Tasting Gretel

Tasting Gretel
Author: Lidiya Foxglove
Publisher: Lidiya Foxglove
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2017-10-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

We were lost in the woods on our way to the city, my brother Hansel and I, when we came upon the cottage. A faery cottage, with a handsome and mysterious occupant. He calls himself the Magus, and he makes magnificent chocolates and confections for the Wicked Revels, the wild woodland dance of the fair folk. The moment I lay eyes on him, I sense he is everything I’ve ever dreamed of. And I’ve dreamed of a lot. No one knows what strange desires dance in my mind—until now. Hansel doesn’t want me to stay. I defy his wishes. He’s my brother, not my master. But the Magus can only offer me desire—never satisfaction. My desire feeds his magic, and his magic makes his confections delicious. He can never touch me, although he certainly has a lot of ways around that. He is forbidden from attending the Revels. And he bears a curse that ends on All Hallow’s Eve, but he can’t tell me its nature. Whoever this man is, whatever his name is, I will find out, because I have never met anyone who understands me the way he does, and I know he is meant to be mine. Tasting Gretel is a standalone fairy tale retelling of Hansel and Gretel, for those who like an unabashedly adorable happily ever after with serious steaminess! Although it is definitely standalone, it doesn't hurt to read These Wicked Revels before this one.

Gretel and the Dark

Gretel and the Dark
Author: Eliza Granville
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014
Genre: Fairy tales
ISBN: 1594632553

Decades after a celebrated Viennese psychoanalyst begins working with a woman who claims to be a machine, a young girl retreats into fairy tales, unaware of the dangers in her Nazi-controlled German city.

Islands, the Universe, Home

Islands, the Universe, Home
Author: Gretel Ehrlich
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2017-02-21
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1504042875

Ten essays on nature, ritual, and philosophy “that are so point-blank vital you nearly need to put the book down to settle yourself” (San Francisco Chronicle). Gretel Ehrlich’s world is one of solitude and wonder, pain and beauty, and these elements give life to her stunning prose. Ever since her acclaimed debut, The Solace of Open Spaces, she has illuminated the particular qualities of nature and the self with graceful precision. In Islands, the Universe, Home, Ehrlich expands her explorations, traveling to the remote reaches of the earth and deep into her soul. She tells of a voyage of discovery in northern Japan, where she finds her “bridge to heaven.” She captures a “light moving down a mountain slope.” She sees a ruined city in the face of a fire-scarred mountain. Above all, she recalls what a painter once told her about art when she was twelve years old, as she sat for her portrait: “You have to mix death into everything. Then you have to mix life into that.” In this unforgettable collection, Ehrlich mixes life and death, real and sacred, to offer a stunning vision of our world that is both achingly familiar and miraculously strange. According to National Book Award–winning author Andrea Barrett, these essays are “as spare and beautiful as the landscape from which they’ve grown. . . . Each one is a pilgrimage into the secrets of the heart.”

365 Sketches

365 Sketches
Author: Joe Janes
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 684
Release: 2010-05-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 055748281X

On January 19, 2009, Chicago teacher and playwright Joe Janes decided to write a comedy sketch a day for a year. He did that. When he was done, Don Hall of the WNEP Theater Foundation decided to produce them. All of them. In June of 2010, Don and Joe gathered together over 200 Chicago actors and directors and over eleven nights presented 26 shows each featuring two weeks worth of sketches (although one has 15 scenes). Yep. Crazy. All 365 comedy sketches are collected in this book along with a complete list of directors and actors from the Strawdog shows. Joe teaches comedy writing at The Second City and Columbia College.

More Kirksey

More Kirksey
Author: Judge Bill Swann
Publisher: Balboa Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2021-10-27
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1982275871

Kirksey lives in Tennessee. Sometimes he has odd visions. Some of them are Orwellian. He thinks a lot. You may think he is crazy.

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 2

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 2
Author: Russ Kick
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1609807057

The Graphic Canon, Volume 2 gives us a visual cornucopia based on the wealth of literature from the 1800s. Several artists—including Maxon Crumb and Gris Grimly—present their versions of Edgar Allan Poe’s visions. The great American novel Huckleberry Finn is adapted uncensored for the first time, as Twain wrote it. The bad boys of Romanticism—Shelley, Keats, and Byron—are visualized here, and so are the Brontë sisters. We see both of Coleridge’s most famous poems: “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the latter by British comics legend Hunt Emerson). Philosophy and science are ably represented by ink versions of Nietzsche’sThus Spake Zarathustra and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Frankenstein, Moby-Dick, Les Misérables, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment (a hallucinatory take on the pivotal murder scene), Thoreau’s Walden (in spare line art by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics fame), “The Drunken Boat” by Rimbaud, Leaves of Grass by Whitman, and two of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems are all present and accounted for. John Coulthart has created ten magnificent full-page collages that tell the story of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. And Pride and Prejudice has never looked this splendiferous! This volume is a special treat for Lewis Carroll fans. Dame Darcy puts her unmistakable stamp on—what else?—the Alice books in a new 16-page tour-de-force, while a dozen other artists present their versions of the most famous characters and moments from Wonderland. There’s also a gorgeous silhouetted telling of “Jabberwocky,” and Mahendra’s Singh’s surrealistic take on “The Hunting of the Snark.” Curveballs in this volume include fairy tales illustrated by the untameable S. Clay Wilson, a fiery speech from freed slave Frederick Douglass (rendered in stark black and white by Seth Tobocman), a letter on reincarnation from Flaubert, the Victorian erotic classic Venus in Furs, the drug classic The Hasheesh Eater, and silk-screened illustrations for the ghastly children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter. Among many other canonical works.

Take Me Slowly

Take Me Slowly
Author: Lidiya Foxglove
Publisher:
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2023-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

"You are the thing that keeps him human. You are what keeps him from madness and darkness. We need you, dearest." The Order of the Blessed is all I have known. I keep my head down and my hair covered. I don’t speak unless spoken to. I follow the rules—mostly. But the clock is ticking. Soon, Father Joshua will name my husband and there isn’t a man here I want to touch me. The last thing I expected was for Father Joshua to choose me for his own. I’m special, he said. I’m wicked. And I need a holy man to keep me from my own wickedness. Now, I must escape. Even though I hardly know what’s beyond these walls. Even if I die out there in the forest. I didn’t expect someone to catch me when I leapt. Especially four someones. Rayner. Silvus. Jie. Thom. They’re the most gorgeous men I’ve ever laid eyes on—and they’re also merciless, vicious vampires. They’ve loved me and pursued me for five hundred years, across every life I’ve lived. And they’re ready to possess me, to show me what love is, even as I’m slow to trust. They will do anything to protect me from the Order of the Blessed—but the Order of the Blessed will do anything to protect me from them. It’s time for me to discover just how special I really am. TAKE ME SLOWLY is a reverse harem romance with some very possessive, obsessive, slightly twisted vampires who will do anything for the woman they love and a damaged heroine who slowly finds her own strength. Did I mention m/m? Vampires get lonely waiting to find their lady. Note: Some scenes of abuse and dark themes.

Taste

Taste
Author: Jehanne Dubrow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2022-08-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231554249

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting. Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment. Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.