White Turtle

Alternately mythic, wistful, and quirky, this short story anthology resonates with an original and confident storytelling voice. An anomalous kiss, a white turtle ferrying the dreams of the dead, a working siesta in a five-star hotel, a woman’s 12-meter hair trawling corpses from a river, and a queue of longings in Sydney: these are some of the subjects of the 23 enigmatic tales brimming with chance and hope.

Caramel and nuts make a turtle; this cookbook makes you a master of chocolate Even if you’ve never made chocolate candies before, you’ll fall in love with the easy recipes in Turtle, Truffle, Bark. The title refers to the three types of candies featured in this cookbook: A turtle is traditionally a pecan-studded, chocolate-covered caramel patty, but reimagined by author Hallie Baker, you'll be making Dark Chocolate Almond Chili Turtles and White Chocolate Cashew Mango Turtles. You might think you know what Baker means by a truffle, but think again. These aren’t everyday flavors—here are crazy-simple recipes for Milk Chocolate Lavender Truffles and Dark Chocolate Stout Truffles, among others. Finally, bark is usually a slab of chocolate in which various ingredients are anchored. Peppermint bark is one familiar kind, but you must try the White Chocolate Strawberry Bark and the Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Bark you'll find in this book. Get ready to satisfy your chocolate craving in yummy new ways!

Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.

The Silent One is Jonasi, sent from the sea as a baby to grow up in an isolated Pacific village. Separated from the villagers by his silence and their prejudices, Jonasi finds solace in his underwater world where he develops a special relationship with a huge white turtle. However, the superstitious villagers see both Jonasi and the turtle as evil spirits. A series of natural disasters and a struggle for leadership within the village sweep Jonasi toward his strange destiny.