The Life Of The World To Come

In a weaving together of contradictory realms—past and present, rustbelt city and rural/urban South, old-world Catholicism and backwoods Protestantism—Joseph Bathanti draws readers into the 1970s as protagonist George Dolce faces major upheaval in The Life of the World to Come. George aspires to leave his blue collar, Catholic neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. He is on the cusp of graduation from college and headed for law school when he becomes entangled in a local gambling ring. After his father gets laid off at the steel mill, George dramatically increases his wagering to help his parents with finances. What's more, he allows his boss at his real job and love interest's father, a pharmacist named Phil Rosechild, to place bets through him with the gambling ring's volatile kingpin. As his parents' financial situation deteriorates, George delves deeper into gambling, and he even goes so far as to set up Phil by using the pharmacist's unschooled and ever-growing betting practices to his own end—cheating the father of the woman he loves. When Phil welches on a large bet that George has placed for him, George finds himself in life-threatening trouble and must abandon his law school dreams. He robs the pharmacy, steals the delivery car, and flees south. After his stolen car breaks down in Queen, North Carolina, he meets a young, mysterious woman known as Crow. The two form a bond and eventually take to the road in an attempt to reconcile their harrowing, often surreal destiny and to escape George's inevitable punishment.

From idea to flesh to myth, this is the story of Alec Checkerfield: Seventh Earl of Finsbury, pirate, renegade, hero, anomaly, Mendoza's once and future love. Mendoza is a Preserver, which means that she's sent back from the twenty-fourth century by Dr. Zeus, Incorporated - the Company - to recover things from the past which would otherwise be lost. She's a botanist, a good one. She's an immortal, indestructible cyborg. And she's a woman in love. In sixteenth century England, Mendoza fell for a native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. He died a martyr's death, burned at the stake. In nineteenth century America, Mendoza fell for an eerily identical native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. When he died, she killed six men to avenge him. The Company didn't like that - bad for business. But she's immortal and indestructible, so they couldn't hurt her. Instead, they dumped her in the Back Way Back. Meanwhile, back in the future, three eccentric geniuses sit in a parlor at Oxford University and play at being the new Inklings, the heirs of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Working for Dr. Zeus, they create heroic stories and give them flesh, myths in blood and DNA to protect the future from the World to Come, the fearsome Silence that will fall on the world in 2355. They create a hero, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality. "Now," stranded 150,000 years in the past, there are no natives for Mendoza to fall in love with. She tends a garden of maize, and she pines for the man she lost, twice. For Three. Thousand. Years. Then, one day, out of the sky and out of the future comes a renegade, a timefaring pirate, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality. This is the beginning of the end. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Like the great Italian poet Dante, Philosophy professor Fiorino Fannella is on a guided tour through the Afterlife. He discovers that he is still free and has the body and emotions which make it possible for him to grow in virtue or die in vice. His progress through Purgatory is monitored by a pedantic professor and a saintly cardinal. He learns much from Greyface, a cat who can speak his language. He is observed by Marcus, an angel who is constantly astounded by the Professor's irrationality.

Leo Brice is dead, in a sense (not the traditional one). When the neurotic law student meets his cosmic match in Fiona Haeberle, an impulsive spirit and burgeoning soap star, all seems well—the two fall fast in love, and spend three years navigating their twenties in wide-eyed wonder. But once the fantastical woman who had defined his future bolts to pursue a fantasy life of her own, Leo is forced to come to terms with a reality that more closely resembles an epilogue than the story he’d hoped it might be. Now a junior death row advocate, Leo immerses himself in the esoteric world of his condemned client, a born-again Georgia inmate named Michael Tiegs. As both men become consumed by the question of an afterlife—and as Leo becomes increasingly confused by his own future and past—Tiegs’ fate hangs in the balance. Leaning on his friends and grappling with his memories, Leo must try to save a client who may not want to be saved after all, even as he struggles to confront the prospect of his own mortality. At once obsessively readable, philosophically probing, and verbally acrobatic, The Life of the World to Come announces Dan Cluchey as a fresh new voice in fiction.

How do worshippers understand the poetic line "and the life of the world to come" when they pray the creed? Are they thinking of a geographical destination? A celestial community they will ultimately join? A participation in the life of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Questions like these inspired John Craghan to mine the biblical texts for insight and answers about heaven. His exploration of the Christian understanding of the "afterlife" moves through the understandings of ancient Israel to the synoptic Gospels and ultimately to the nascent beliefs of the early Christians as reflected in the letters of Paul and the book of Revelation. Grounded firmly in Scripture and written in a lively accessible style, And the Life of the World to Come is an intellectual and spiritual journey for readers that are willing to explore their own beliefs and anxieties about the heavenly home promised by Jesus.

"Nothing short of amazing." —Entertainment Weekly A million-dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history—from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam.

In three brief chapters, Zaleski offers an extended meditation on the encounter with death, the hope for life beyond death, and the vision of last things as distilled in the testimony of near-death experience and the Christian tradition.