Luminarium

Luminarium
Author: Alex Shakar
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-05-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616951834

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. “Heady and engrossing ... Shakar is such an engaging writer, bringing rich complications to the narrative.... At times, Luminarium reads like a Christopher Nolan or Wachowski brothers movie as scripted by Don DeLillo.”—The New York Times Book Review Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George, were once co-CEOs of a burgeoning New York City software company devoted to the creation of utopian virtual worlds. Now, in the summer of 2006, as two wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, George has fallen into a coma, control of the company has been wrenched away by a military contracting conglomerate, and Fred has moved back in with his parents. Broke and alone, he’s led by an attractive woman, Mira, into a neurological study promising to give him "peak" experiences and a newfound spiritual outlook on life. As the study progresses, lines between the subject and the experimenter blur, and reality becomes increasingly porous. Meanwhile, Fred finds himself caught up in what seems at first a cruel prank: a series of bizarre emails and texts that purport to be from his comatose brother. Moving between the research hospitals of Manhattan, the streets of a meticulously planned Florida city, the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the uncanny, immersive worlds of urban disaster simulation; threading through military listserv geek-speak, Hindu cosmology, the maxims of outmoded self-help books and the latest neuroscientific breakthroughs, Luminarium is a brilliant examination of the way we live now, a novel that’s as much about the role technology and spirituality play in shaping our reality as it is about the undying bond between brothers, and the redemptive possibilities of love.

Luminarium

Luminarium
Author: Bj Swain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-06-04
Genre:
ISBN:

A streamlined, practice-focused text on conjuration. This is a 0 to 60mph, level up your work, hit the ground running approach to spirit conjuration. The core idea is using magical approaches to facilitate and improve your access to magic. This text combines elements of the Greek Magical Papyri, the Hygromanteia, the Heptameron and Orphism to create a more holistic approach to conjuring angels and aerial spirits. You can use these spirits for either knowledge or practical purposes. The method is easily adapted to demons. With this text you will gain the benefits of traditional ancient magical sources and the ease of contemporary spirit relationship approaches to magic. To prepare you, the text draws on Hoodoo, Catholicism, Buddhism, Greek Orthodoxy, Hinduism, and Zen to build an array of spiritual and magical practices from which to choose so you can simulate the benefits of long term spiritual preparations and development.With Luminarium someone who's never done magic can begin conjuring spirits in under two weeks, maybe just a few days. You probably already have most of the tools you'll need because this magic is based on magic from 1500 years ago, not complicated High Church rituals. Combine that with a hefty exploration of spells drawn on the Psalms, Solomonic Pentacles, Abramelin Squares, and folk magical tools and methods and you have Luminarium. This system has been tested by a handful of magical practitioners and their experiences are included in the text to help you explore it more easily. "Great stuff! I personally appreciate how straightforward and clear it was when it comes to ritual and spell work." - Jonathan Masters"I think it absolutely is fantastic, this is so needed and I think this is going to be really ground breaking, and makes conjurations accessible to a much wider audience." - Anneliese Anthoinette"All I gotta say is.... WOAH. That was powerful. And I am buzzing. Also, some real interesting physical manifestation stuff happened" - Alexander Deckman"I'm really excited for people to read this." - Aequus Nox

The Savage Girl

The Savage Girl
Author: Alex Shakar
Publisher: Harper
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2001-09-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780066209876

In the wake of her sister Ivy's widely publicized suicide attempt, Ursula Van Urden arrives in the metropolis of Middle City with hopes of starting her own life anew. In an attempt to understand the events leading up to her sister's breakdown, Ursula meets Ivy's mysterious boyfriend, Chas Lacouture, and joins his trendspotting firm, Tomorrow, Ltd. Armed with only a sketch pad and the mandate to "find the future," she begins an odyssey into the strangely intoxicating world of trendspotting where one lesson prevails: At the heart of every product lies a paradox, and when cultivated successfully, it yields untold riches. As Ivy's delusions grow stronger and more apocalyptic, Ursula's observations of a filthy, rodent-eating homeless girl -- an urban savage -- lead to an elaborate advertising scheme gone awry that has unexpected consequences.

A Beautiful Truth

A Beautiful Truth
Author: Colin McAdam
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013-09-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616953160

This novel told from the perspectives of both humans and chimpanzees “packs a huge emotional punch” (The Gazette, Montreal). Looee is a chimp raised by a well-meaning and compassionate human couple who cannot conceive a baby of their own. He is forever set apart—not human, but certainly not like other chimps. Then one night, after years at the family’s Vermont home, all their lives are changed forever. At the Girdish Institute, a group of chimpanzees has been studied for decades. There is proof that chimps have memories and solve problems, that they can learn language and need friends. They are political and altruistic. They get angry, and forgive. Mr. Ghoul has been there from the beginning, and has grown up in a world of rivals, sex, and unpredictable loss. Looee and Mr. Ghoul travel distant but parallel paths through childhood, adolescence, and early middle age. But ultimately their paths will cross at this Florida primate research facility, in this “strangely captivating [and] deeply moving” novel about the truths that transcend species, and the capacity for survival (Booklist).

William Langland's "Piers Plowman"

William Langland's
Author: William Langland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1996-12
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780812215618

"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum

Le Morte Darthur

Le Morte Darthur
Author: Sir Thomas Malory
Publisher:
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1903
Genre: Arthurian romances
ISBN:

The Witch of Edmonton

The Witch of Edmonton
Author: William Rowley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 1999
Genre: Edmonton (England)
ISBN: 9780719052477

"The play, based on a sensational witchcraft trial of 1621, presents Mother Sawyer and her local community in the grip of a witch-mania reflecting popular belief and superstition of the time ..."--Back cover.

Partners and Strangers

Partners and Strangers
Author: Michael Don
Publisher: Carnegie-Mellon University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780887486500

Dark, enigmatic, and sometimes comic, the stories in Partners and Strangers unite intimate anxieties with public dangers. Its characters embody grief, deviance, and the repressed: In "Yoav Feinsten's Last Year at Home," a teenager's pain over his father's death becomes unpredictably intertwined with an obsession with a cable man. In "A Home for an Eggplant," the specter of a Craigslist killer provides a backdrop for a couple's struggle with fertility. In "The Best Delivery Service," the narrator and his sister, living together after their parents' disappearance, obsessively order items through a hotline that promises delivery of anything one can imagine. The collection highlights a contemporary age characterized by loneliness and alienation. "How does Michael Don do it? The more absurd his situations--an eggplant on Craigslist, or a company that delivers anything from soft-shell crabs to the greatest mysteries of your life--the more real they feel. The more palpably real his characters' yearnings--inhabiting bodies and lives full of urges they can scarcely understand much less control--the more beautiful absurdity he unearths. Again and again, Don shows us how hard it is for us to know each other, how harder still it is to know ourselves, yet how startlingly a story just a few pages long can snap us into insight."--Alex Shakar, author of Luminarium

My Sweet Satan

My Sweet Satan
Author: Peter Ronald Cawdron
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2014-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781502539243

The crew of the Copernicus are sent to investigate Bestla, one of the remote moons of Saturn. Bestla has always been an oddball, orbiting Saturn in the wrong direction and at a distance of thirty million kilometers, so far away Saturn appears smaller than Earth's moon in the night sky. Bestla hides a secret. When mapped by an unmanned probe, Bestla awoke and began transmitting a message, only it's a message no one wants to hear: “I want to live and die for you, Satan.”