The Red Haired Girl From The Bog

When Patricia Monaghan traveled to Ireland seeking her roots, what she found was much more than her physical ancestors. This is the story of her journey and the legends, landmarks, and mystical lore she encountered. Her poetic stories elucidate the ways that myth reveals the truth of human experience as well as the contradictions that are embodied in women's lives. This book is an extensive exploration of goddess mythology in Ireland, from Brigit, the Celtic goddess of water, fire, and transformation, to the historical figure of Granueille, a pirate queen.

In Irish Celtic lore, "thin places" are those locales where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape. The earth takes on the hue of the sacred among peoples whose connection to place has remained unbroken through the ages. What happens, then, when a Celtic view of nature is brought home to a North American landscape in which many inhabitants' ancestral connections to place are surface-thin? In a quest to find a deeper spiritual landscape in his own home, Kevin Koch applies eight principles of a Celtic spiritual view of nature to places in Ireland and to the American Midwest's rugged Driftless Area, an unglaciated region of river bluffs, rock outcrops, and steeply wooded hills. The Thin Places brings onsite mountaineering guides, spiritual leaders, geologists, and archaeologists alongside scholars in the fields of Celtic studies, religion, and conservation. But the text never strays far from story, from a trek through the Wicklow Mountains and the bogs of Western Ireland or among ancient Native American burial mounds and abandoned nineteenth-century lead mines in the bluffs above the Mississippi River.

The dazzling, award-winning debut in a series that delivers mystery, romance, suspense, and fascinating forensic detail. When farmers cutting turf in an Irish peat bog make a grisly discovery—the perfectly preserved head of a young woman with long red hair—Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin must use cutting-edge techniques to preserve ancient evidence. Because the bog’s watery, acidic environment prevents decay, it’s difficult to tell how long the red-haired girl has been buried—two years, two centuries, or even much longer. Who is she? The extraordinary find leads to even more disturbing puzzles. The red-haired girl is not the only enigma in this remote corner of Galway. Two years earlier, Mina Osborne, the wife of a local landowner, went for a walk with her young son and vanished without a trace. Could they, too, be hidden in the bog’s treacherous depths, only to be discovered centuries from now? Or did Hugh Osborne murder his family, as some villagers suspect? Bracklyn House, Osborne’s stately home, holds many secrets, and Nora and Cormac's inquiries threaten to expose them all.

*Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Literary Hub!* *A 2022 NBCC Awards Nonfiction Finalist and a 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist* From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, this riveting deep dive into the history of our wetlands and what their systematic destruction means for the planet “is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action” (Esquire). “I learned something new—and found something amazing—on every page.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth’s survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada’s Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia’s Great Vasyugan Mire, and America’s Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands—the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is “an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important” (Bill McKibben). “A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring–style warning from one of our greatest novelists.” —The Christian Science Monitor

In this revelatory story about first love from Karen Russell’s Orange World, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. Through a darkly comic lens, Russell explores the vertigo of falling in and out of love, and the way that our shallow projections and fairytale fantasies can cover over the mysterious reality of another human being. A Vintage Short.

Sons of the Rumour is nothing short of a dazzling and genre-defying work of genius. Foster retells the tale of the legendary eighth-century King Shahrban of Persia who, furious at his wife's infidelity, has decided to marry and then behead a fresh virgin every day. But then the king meets Scheherazade, a beauty of such wiles and storytelling gifts she manages to entertain the him for 1001 nights, staving off death for both herself and her countrywomen. In the process, she also bears him three sons, wisely educates him in morality and kindness, and eventually convinces him to take her as his lawful wife. Intersecting with the historical tale is the story of Al Morrisey - a middle-aged, Anglo-Irish, former jazz-drumming everyman, on the run from a failed marriage, and cursed with Freudian daydreams of his mother and peculiar nightmares of all things Persian - as he vainly attempts to reconcile the past with the present and reclaim some of his youthful vigour. Ingeniously manipulating the frame tale of the Arabian Nights, and utilising all his narrative gifts of adventurous satire, David Foster has produced a work of fiction like no other. Sprawling, ambitious, explicit but frequently hilarious, Sons of the Rumour is a modern masterpiece, an utterly original novel by one of Australia's greatest living writers, a man who the Sydney Morning Herald critic Andrew Riemer has called Patrick White's worthy successor.

She Is Everywhere! Volume 3 presents a bold, brave, and beautiful compilation of womanist/feminist essays, poems, and artwork showcasing work from an international community of women and men who honor the Sacred Female. The fifty contributors in this anthologyscholars, creative writers, and visual artistsshare their vision for a world that reclaims the inviolability of the Divine Female in all Her many and varied manifestations. She Is Everywhere! Volume 3 is the latest edition of a leading-edge series which, like its predecessors, offers an invaluable contribution to womens spirituality, religion, philosophy, and womens studies. The contemporary voices contained within its pages echo an ancient clarion call to embrace the values of justice with compassion, equality for all people, and transformation. We have a calling in this worldnamely, to prevent the destruction from continuing. Claudia von Werlhof I am in the presence of a divine Mother, and She is fulfilling a deep longing inside of me. Nicole Margiasso-Tran She was, I am, my daughter is because we are all Her. Etoyle McKee Just as dark matter (mother) in space shapes galaxies and holds them together, we are shaped and held by the African Dark Mother who has given us Her life force, and resides in the very depths of our being, where the macrocosm is literally reflected in the microcosm. Leslene della-Madre

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.