As she introduces us to the array of women and men who seek a variety of experiences through rites both ancient and new, a unique community emerges—one that provokes us to examine the very nature of faith. Illuminating the shadowed world of witchcraft, Witches of America speaks powerfully to the mysteries of the spirit. We hope the following guide will enhance your discussion of this extraordinary journey. Discuss your own experiences with spirituality.
How do the rituals described in the book compare with the religious traditions you observed as a child? How do the communities described in the book create hierarchies and leaders while remaining open to change? While many religions restrict sexual behavior, considering it a path to sin, the author confronts the belief that sex can have magical and spiritual power. Did the book change the way you view sexuality? As we see at Stone City, in the woods of Illinois, and through several outdoor rituals and initiations, the natural world plays an important role in Paganism.
Morpheus built Stone City with her own hands.
- The Ultimate Youtube Success Guide?
- Dont Worry bout Me!
- Upcoming Events!
Could you survive off the grid? How would you be affected by an intensely unplugged existence? While televangelists broadcast to global audiences, Wicca and other Pagan traditions are mostly practiced in the shadows. How does secrecy affect the belief system? What are your beliefs about the power of rituals? Initiation rituals appear in various places throughout the book. What role has the concept of initiation played in either your religious or your secular life?
When the author goes into training with Karina, who struggles with earthly poverty, what does she learn from her mentor besides the practice of witchcraft? At one gathering, the author meets a group of Dianic Wiccans of an all-female strain that emerged as part of second-wave feminism. But many Pagan traditions attract both men and women. Before reading the book, did you think of witchcraft as exclusively for women? What does the Pagan movement offer men in equal measure to what it offers women? Before you read the book, what was your definition of magic? Did the practices in the book—whether those of Morpheus, Karina, or Josh—change your view of magic?
Do you believe that a spell is similar to a prayer? In the final chapter, what transformation did you recognize in the author? What do you think the message of the closing section is? With the depth and scope of her curiosity, Alex Mar compelled me to follow her driving questions—about meaning, faith, and longing for community and wonder—on a breathless, deepening, and constantly surprising quest.
But what Alex Mar has actually achieved is something altogether more haunting. This is an intellectually serious and sweetly vulnerable work about connection both on and off the grid, and our common aspiration to lead lives spellbound and spellbinding. This is a quest to come to terms with the Unknowable. In Witches of America , Alex Mar exposes what we fear most—our own power. To be a witch is to reimagine the world. Alex Mar lives in New York City, her hometown. Mar is also the director of the documentary feature film American Mystic.
Witches of America is her first book. In her wildly inventive debut novel, Naomi J. Deeply grounded in historical fact but refracted through a powerful imagination, Landfalls follows the exploits and heartbreaks not only of the men on the ships but also of the people affected by the voyage—indigenous people and other Europeans the explorers encountered, loved ones left waiting at home, and those who survived and remembered the expedition later.
Each chapter is told from a different point of view and is set in a different part of the world, ranging from London to Tenerife, from Alaska to remote South Pacific islands to Siberia, and eventually back to France. The result is a beautifully written and absorbing tale of the high seas, scientific exploration, human tragedy, and the world on the cusp of the modern era.
By turns elegiac, profound, and comic, Landfalls reinvents the maritime adventure novel for the twenty-first century.
In the prologue and the opening chapter, what do we learn about the purpose of the French expedition and the state of relations between France and England? What is the significance of the galley stoves? Why does the naval engineer Monneron lie about who he is working for? In his meetings with Sir Joseph Banks and the artist John Webber is there any foreshadowing of the ultimate fate of the expedition? What are the flaws in his personality that lead not only to his death but, ultimately, to the loss of his legacy as a scientist?
Do you see him as a dedicated and brilliant man of science or as a self-important, insubordinate bumbler? How do they differ in their approaches to their work? What are their strengths?
The Hive | Book Keeping
Who do you think is wiser? Both were qualified to lead the expedition. Landfalls tells the stories of many complex men and women, each with desires, jealousies, worries, ambitions, and frailties. Which of the characters do you most admire? Who do you feel sorry for? Who do you dislike?
The novel begins with three epigraphs, one a quote from Captain John Smith: Each chapter is told from a different point of view, encompassing not only members of the crew but also the people they encounter in various locations around the globe. What are the advantages of this type of narrative? In the end, does it confuse or deepen our understanding of events? What insights do we gain by hearing the same story told by more than one person?
What are his feelings toward each of them? What details about them are missing from his understanding of their circumstances? Monsieur Lavaux, the physician on the Astrolabe , is concerned about the low spirits of the crew and especially the captain. He gives as his prescription for recovery the elements of light, warmth, visibility, and color. What are other periods of doubt or despair fog on the voyage? What are the moments that offer relief? What does the story of the millstone in chapter 7 reveal about European attitudes toward the indigenous people of the Americas and the South Pacific?
How do the Spaniards see themselves and their mission? How do the French see the Spaniards? In chapter 10, Vaujuas is the officer charged with writing the report about the massacre on an island in the Navigators Archipelago. As the sole author, he has the power to alter the truth to serve his own purposes. Does he do this? Is there evidence that his dream, at the end of the chapter, contains more truth than his report?
We hear from several unreliable witnesses when the priest died and each of them has a theory about what happened. How did the personal bias of each witness obscure the truth? What effect does seeing the relics discovered by Peter Dillon have on Lesseps? Do you agree that Landfalls is a tale of madness, the men victims of the madness of a French king who wants to prove that his nation is as great as its rival? Or was their shared experience of the voyage, along with its modest accomplishments, enough to justify their fate?
Have you ever had an experience that in any way compares to that of the men on the Boussole and Astrolabe? A long trip where everything went wrong? An extended period of homesickness or loneliness? Feelings of intense grief or intense connection to another person? These traits are all in evidence in Naomi J.
Both disjunctive and rigorous, Landfalls confirms that history and literature share a fundamental exploratory impulse. Landfalls is intelligent and utterly human. With keen sensual flair and understated poignancy, especially as she limns the friendships of men at sea, Williams has delivered a bona fide masterpiece.
Williams lives in Northern California with her family. Landfalls is her first novel. Book Keeping with Naomi J. In the midst of a heady world of poetry and liberal politics, gay love affairs, and tense silences, Matthew Spender grew up the child of two brilliant artists. Taught how to use adjectives by Uncle Auden and raised among the British cultural elite, Spender led what might have been a charmed existence were it not for the tensions in his household.
In A House in St. We asked him about the interaction of fact and memory and the challenge of recreating his parents as characters in a memoir. It was impossible to write this book while my parents were alive. Indeed, one friend of theirs has written to tell me I have betrayed them by writing this book at all, even though they are both dead. There is so much compromising material in public archives that it would be easy for someone to write a hostile book about them.
This could still happen, but whoever comes next will have to challenge my book, which I believe is more subtle than anything an academic could write. I know the story. After all, I was there. Underneath the memories, however, my book includes a great deal of academic research. I am proud of having clarified several sub-plots which had remained unclear to posterity: These themes are now academic, yet I have managed to include lots of evidence into my book, in spite of the fact that it often reads as a novel.
Do you think it was easier, from this vantage of the present day, to recreate your parents as characters? I take this as a compliment. My parents are the main protagonists, plus a narrator, who is myself. In fact there are two narrators: Were there pieces of the archive you chose to ignore? Or anecdotes you had to abandon? The first hundred pages of my book cover ground that has already been dealt with in several books. In spite of having uncovered new material, I had to hurry along to the moment when I was born, because only then could I insert my own viewpoint into the book.
The book consists of memories, and these did not change, but they were certainly modified by my archival research. For instance, research into the Secret Service which watched my father confirmed my impression that, at the highest level, everyone knew each other and trusted each other. And they were right to do so, even though now and again there were disasters to do with espionage. Free societies depend on trust. When that trust is betrayed, governments can move towards greater control, but obviously this will limit individual freedom.
Getting the balance right, during the Cold War and even more so today, is very hard. Hemingway in Love by A. Dreaming up Skies by Benjamin Johncock. In June of , A. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Ernest Hemingway had just undergone a second round of electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic and was suicidal and paranoid, convinced that his rooms were bugged and movements recorded.
It would be the last time they ever spoke: I checked into my hotel and went directly to the hospital. The room was small, but it had a large window that admitted abundant sunshine. There were no flowers and the walls were bare. On a table beside the bed were three stacked books, and next to the table was a straight- backed metal chair. There were metal bars horizontally across the window.
Ernest was facing the window, his back to the door, standing at a hospital table that had been raised to serve him as a desk. He wore his favorite scuffed Indian moccasins and a soiled white tennis visor over his eyes. His beard was scraggly and he seemed to have lost quite a bit of weight. Ernest turned; the startled look on his face held for a moment and then faded into a broad smile as he connected with me. He was genuinely glad I had come. He appeared attenuated, as if the man he once was had disappeared and the man before me was only a marker to show who he had been.
Pecas, this is Susan who holds the key to my heart. Ernest and I sat for a while, he on the bed, me on the chair, and at first he sounded like he was back on solid ground, but to my dismay, he began to lapse into a repetition of his old miseries: There was much repetition. I stood up, intent on directing him away from the same grievances that had assailed him when I had visited him during his previous confinement. I walked over to the table and asked him what he was working on.
He was referring to his impressions of Paris and of some of the people he knew when he first went to live there with his first wife, Hadley, back in the early twenties. All I need is. Not any of it, you understand?
Recent Posts
It was all set for the fall, but I had to scratch it. I asked him if these were the sketches from the Ritz trunk, the ones I had read. He said they were, plus a final new one, which mattered most. It was a trunk that Vuitton himself had made for Ernest, and he was delighted to see it come back to him.
There was a rap on the door and nurse Susan came in. Ernest took a sheaf of papers from his improvised desk and handed them to me to read until he came back. Hotchner is a life-long writer and the author of seventeen books, among them O. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and his indispensable parrot, Ernie.
Narrating this turn of events is a middle-aged literature professor whose passions include sleeping with his students and studying J.
Huysmans the Decadent author who eventually converted to Catholicism. As he watches Islamic law come into force, our sex-obsessed scholar misses seeing women in short skirts, but he is intrigued by polygamy. Ultimately, he must decide whether to convert in order to advance his career.
Brimming with satirical wit and provocative what-ifs, Submission poses essential questions of our time, examining the changing face of Europe and the role of religious fundamentalism in global politics. What makes a professor of literature an ideal person to narrate this novel?
What traits make him an effective storyteller? In Submission , is Michel Houellebecq satirizing only the French intelligentsia? Do you notice the same points being raised in American political life? How would higher education change if Harvard were owned by a Saudi prince? What has French culture meant to her, besides good cheese?
Is it possible to truly separate religion and politics? Does this question have a different answer in America and in western Europe? Would you have made the same choice? Is conversion always synonymous with submission? Is the novel realistic about the democratic process? Is Ben Abbes really a moderate? In reality, will his brand of rhetoric become the status quo in elections around the globe, or will extremism become the key to winning? No recent English-language novel compares. Furthermore, and God knows that I love Huxley and Orwell, he is an even more powerful novelist.
Michel Houellebecq is a French novelist, poet, and literary critic. He lives in France. He lives in New York. As Daydreams of Angels lands on our fair U. From the construction of invisible cities to the farthest reaches of her memory, Heather shares some of the reasons she got into the writing business in the first place.
Fingertips: Five Tales of Gothic Mystery and Monsters Reinvented
They had come from Virginia. They were in their twenties and they seemed so wild to me. They were the only adults that I knew who professed to being in love. My parents had just divorced and so I was accustomed to love being described as a fraudulent thing. And it was nice to have new love in the house. As a gift, they gave me a black journal to write in. I described how I had made spaghetti sauce with my dad.
I stood on a chair stirring the giant pot with a wooden spoon. I would write down all the things that my dad said to me. It seemed back then that later on, I would be able to look back at them and judge as an adult whether or not I deserved to be punished. There was something fascinating that began to happen as I was writing. I discovered that the events began to take on a different quality as I wrote them down. They seemed more ludicrous and funny as I was writing them. The events seemed more luminous. I had found that in every event, all the themes of a novel were transpiring.
It made life seem important. She is essentially trying to construct an identity that is completely distinct from the world around her. She has to make these great leaps of understanding. She has to really be brave. Her psychic existence is sort of like a video game where she is firing at alien ships, except the ships are the insults and idiotic assumptions people make about her. So I would just like to give her a break one day. Whisper into her ear that she is wonderful. And then she can take the day off and read a book.
She just wants someone from the outside world to tell her that she is bright and important. And then throw my arms around him and weep into his fur. But I am probably being Canadian in public right now. The bear represents the good side of the child in the story. Sometimes it feels as though it would be nice just to spent time with our decent part. Our psychic atmosphere is so polluted with bitterness and self-recrimination and greed.
So if I somehow just got to sit down with the bear, I think that I might just say hello, how do you do? There are also some funny angels in the book. I would like to just go out and see a film with them. One of my favorite things is walking home up the steep hill from downtown that leads to my neighborhood after seeing a film and discussing it—using it as a springboard for philosophical discussions. Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal. I bought Invisible Cities there today.
My daughter called in and got them to order it. In high school my daughter had to make an art project based on one of the cities. I have spent my whole life in Montreal, but I swear that there are alleyways that move and doors that appear out of nowhere in the middle of the night. What is the first book you ever remember reading or having read to you?
I was given a giant book of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes from my great grandmother. It was about the size of me. The book was too heavy for me to hold. I tried to make sense of all the talking animals and bloody revolutions. The strange rhythms and metaphors were ones that became part of the way that I speak.
I liked the little girls drawn in blue ink at the corners of the pages. I thought they were drawings of me. I remember thinking that the book was magical. It told the story of my past and my future. I was so consumed by the things that I read, that I thought that every book was a book about myself. And that there was no discernible difference between the life that one lived and the life that one read about. She lives in Montreal, Canada. For Kezia, the trip fails to deliver a break from her boss from hell, a jewelry designer in Manhattan. Nathaniel was a literary cool kid but now struggles to get Hollywood backing for his brainchild: She slaps him awake, but instead of scolding him, she tells him an enticing secret about a valuable necklace that disappeared during the Nazi occupation of France.
Embarking on a madcap treasure hunt that leads from New York to Paris, with an excursion to the chateau where Maupassant was born, the trio struggles to interpret cryptic clues while separating fakes from the real thing—not only in the world of gems, but also in life and love. Discuss the Yeats and Maupassant epigraphs. What first impressions did you get of Kezia, Victor, and Nathaniel as they gathered in Florida for the wedding?
As the scenes shifted in points of view, who were you rooting for the most? What were your theories about the drawing? What results did you predict for the treasure hunt? Make a virtual visit to Chateau Miromesnil www. What does The Clasp say about the nature of friendship? What has kept Victor, Nathaniel, and Kezia from achieving success in their careers as they approach age thirty?
What do you predict for the next decade of their lives? Would you value fake jewelry inspired by fictional stories? Discuss the idea of a clasp, which is meant to provide security.
What does Claude teach Kezia about the practical aspects of his craft? What do all of the characters discover about weak links and ways of strengthening them? What took Nathaniel and Kezia so long to acknowledge their attraction to each other? What makes them simultaneously an unlikely couple and a great match? How are they different from Caroline and Felix, and Grey and Paul? In the closing scene, on the flight home, have the characters been transformed, or are they simply able to be themselves at last? As you read about the life of Guy de Maupassant, how did you react?
Are writers like Nathaniel pitching shows like The Pretenders to executives like Lauren our modern-day Maupassants? How does The Clasp enhance your experience of her two nonfiction bestsellers? A touching but never sentimental portrait of a trio of quasi-adults turning into adult adults, this is one of those rare deeply literary books that also features—a plot! From the shores of Florida to the coast of Normandy, wonderful, unforgettable things happen in this enormously hilarious novel.
From carrot forests to Maupassantian necklaces, Sloane shares the genesis of her reading and writing. I was diagnosed with a spatial learning disability when I was little and my parents went into overdrive, trying too hard to help me with every little thing. So I wrote my first story mostly to get these well-meaning baby boomers off my back. It was about a family of rabbits who go into the forest to bring back carrots for their youngest rabbit.
Everything is very cute. Carrot forests, as we all know, are mystifying and dangerous places. What book would you consider an ancestor of The Clasp and why? Instead, each of the three main characters roughly follows the plotline of the story, one of them becomes obsessed with Guy de Maupassant and sees him as a great symbol of manhood, there are two necklaces, both possibly real, both possibly fake, and a large portion of the book takes place around the are of Normandy where Guy grew up. You walked down the subway steps and some big burly stranger pushed you back up?
There are hindrances trapped in a dull conversation and there are hindrances locusts. This is all to say that I finish the books I actually attempt to finish. I had trouble getting through Middlemarch — you may have to revoke my femininity for that one. That last line kills me every time. I was inexplicably inconsolable after The Chosen by Chaim Potok.
I cried at the end of Project X by Jim Shepard. The staff has impeccable taste. Walking past their display windows at night feels like walking into a New Yorker cover. Ceridwen Dovey is a social anthropologist and a hugely talented author. It was a treat to ask her about her life in books, from nailing down dialogue to her favorite Sydney bookshop.
My first story was written on one of those old word processors with the black screen and green text, probably around age 10, and it blatantly plagiarized her style. It took me a while to get up the courage to write another story after that, but when I did, I made sure the dialogue sounded more natural. What is the question you are asked most frequently about your writing? That may change in the future in fact, I hope it does , but for now I prefer to explore what seem to be my recurring thematic obsessions power, complicity, accountability through fables.
What book would you consider an ancestor of Only the Animals? I loved the audacity of his collection, how each story evoked an entirely new set of people, set in a different place around the globe, and each voice was so dissimilar from the others, but together the stories added up to a portrait of the radical act of imagining itself.
I also loved his critique of autobiographical fiction, the way the first and last stories in The Boat undermine the assumptions that authors should act as witnesses, or that authenticity in fiction is directly related to personal experience. The stories in Only the Animals have very different registers, but are thematically linked, and my hope is that taken together they are also more than the sum of their parts.
The memoir Ransacking Paris: She and her husband spend some time in Paris, trying to adapt to life beyond the exigencies of being parents to young children; their youngest son has just left home to go to university. Early on, she describes sitting beside her husband in a Paris park, watching a small boy playing: I could feel his shoulder warm on mine. Accidentally we had made creatures together for whom we would both crawl across deserts of broken glass, but mostly it had been washing nappies and spooning avocado mash into mouths, then later, cheering on the side of chilly soccer fields and reading endless chapters of Lord of the Rings , and later again, ferrying them to parties and discussing homework and marijuana and girls.
There was nothing to say but my heart felt tight to bursting.
楽天Koboで今日から電子書籍を始めよう
But these words brought me to tears, and reminded me that while the days of parenting may feel long, the years are short. I love the disjunction between who we are with other people, and how we express ourselves in works of fiction or non-fiction. The self is so mutable. I live in Sydney, Australia, and my favorite indie bookstore is Gleebooks in Glebe, a neighborhood in the inner west. Most recently, I purchased Euphoria by Lily King. Who would you say is your ideal reader?
In celebration we were only too glad to pick her brain. See her dig into the literary archaeology of the school story, and even produce the very first yarn she ever finished solo—from second grade, no less! Enraptured by my first trip to the theater, I wrote my first book when I was five—that is, I dictated it to my mother, who set it down in ballpoint on a notepad and stapled the pages together so I could read it at night.
The genre was Self-Actualization. Here is the first page: Allying themselves with dangerous characters and using their unique kinetic powers they must journey into the violent underworld of society to rescue her, before it? Shadow Lords, demons, bounty hunters, aliens, soldiers, warlocks, witches, ogres, elves and pirates await them.
It will take a lot of bullets, swearing, blood and gore to fight through the nightmare An electric fusion of drama, blood, action, comedy and chaos set in a futuristic, post apocalyptic stage. Enter the world of Gothic Opera. Architecture Gothic And Renaissance T. Begun by Marco di Campione, A. Welcome to a world of insanity, wicked monks, sublime landscapes, romantic heroines, golems, vampires, and wanderers Determined to retain power, Armine will stop at nothing to destroy Edgar, who stands to inherit the castle.
Now Edgar must flee his tyrannical uncle and outrun the murderous army of assassins sent to kill him. His flight will lead him, on a dark and stormy night, to a ruined priory, where he will discover the horrible truth behind his father's untimely end. This edition, the first since its initial publication in , includes a new introduction,.
Die Filmkategorie Literaturverfilmung besetzt seit vielen Jahrzehnten eine wichtige Position an den Schnittstellen von Literatur- und Filminstitutionen. Besonders Klassiker- und Bestsellerverfilmungen haben immer Konjunktur, weil sie in einer mehr oder weniger vorausgesetzten Beziehung zu einer. Her novels are praised for their underlieing social comedy and thorough description of human relationships. She lived and worked during a time predominated by novels of sentiment, sensation and sensibility. However she stayed aloof from this literary style and especially her novel Northanger Abbey is often regarded to as a parody of the Gothic novel.
The Gothic novel has its origins in the Middle Ages and deals with mysterious, frightening, fantastic, supernatural, sexual and sublime things. The stories seem rather ridiculous to us today. The reader always finds similar characters and plots in those novels: The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are among the most astonishing achievements of Western culture. Evoking feelings of awe and humility, they make us want to understand what inspired the people who had the audacity to build them. This engrossing book surveys an era that has fired the historical imagination for centuries. In it Robert A.
Scott explores why medieval people built Gothic cathedrals, how they built them, what conception of the divine lay behind their creation, and how religious and secular leaders used cathedrals for social and political purposes. As a traveler's companion or a rich source of knowledge for the armchair enthusiast, The Gothic Enterprise helps us understand how ordinary people managed such tremendous feats of physical and creative energy at a time when technology was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent.
War selten so gefesselt von einem Buch. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness.
His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.
Coming in such a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head This heady brew was caught nowhere better than in the revival of the Gothic tale in the late Victorian age, where the undead walked and evil curses, foul murder, doomed inheritance and sexual menace played on the stretched nerves of the new mass readerships.
This anthology collects together some of the most famous examples of the Gothic tale in the s, with stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee, Henry James and Arthur Machen, as well as some lesser known yet superbly chilling tales from the era. The introduction explores the many reasons for the Gothic revival, and. Written by Graeme Davis, this book is your guide to the Thirteen Colonies. Filled with maps, adventure hooks, and other information, this book picks up were Colonial Gothic Revised left off, and begins exploring the world of Colonial Gothic.