on solid fact, words actually spoken and made up, and acts, thoughts, and emotions inferred. This mix is salted by occasional detours between chapters for personal reflections on words of meaning to Lee-family and heritage, faith, freedom and liberty, sacrifice, duty, and home. All in all, this work of fact, fiction, and reflection combine for a compelling account of Lee on the third day at Gettysburg. -John C. Waugh Author of The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox-Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan and Their Brothers Fritzky is an exceptional human being who has a sensibility that feels the emotions of the past and searches for their historical meaning in the present. -Kent Gramm Author of November, Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg This is a well-written, readable, and important work that hopefully reaches a much broader readership than an academic tome. Mr. Fritzky has performed a very important function in writing this book, by contributing toward the maintenance of an historical memory for concerned Americans. If men like Robert E. Lee were to vanish from the historical stage, so too would the principles of honor, duty, and self-sacrifice cease to inform public debate. -Marshall DeRosa Author of The Enduring Influence of Robert E. Lee - the Ideological Warfare Underpinning the American Civil War

Treason within, war from without. Torn asunder by the nightmares of a mad king, the elven realm of Silvanesti has nearly been restored to its former grandeur. But the elf Porthios, returning to his homeland, launches a rebellion against young Gilthas, his own nephew. Gilthas's troubles are multiplied by threats from green dragons and from the Knights of Takhisis. Now, with Porthios at his throat, Gilthas must choose between blood and honor. Douglas Nile's Dragonlance novel is filled with treachery and intrigue among the elves during the Chaos War, the backdrop for The New York Times best-selling novel Dragons of Summer Flame.

“Bleak, melancholy, and intelligent like the best by Thomas Ligotti and Jon Padgett, these tales unmistakably come from a deep, personal place and will best resonate with searchers after metaphysical horrors.” —Dejan Ognjanović, RUE MORGUE The Puppet King and Other Atonements conjures a horrific universe of puppets, labyrinths, and liminal spaces. Over the span of fourteen Borgesian terrors, Justin A. Burnett inhabits the strange borderlands between intimacy and isolation, fiction and philosophy, reality and nightmare. Sprouting from the blackened landscape of weird writers such as Thomas Ligotti, Jon Padgett, and Brian Evenson, this collection is a bleak, unflinching gaze into the vertiginous depths of the nonhuman. “A collection brimming with sublime torments. Burnett masterfully grasps the transcendent grotesque, weaving tales charged with cosmic danger. A refreshing and powerful new voice in contemporary dread.” —Rebecca Gransden, author of SEA OF GLASS “Burnett takes you through a journey of contrasts. At once delicate and painfully intimate, yet vast, reverberant and strange, The Puppet King and Other Atonements draws the reader deep into the primordial to the very edge of the stars. Highly recommended.” —Emma J. Gibbon, author of DARK BLOOD COMES FROM THE FEET

Lucrezia Borgia is one of the most vilified women in modern history. The daughter of a notorious pope, she was twice betrothed before the age of eleven and thrice married—one husband was forced to declare himself impotent and thereby unfit and another was murdered by Lucrezia’s own brother, Cesar Borgia. She is cast in the role of murderess, temptress, incestuous lover, loose woman, femme fatale par excellence. But there are two sides to every story. Lucrezia Borgia is the only woman in history to have serve as the head of the Catholic Church. She successfully administered several of Renaissance Italy’s most thriving cities, founded one of the world’s first credit unions, and was a generous patron of the arts. She was mother to a prince and to a cardinal. She was a devoted wife to the Prince of Ferrara, and the lover of the poet Pietro Bembo. She was a child of the renaissance and, in many ways, the world’s first modern woman. In this richly imagined novel, Nobel laureate Dario Fo reveals Lucrezia’s humanity, her passion for life, her compassion for others, and her skill at navigating around her family’s evildoings. The Borgias are unrivalled for the range and magnitude of their political machinations and opportunism. Fo’s brilliance rests in his rendering their story as a shocking mirror image of the uses and abuses of power in our own time. Lucrezia herself becomes a model for how to survive and rise above those abuses. Part Wolf Hall, part House of Cards, The Pope's Daugther will appeal to readers of historical fiction and of contemporary fiction alike and will delight anyone fascinated by Renaissance Italy.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects—objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature—Collodi’s cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppetlike characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke’s puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth’s Micky Sabbath—as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, Puppet evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.