A Time to Keep Silence


Book Description

From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings. In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of 'supernatural windfall' which A Time to Keep Silence so effortlessly records.




Silence, the Word and the Sacred


Book Description

The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world’s religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role language plays in the creation of the sacred, particularly in the relation that language bears to silence. In their interplay, language does not silence silence by, rather, calls the other as sacred into articulate existence.




A'Kyria


Book Description

This is A'Kyria.... Somewhere out in space lies the edge of the universe; a point where there is no more void, but an anti-void...or a full space. It is a wall of matter so wide, so far reaching that the beings of a thousand planets cannot trace the end of it. It is where dark matter ends and white matter begins. The end of the universe, it seems, is just the beginning of a world so vast that physics must discover new laws to explain it. The surface is merely the edge of where one stage of the universe transitions into the next. The mysterious white matter has mass but is not effected by or generates gravity. Other mass centers create gravity; they can exist anywhere and in any combination. In this Universe the types of lands are as diverse as the imagination can create. Suns orbit some lands to create rings of life along the endless surface. Our forbears who believed that the sun orbited the planet would find their beliefs valid. Life might exist in a figure 8 set of rings around cavern entrances, radiating areas from tropical to glacial. Moons or planetoids could spin around their own centers creating kaleidoscopes of orbiting bodies. In other areas, suns might exist below the surface creating cavernous lands that cover the surface like lichen; a Dyson sphere with the star positioned in the center and life on the walls. In A'Kyria, the lands do not need to be traditional or follow the methods we deem normal to create places of splendor. Some lands might not need a star at all, but maybe a moon heated by a sun when exiting a cavern and brings the heat down with it as it travels. Imagine a weaker, dimmer star that travels through a channel with all the life existing upon the surface of the cavern. The sun sets when it rises above the surface, leaving the cavern in darkness. There are lands in permanent twilight from suns that barely rise above the surface, as well as, others that remain fixed giving constant daylight and burned lands where the suns are too close together. There are frozen wastes and oceans that stretch to the edges of forever; lands of strange beliefs, alien, bizarre or comforting in its familiarity. It is a land of infinite possibilities, where magic and technology, peasant and space ranger can meet just as easily as neighbors taking out the trash. It is a world where the only limits are the limits you place on yourself. Welcome to A'Kyria.




Silence Is My Mother Tongue


Book Description

A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.




Unwonted Spellweavers


Book Description

Drelvish Spellweavers are born during approximations of the Gray Sun Andreas. The gifts of Andreas to the People of the Forest, the ancient spell book, replicates at a Spellweavers birth. Rarely Grayness bequeaths Magick to a diverse lot, unwonted Spellweavers, who are not Drelvish, dwell in other realms, and connected to Drelvedom by wisps of Magick and threads of fate. Magick oft comes at high cost. Sometimes the unwonted gifts of Grayness are also unwanted. Albtrume . . .




Witchcraft, Demonology, and Confession in Early Modern France


Book Description

Situated at the crossroads of history and literary studies, this book examines confession's place at the heart of French demonology. Drawing on evidence from published treatises, the writings of skeptics such as Montaigne, and the documents from a witchcraft trial, Virginia Krause shows how demonologists erected their science of demons on the confessed experiences of would-be witches.




Island of Silence


Book Description

The second book in the middle-grade dystopian fantasy series that Kirkus Reviews calls “The Hunger Games meets Harry Potter,” by New York Times bestselling author Lisa McMann. Following the life-altering events at the conclusion of The Unwanteds, the stark world of Quill and the magical haven of Artimé are now home to whoever wants to live there, whether they are Wanteds, Unwanteds, or Necessaries. In Artimé, Alex Stowe and his friends continue to hone their artistic magical spells while welcoming newcomers, wondering how long this peace between Quill and Artimé will last. Alex is stunned when Mr. Today comes to him with a very special request—one Alex questions his readiness for, until circumstances offer a dramatic answer. And back in Quill, Aaron Stowe, Alex’s twin, faces a very different path. Devastated by his loss of status after Justine’s defeat and seething with rage toward Alex, Aaron is stealthily planning his revenge and return to power. Alex and Aaron’s separate stories proceed with suspenseful pacing, colliding in a stunning climax that elevates sibling rivalry to epic proportions and leaves the fate of both worlds hanging in the balance.




Life Breaks In


Book Description

The Exciting or Opiatic Effect of Certain Words -- Arrangement for Voice and Interiors -- Sonorous Envelopes -- Acknowledgments -- Notes and Sources -- Playlist of Music or Sound Works (With Links to YouTube Recordings) -- Photo Credits and Content Descriptions -- Index




The Orb of Chalar


Book Description

The world of Donothor was a child feeling the pangs of growth. A just man and his family labor to unite the peoples of Donothor against beasts and lawlessness. Dark Magick of utmost power carries ancient evil to Donothor. Childhood is spoiled. Alliances of dwarves, men, gray elves, prismatic dragons and Light Sorcerers oppose the alliances of goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, giants, black dragons, dark elves, and Dark Sorcerers. An aberration of Magick creates a breach between two very different worlds. These worlds become entangled. Peoples of both worlds struggle against the forces of Dark Magick. They must face a myriad of fantastic beasts. What courses should they take? How will events in one world affect the other? Can ancient powers overcome the evil? What are the keys to victory?




The Spell of Language


Book Description

The "spell of language" for Pavel consists of three things: the promise that linguistics seemed to represent for the humanities and social sciences; the distortions, misunderstandings, and willful neglect incumbent upon the "linguistic turn"; and, above all, the break with traditional humanism.