Dark Twins


Book Description

Gillman (English, University of Cal., Santa Cruz) challenges the widely held assumption that Twain's concern with identity is purely biographical and argues that what has been regarded as a problem of individual psychology must be located instead within American society around the turn of the century. Paper edition available at $12.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




The Dark Half


Book Description

“A chiller” (The New York Times Book Review) and #1 New York Times bestseller about a writer’s horrific and haunting pseudonym that destroys everyone on the path leading to the man who created him. After thirteen years of international bestseller stardom with his works of violent crime fiction, author George Stark is officially declared dead—revealed by a national magazine to have been killed at the hands of the man who created him: the once well-regarded but now obscure writer Thad Beaumont. Thad’s even gone so far as to stage a mock burial of his wildly successful pseudonym, complete with tombstone and the epitaph “Not a Very Nice Guy.” Although on the surface, it seems that Thad can finally concentrate on his own novels, there’s a certain unease at the prospect of leaving George Stark behind. But that’s nothing compared to the horror about to descend upon Thad’s new life. There are the vicious, out-of-control nightmares, for starters. And how is he able to explain the fact that everyone connected to George Stark’s untimely demise is now meeting a brutal end of their own in a pattern of homicidal savagery…and why each blood-soaked crime scene has Thad’s fingerprints all over it? Thad Beaumont may have once believed that George Stark was running out of things to say, but he’s going to find out just how wrong he is…




The Evil Twins of American Television


Book Description

The Evil Twins of American Television examines evil-twin depictions in over fifty years of television, comparing male twins to female twins and male-writer depictions to female-writer depictions. Kristi Rowan Humphreys evaluates The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, among other television programs that use the twinning trope to explore themes of feminism and identity. Employing traits identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique as belonging to the “evil” side of her “schizophrenic split” theory, Humphreys analyzes the ways in which these alter ego characters embody the desire for a separate self and independence through loose inhibitions, career interests, political interests, intellectual prowess, and assertiveness. This book then compares female-written twin episodes to male-written twin episodes, finding that when “evil twin” episodes are written by women writers, the twins are presented less as oppositional binaries and more as compatible, often symbiotic binaries. Thus, the women writers of these shows offer a compelling response to Friedan’s text, one that acknowledges and underscores the many complexities of women—the image of which cannot in reality be so easily split into two oppositional binaries. Humphreys then connects 1960s depictions to more current evil-twin examples, including those in Friends, Knight Rider, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.




The Twin


Book Description

When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother's role and spending the rest of his days 'with his head under a cow'. After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. 'A double bed and a duvet', advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?'The Twin' is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, 'the Twin' is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.




The Twins and the Bird of Darkness


Book Description

When a benevolent king and his daughter, Princess Marie, find their peaceful kingdom threatened by an enormous, evil, seven-headed bird, the brave princess offers herself as the bird's hostage in order to prevent the entire kingdom from being thrust into eternal darkness. As soon as Soliday, a kindhearted, hardworking, and generous youth hears about the princess's sacrifice, he vows to kill the Bird of Darkness and save Marie. His identical twin brother -- the jealous, lazy, and dishonest Salacotta -- accompanies Soliday on the dangerous journey, but doesn't lift a finger in order to rescue the princess or slay the monstrous bird. And the second Salacotta sees his chance to claim that he was the one who freed the princess, he does just that. Will Soliday be able to convince everyone that he is indeed who he says? Will his brother admit his treachery? Will Soliday ever be able to trust his twin again? This timeless and resonant folktale about the forces of good and evil and the redemptive power of brotherly love is the perfect story for the ages.




The Magical Twins


Book Description

The first YA book ever written by Jodorowsky!! A magical quest that explores the senses and sensibility of teamwork, duty and honor, by best-selling creators, Jodorowsky & Bess.




Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures


Book Description

Introduction : beginning to rethink twins / Philip M. Peek -- Twins and double beings among the Bamana and Maninka of Mali / Pascal James Imperato and Gavin H. Imperato -- Twins and intertwinement : reflections on ambiguity and ambivalence in northwestern Namibia / Steven Van Wolputte -- Sustaining the oneness in their twoness : poetics of twin figures (ère ìbejì) among the Yoruba / Babatunde Lawal -- "Son dos los jimagüas" ("the twins are two") : worship of the sacred twins in Lucumí religious culture / Ysamur Flores-Pena -- Twins, couples, and doubles and the negotiation of spirit-human identities among the Win / Susan Cooksey -- Double portraits : images of twinness in West African studio photography / C. Angelo Micheli -- Forever liminal : twins among the Kapsiki/Higi of north Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria / Walter E.A. Van Beek -- Snake, bush, and metaphor : twinship among Ubangians / Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers -- Fiction and forbidden sexual fantasy in the culture of Temne twins / Frederick John Lamp -- Embodied dilemma : Tabwa twinship in thought and performance / Allen F. Roberts -- Children of the moon : twins in Luba art and ontology / Mary Nooter Roberts -- Two equals three : twins and the trickster in Haitian vodou / Marilyn Houlberg -- Divine children : the ibejis and the erês in Brazilian candomblé / Stefania Capone -- The ambiguous ordinariness of Yoruba twins / Elisha P. Renne -- Twins, albinos, and vanishing prisoners : a Mozambican theory of political power / Paulo Granjo.







The Phantom Twin


Book Description

A young woman is haunted by the ghost of her conjoined twin, in Lisa Brown's The Phantom Twin, a sweetly spooky graphic novel set in a turn-of-the-century sideshow. Isabel and Jane are the Extraordinary Peabody Sisters, conjoined twins in a traveling carnival freak show—until an ambitious surgeon tries to separate them and fails, causing Jane's death. Isabel has lost an arm and a leg but gained a ghostly companion: Her dead twin is now her phantom limb. Haunted, altered, and alone for the first time, can Isabel build a new life that's truly her own?




The Cult of the Heavenly Twins


Book Description