Which Way to Mecca, Jack?

Which Way to Mecca, Jack?
Author: William Peter Blatty
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466834730

Before William Peter Blatty was the New York Times bestselling author of The Exorcist, he penned a series of comic articles for The Saturday Evening Post about his experiences in the Middle East. Which Way to Mecca, Jack?: From Brooklyn to Beirut: The Adventures of an American Sheik is his hilarious, semi-autobiographical story, based on the Post articles, originally inspired by his two-year stint in Lebanon working for the United States Information Agency. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Countdown to Mecca

Countdown to Mecca
Author: Michael Savage
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250035260

A plane bound for Amman, Jordan goes down in the Caspian Sea. The crash yields no survivors—save the Russian mercenary who hijacked the flight—and a cask containing an agent of unprecedented destructive potential is missing from the wreckage. A carefully plotted terrorist attack has been put into motion, and the resulting chaos might be enough to push America toward another costly war. The one man who might be able to stop the attack is Jack Hatfield, a freelance reporter who has never shied away from controversy. After making a politically incorrect statement about Islamic extremists, he has been discredited as a journalist and left to pick up the pieces of his career. But when his half-brother Sammy calls him, saying that his neighbor Ana overheard something she shouldn't have and now both their lives are in danger, Jack realizes he's stumbled upon a conspiracy to destroy Mecca. Now he, and a group of likeminded friends on the fringes of the law, must uncover who is behind the plot and stop them—or else witness the collapse of the world into a war of mutually assured global destruction. Michael Savage's COUNTDOWN TO MECCA is a gripping page-turner that takes readers on a journey where even the seemingly innocent aren't always innocent, the loyal aren't always loyal, and that even those counted on to serve their country, cannot always be counted on to protect it. With the threat of a third world war looming, Jack Hatfield must stop the destruction... before somebody can stop him.

The Modern Weird Tale

The Modern Weird Tale
Author: S.T. Joshi
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786462493

This is a critical study of many of the leading writers of horror and supernatural fiction since World War II. The primary purpose is to establish a canon of weird literature, and to distinguish the genuinely meritorious writers of the past fifty years from those who have obtained merely transient popular renown. Accordingly, the author regards the complex, subtle work of Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein, and Thomas Ligotti as considerably superior to the best-sellers of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, and Anne Rice. Other writers such as William Peter Blatty, Thomas Tryon, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Harris are also discussed. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a pioneering attempt to chart the development of weird fiction over the past half-century.

Finding Peter

Finding Peter
Author: William Peter Blatty
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2015-03-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1621573907

A New York Times Bestseller! For those who have lost a loved one to that liar and fraud named Death. So reads the dedication of William Peter Blatty's Finding Peter, a deeply moving memoir that tests the bounds of grief, love, and the soul. Blatty, the bestselling author and Oscar Award–winning screenwriter of The Exorcist, lived a charmed life among the elite stars of Hollywood. His son Peter, born over a decade after The Exorcist, grew from an apple-cheeked boy into an "imposing young man with a quick, warm smile." But when Peter died very suddenly from a rare disorder, Blatty's world turned upside down. As he and his wife struggled through their unrelenting grief, a series of strange and supernatural events began occurring—and Blatty became convinced that Peter was sending messages from the afterlife. A true and unabashedly personal story, Finding Peter will shake the most cynical of readers—and it will remind those in grief that our loved ones do truly live on.

Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead

Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead
Author: Habeeb Salloum
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2005
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780889771826

In Arab Cooking on a Saskatchewan Homestead, over 200 recipes and the author's recollections from childhood combine to tell the story of a little-known group of early immigrants to the Saskatchewan prairies--the Syrians (most of them later known as Lebanese). There was a significant Syrian community in Saskatchewan during the Depression, and as Mr. Salloum points out, their traditional foods and crops were well-suited to the dryland farming that the drought of the 1930s demanded. Thus they thrived during this difficult period on the prairies. Their traditional foods--such as yogurt, chickpeas, and burghul--were, at the time, virtually unknown to their fellow homesteaders; today, however, these same foods are an important part of an increasingly varied and globally influenced North American cuisine.

Postcolonial Theory and the United States

Postcolonial Theory and the United States
Author: Amritjit Singh
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2009-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496800214

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we may be in a “transnational” moment, increasingly aware of the ways in which local and national narratives, in literature and elsewhere, cannot be conceived apart from a radically new sense of shared human histories and global interdependence. To think transnationally about literature, history, and culture requires a study of the evolution of hybrid identities within nation-states and diasporic identities across national boundaries. Studies addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in US culture have provided some of the most innovative and controversial contributions to recent scholarship. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature represents a new chapter in the emerging dialogues about the importance of borders on a global scale. This book collects nineteen essays written in the 1990s in this emergent field by both well established and up-and-coming scholars. Almost all the essays have been either especially written for this volume or revised for inclusion here. These essays are accessible, well-focused resources for college and university students and their teachers, displaying both historical depth and theoretical finesse as they attempt close and lively readings. The anthology includes more than one discussion of each literary tradition associated with major racial or ethnic communities. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today. The volume opens with two essays by the editors: first, a survey of the ideas in the individual pieces, and, second, a long essay that places current debates in US ethnicity and race studies within both the history of American studies as a whole and recent developments in postcolonial theory.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Novel

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing a Novel
Author: Tom Monteleone
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2004
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1592571727

The trick for most first-time novelists is How do I tell my story? Well, look no further. In a reader-friendly, easy-to-understand style, CIG to Writing a Novel will cover in detail all of the elements necessary to create a great novel. Author Tom Monteleone illustrates how to create three-dimensional characters, write believable and colourful dialogue, pace the story, write effective transitions, and nail down the often tricky process of shifting points of view. He'll also explore such crucial concepts as style, structure, creating a setting, rewriting, and common mistakes first-time novelists make. He'll guide readers through the research process, distinguish between the many different genres of fiction to help them gear their work toward the best audience, and offer suggestions for time management and discipline - necessary tools for the would-be Courtenay in all of us.

The Chronology of American Literature

The Chronology of American Literature
Author: Daniel S. Burt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 824
Release: 2004
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780618168217

If you are looking to brush up on your literary knowledge, check a favorite author's work, or see a year's bestsellers at a glance, The Chronology of American Literature is the perfect resource. At once an authoritative reference and an ideal browser's guide, this book outlines the indispensable information in America's rich literary past--from major publications to lesser-known gems--while also identifying larger trends along the literary timeline. Who wrote the first published book in America? When did Edgar Allan Poe achieve notoriety as a mystery writer? What was Hemingway's breakout title? With more than 8,000 works by 5,000 authors, The Chronology makes it easy to find answers to these questions and more. Authors and their works are grouped within each year by category: fiction and nonfiction; poems; drama; literary criticism; and publishing events. Short, concise entries describe an author's major works for a particular year while placing them within the larger context of that writer's career. The result is a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of some of America's most prominent writers. Perhaps most important, The Chronology offers an invaluable line through our literary past, tying literature to the American experience--war and peace, boom and bust, and reaction to social change. You'll find everything here from Benjamin Franklin's "Experiments and Observations on Electricity," to Davy Crockett's first memoir; from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" to Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome; from meditations by James Weldon Johnson and James Agee to poetry by Elizabeth Bishop. Also included here are seminal works by authors such as Rachel Carson, Toni Morrison, John Updike, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Lavishly illustrated--and rounded out with handy bestseller lists throughout the twentieth century, lists of literary awards and prizes, and authors' birth and death dates--The Chronology of American Literature belongs on the shelf of every bibliophile and literary enthusiast. It is the essential link to our literary past and present.

Transnational American Memories

Transnational American Memories
Author: Udo Hebel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2009-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110224216

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world’s fairs as transnational sites of memory.