To Remember The Faces Of The Dead

As he challenges classical semiological accounts of cultural representation in this ethnography of Melanesian religious phenomenology, Thomas Maschio shows that ritual and poetic performance are about the enactment, expression, and invention of the self. Maschio demonstrates how such emotions as nostalgia, anger, sadness, and grief are creatively transformed during the course of religious performance and expression into a form of cultural memory--one that juxtaposes a pattern of cultural meaning with the emotional feeling of plenitude the Melanesian Rauto call makai. Evoked during initiation, mourning, and agricultural rites, and figuring prominently in Rauto discourse about the self, makai joins personal memory to patterned sets of images and meanings that Westerners would call culture.

As he challenges classical semiological accounts of cultural representation in this ethnography of Melanesian religious phenomenology, Thomas Maschio shows that ritual and poetic performance are about the enactment, expression, and invention of the self. Maschio demonstrates how such emotions as nostalgia, anger, sadness, and grief are creatively transformed during the course of religious performance and expression into a form of cultural memory--one that juxtaposes a pattern of cultural meaning with the emotional feeling of plenitude the Melanesian Rauto call makai. Evoked during initiation, mourning, and agricultural rites, and figuring prominently in Rauto discourse about the self, makai joins personal memory to patterned sets of images and meanings that Westerners would call culture.

When Marie-Therese, daughter of Marie Antoinette, slips into the streets of Paris at the height of the French Revolution, she finds a world much darker than what she's ever known. When Marie-Thérèse Charlotte of France learns of the powerful rebellion sweeping her country, the sheltered princess is determined to see the revolution for herself. Switching places with a chambermaid, the princess sneaks out of the safety of the royal palace and into the heart of a city in strife. Soon the princess is brushing shoulders with revolutionaries and activists. One boy in particular, Henri, befriends her and has her questioning the only life she's known. When the princess returns to the palace one night to find an angry mob storming its walls, she's forced into hiding in Paris. Henri brings her to the workshop of one Mademoiselle Grosholtz, whose wax figures seem to bring the famous back from the dead, and who looks at Marie-Thérèse as if she can see all of her secrets. There, the princess quickly discovers there's much more to the outside world - and to the mysterious woman's wax figures - than meets the eye.

Johnstone Country. Try Not to Get Killed. In this explosive Hank Fallon thriller, the justice-seeking ex-con goes undercover and behind bars to expose a plot as big, as bold, and as deadly as the American Civil War . . . GET OUT OF JAIL FREE—OR DIE Doing time in Texas is no picnic. But getting sent to The Walls in Huntsville is a fate worse than hanging. If the guards don’t kill you, the prisoners will. And if it weren’t for the fact that the man who framed Hank Fallon and murdered his family could be inside The Walls, Hank would never step one foot in that heinous helltrap—let alone go undercover as an inmate. But this isn’t just another assignment. This is his chance for revenge . . . Inside The Walls, Hank quickly discovers who’s boss—as well as judge, jury, and executioner. The only relief from the gang fights and guard beatings is a prison work program that allows inmates to leave The Walls to work for plantation owner J.J. Justice. Hank figures it can’t be any worse than jail. But it is. Seems that Justice is ordering the men to commit robberies and murders. He’s stockpiling weapons. Building an army. And planning to restart the Civil War—all in the name of Justice . . . Live Free. Read Hard.

Jemima Stone has waited four long years for Gerald, her missing fiancé, to come home. When he is found dead halfway across the country, the news is devastating. Detective Finn Wight has been working Gerald’s case from the beginning. He refuses to drop it now, even though it is out of his jurisdiction. He keeps Jemima apprised of all his findings, no matter how painful. Defending her ‘innocent’ clients fills Jemima’s days. Finn’s muscular frame and easy smile fills her fantasies. But nothing relieves the guilt. Guilt that she couldn’t prevent Gerald’s devolution from genius scientist, to absent-minded professor, to ‘bat-shit crazy’ at the hands of paranoid schizophrenia. Guilt that, not long after his death, she was finding solace, and happiness, in the arms of another man. Feeding homeless in a local park helps ease Jemima’s pain. When a new ‘resident’ shows up, the others are wary. Though he refuses to speak, something in his eyes tells Jemima that he doesn’t belong there — that someone is looking for him. Jemima and Finn join forces to discover the man’s identity. They uncover the secret that sent him running from home, but there is so much that even he doesn’t know. Will the truth send him over the edge for good? Or can Jemima bring him back to reality? Bring him home? Before it is too late.

Novelist Fiona McGregor'snew book, Buried Not Dead, is a collection of essays on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. It features performance artists, writers, dancers, tattooists and DJs, some of them famous, like Marina Abramović and Mike Parr, while others, like Latai Taumoepeau, Lanny K and Kathleen Mary Fallon, are important figures but less well known. In her portraits of these performers and artists and the scenes they inhabit, McGregor creates an intimate and expansive archive of a kind rarely recorded in our histories. Fiona McGregor has a deep and enduring involvement in the worlds she represents. She came of age as an artist during an outpouring of performative queer creativity, in a community that celebrated subversion, dissent and uninhibited partygoing, and in her writing she observes the shift from that moment to new forms of cultural repression. McGregor is a participant in her essays as well as a witness — she sees through an artist's eyes and records what she perceives with a novelist's insight. In excavating the lives of others, she reveals her own, and shows the possibilities that exist beneath the surface of our culture. 'Compromise-averse, dangerous, this book is also a precious archive of radical art-making witnessed firsthand.' — Maria Tumarkin 'MacGregor has a fine eye for the moment, in a text or performance, when the marvellous happens. Cutting across the boring divides between high art and low dives, Buried Not Dead is alive to what's alive.' — McKenzie Wark 'In a world that bludgeons you into numbness Buried Not Dead will startle you back to life. McGregor's book is a shriek of rage and a cry of pleasure, and sometimes it is hard to tell one from the other.' — Krissy Kneen

Concetta Bertoldi has been communicating with the "Other Side" since childhood. In the first book of its kind, she exposes the naked truth about the fate and happiness of our late loved ones with no-holds-barred honesty and delightfully wry humor, answering questions that range from the practical to the outrageous. In addition she shares with us her own intimate secrets, revealing how her miraculous gift has affected her life, her marriage, her friendships, and her career, as well as the myriad ways she has used it to help others.--From publisher description.

‘Passing’ is a common euphemism for the death of a person, as he or she is said to ‘pass away’ or ‘pass on’. This open-ended saying has at its heart a notion of transformation from one state to another, which in turn grants the possibility of grasping or approximating the passage of time and the materiality of death and decay. This book begins with the idea that since all material things - whether animals, human beings, objects or buildings - undergo some form of passing, then the specific transformation in these passages and the materiality actively given to it can offer us a grasp of otherwise precarious temporalities. It examines how human beings strive to relate to the temporal dimension of death and decay, by giving new shape and direction to being and by examining its natural transformations. Focusing on the materiality of passing, and thereby the relationship between embodiment, temporality and death, Materialities of Passing offers rich case studies from Europe, Papua New Guinea, South Africa and the Russian Far East for exploring the material, spatial and directional aspects of the very interface between life and death. As such, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, death studies, archaeology, philosophy and cultural studies.