The Old Priest

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection’s title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator’s eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they’ve been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

In One Happy Old Priest, Father Thomas Sullivan looks back on his eighty years as a catholic, a life that includes both family and scores of fine seminarians, priests, nuns, and parishioners. With an honest and rollicking writing style, Father Sullivan recreates moments that stand out in his childhood, seminary education, priest training, and life as a foreign missionary and pastor stateside. One Happy Old Priest is one mans look at how the church has cultivated, preserved, and navigated decades of sometimes unwelcome change. The volume includes photographs of family, priests, nuns, and parishioners. An appendix lists Columban Fathers mentioned in the text, a testament of the many who dedicated their lives to the service of the church. The epilogue draws attention to the man Father Sullivan believes represents the best of what the church has to offer, then and now.

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An epic fantasy with rich world-building and a wry take on genre conventions from a Betty Trask Award-winning author -- Inar is Master Builder for the Kingdom of Mishig-Tenh. Life is hard after the Kingdom lost the war against the League of Free Cities. Doubly so since his father betrayed the King and paid the ultimate price. And now the King’s terrifying chancellor and torturer in chief has arrived and instructed Inar to go and work for the League. And to spy for him. And any builder knows you don’t put yourself between a rock and a hard place. Far away Anton, Blade Priest for Craithe, the God Mountain, is about to be caught up in a vicious internal war that will tear his religion apart. Chosen from infancy to conduct human sacrifice, he is secretly relieved that the practice has been abruptly stopped. But an ancient enemy has returned, an occult conspiracy is unfolding, and he will struggle to keep his hands clean in a world engulfed by bloodshed. In a series of constantly surprising twists and turns that take the reader through a vividly imagined and original world full of familiar tensions and surprising perspectives on old tropes, Inar and Anton find that others in their story may have more influence on their lives, on the future of the League and on their whole world than they, or the reader imagined. File Under: Fantasy [ Nightmare Crows | Scarred Altars | Broken Stone | Unlikely Elves ]

The 48 Folk-Tales in this book hail from the South East Asian land-locked country of Laos. Herein are stories like The Enchanted Mountain, The Spirit-Guarded Cave, The Monkeys and the Crabs, The Origin of Lightning (a tale which seems to be endemic amongst all the world’s cultures,) The Faithful Husband, The Cheating Priest and many more children’s stories which cover Romance and Tragedy, Temples and Priests, Moderation and Greed, Parables and Proverbs and The Wonders of Wisdom. There is also a small collection of Stories which went Astray. When these were first gathered by Katherine Neville Fleeson, the country was a part of the kingdom of Siam, and are uniquely South East Asian in their charm and complete novelty. Until the translator of this volume collected these stories, they were even unwritten, with a single exception which was found in an ancient Laos manuscript. They are, and have been, orally preserved in the provinces which constitute the Laos country, just as they have been handed down from generation to generation, with slight variations in words or incidents. In older times, village elders would tell the stories at their merrymakings around the camp-fires and within their primitive houses, to amuse and instruct the youth and children. However, with the advent of the electronic age, this tradition is being lost, and the more the pity for it. To the Scholar, who is a student of the world's Folk-Lore, you may be assured that you have here a small window in history with the tales of Laos, unobscured, just as they were told when this volume was published in 1899.