808s & Otherworlds

808s & Otherworlds
Author: Sean Avery Medlin
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1953387071

"September’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature" —Lambda Literary "Most-Anticipated New LGBTQIA+ Books of 2021" —Paperback Paris "An elegant mash of memoir, poetry, tales of appropriation, thoughts on Black masculinity, Hulk, Kanye." —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune 808s & Otherworlds announces a bold and incendiary new voice in Sean Avery Medlin. Against the backdrop of the Phoenix suburbs where they were raised, Medlin interrogates the effects of media misrepresentation on the performance of Black masculinity. Through storytelling rhymes and vulnerable narratives in conversation with both contemporary Hip-Hop culture and systemic anti-Blackness, 808s & Otherworlds pieces together a speculative reality where Blackfolk are simultaneously superhuman and dehumanized. From the gut-wrenchingly real stories of young lovers unmythed by segregation or former classmates appropriating Black culture, to the fantastic settings of Hip-Hop songs and comic characters, Medlin weaves a tapestry of worlds and otherworlds while composing a love letter to family and self, told to an undeniably energetic beat.

The Summer Tree

The Summer Tree
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2001-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101663995

Taken to a realm of magic and war, five men and women from our world embark on an epic journey in the first novel in Guy Gavriel Kay’s classic, critically acclaimed fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry. It begins with a chance meeting that introduces the five to a man who will change their lives: a mage who brings them to the first of all worlds, Fionavar. In this land of gods and myth, each of them is forced to discover what they are and what they are willing to do, as Fionavar stands on the brink of a terrifying war against a dark, vengeful god...

Operation Luna

Operation Luna
Author: Poul Anderson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2010-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429970383

Poul Anderson, recently the winner of the Nebula's Grandmaster Award for lifetime achievement, returns to the world of his acclaimed novel Operation Chaos with the tale of one family's mission to the moon. Ginny Greylock and Steven Matuchek are partners an Earth quite unlike our own. For starters, Ginny is a licensed witch and Steve is an engineer and werewolf. Steve moonlights by working on a spacecraft in the Arizona desert, a project which soon discovers that there is life on the moon. Neither Steve nor the US government has any inkling as to the nature of the moonsprites, and everyone is anxious to make contact. But when the time comes to test the spacecraft, a host of bugs, snafus, and angry spirits conspire to prevent the launch. It's a recipe for perfect lunacy as Ginny and her clan struggle to figure out who, or what, is sabotaging the greatest magical and scientific achievement of the century.

Men of the Otherworld

Men of the Otherworld
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009-01-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553905961

New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong has captivated readers with her spellbinding Women of the Otherworld series. In this collection of four tales, she gives equal time to the men who love these sexy, supernatural women—men who live on the wild side. As a curious six-year-old, Clayton didn’t resist the bite—he asked for it. But surviving as a lone child-werewolf was more than he could manage—until Jeremy came along, taught Clayton how to straddle the human-werewolf worlds, and introduced him to the Pack. So begins this tantalizing volume featuring three of the most intriguing members of the American Pack—a hierarchical founding family where bloodlines mean everything and each day presents a new, thrilling, and often deadly challenge. For as he grows from a wild child to a clever teen who tests his mentor at every turn, Clayton must learn not only to control his animal instincts but to navigate Pack politics—including showing his brutal archnemesis who the real Alpha is.

River Weather

River Weather
Author: Cameron MacKenzie
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781946580290

As the D.C. city sprawl moved west along the banks of the Potomac in the late 1990s, what had once been a rural backwater was rapidly transformed into a dystopian suburbia of suspicion, greed, and naked self-interest. This collection examines the resulting blends of money, race, and class that have come to define the ongoing metamorphosis of Northern Virginia. In "Kalim Mansour," a boy trying to understand his father fixates on a mysterious Saudi car salesman. In "Rowdy," a man who was sexually assaulted by his high school football team still romanticizes their masculine code of behavior. In "A Non-Smoking House," two contractors battle the realtors who control their livelihood as the ties that bind civil behavior pull tight, and then snap. Each of MacKenzie's stories explores the incommensurable moments that lie at the heart of shared experience, the yawning gaps that separate us, and our desperate attempts to close them.Content warnings: suicide, derogatory epithets, sports rape, peer pressure, strong language, racism, xenophobia, social injustice, war trauma, disability, toxic masculinity

Maphead

Maphead
Author: Ken Jennings
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1439167184

Traces the history of mapmaking while offering insight into the role of cartography in human civilization and sharing anecdotes about the cultural arenas frequented by map enthusiasts.

Iron Crowned

Iron Crowned
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1420122525

In this sexy paranormal thriller, a powerful shaman queen takes the ultimate risk to stop a war that threatens to destroy her Otherworldly kingdom. Back in the mortal realm, shaman-for-hire Eugenie Markham was skilled at banishing beings that didn't belong. But as the Thorn Land's new queen, she's desperately searching for a way to end the war devastating her kingdom. Her only hope is the Iron Crown, a legendary object even the most powerful gentry fear . . . Knowing who to trust is the hardest part. Fairy king Dorian has his own agenda for aiding her search. And Kiyo, her shape-shifter ex-boyfriend, has every reason to betray her along the way. To control the Crown's ever-consuming powers, Eugenie will have to confront an unimaginable temptation—one that will put her soul and the fate of two worlds in mortal peril . . .

Cultures in Contact

Cultures in Contact
Author: Dirk Hoerder
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 820
Release: 2002-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822328346

A landmark work on human migration around the globe, Cultures in Contact provides a history of the world told through the movements of its people. It is a broad, pioneering interpretation of the scope, patterns, and consequences of human migrations over the past ten centuries. In this magnum opus thirty years in the making, Dirk Hoerder reconceptualizes the history of migration and immigration, establishing that societal transformation cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of migrations and, indeed, that mobility is more characteristic of human behavior than is stasis. Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.

Entangled Life

Entangled Life
Author: Merlin Sheldrake
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0525510338

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems. “Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works. Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Award • Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

Knotting the Banner

Knotting the Banner
Author: David J. Mozina
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2021-06-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0824883411

In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters, relatives, and villagers—and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to witness the event—he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination suspended: His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins. This richly textured study asks how the Banner Rite works or fails to work in its own terms. How do the cosmological, theological, and anthropological assumptions ensconced in the ritual itself account for its own efficacy or inefficacy? Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, David J. Mozina invites readers into the religious world of ritual masters in today’s south China. He shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a ritual master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. Written for students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion, Knotting the Banner will also appeal to anthropologists and comparative religionists, especially those working on ritual.