God’S Mystical Realism


Book Description

Writing about her indescribable Christ-driven unusual experience, Wilma returns to tell of a divine place over yondera place we describe as limbo to some, the place between heaven and hell. It is somewhere for people who are not Christians, those who are not walking the walk of Christianity now. Maybe a stopping off place many go to when they die. A place described as the place that is believed to be home to the souls of children who died before baptism or believers. The souls of the righteous who died stop there. Although they are barred from entry to heaven, they are not condemned to the eternal suffering of hell. Realizing the portal was the entrance to heaven, Wilma remembers she was in the presence of the Holy Spirit, turning to see Jesus Christ standing on the pathway. Yet Wilma returns from a divine place, with a burning personal desire inside to tell this story. Wilma presses daily to complete this manuscript and reveal to unbelievers that there is a place called skekinah, visiting God in prayer, a living God, revealing his mighty power besides telling of a mystical place where the soul descends to after death. In reality, we do meet Christ for his divine judgment. Daily, Wilma finds herself wanting to drift outside and sit in the yard swing that extends from a large hickory tree limb. In finding peace there, she sings and praises the Lord. At times, she feels his presence with her during prayer time there. The wind starts to blow softly, and she closes her eyes. At this point, he comes to her as a feeling in her heart that he is there with her. She feels his presence as the wind stops, and there is a silence that only she and Christ can feel.




Gods of Jade and Shadow


Book Description

The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore. “A spellbinding fairy tale rooted in Mexican mythology . . . Gods of Jade and Shadow is a magical fairy tale about identity, freedom, and love, and it's like nothing you've read before.”—Bustle NEBULA AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Tordotcom • The New York Public Library • BookRiot The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own. Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true. In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld. Praise for Gods of Jade and Shadow “A dark, dazzling fairy tale . . . a whirlwind tour of a 1920s Mexico vivid with jazz, the memories of revolution, and gods, demons, and magic.”—NPR “Snappy dialog, stellar worldbuilding, lyrical prose, and a slow-burn romance make this a standout. . . . Purchase where Naomi Novik, Nnedi Okorafor, and N. K. Jemisin are popular.”—Library Journal (starred review) “A magical novel of duality, tradition, and change . . . Moreno-Garcia’s seamless blend of mythology and history provides a ripe setting for Casiopea’s stellar journey of self-discovery, which culminates in a dramatic denouement. Readers will gladly immerse themselves in Moreno-Garcia’s rich and complex tale of desperate hopes and complicated relationships.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)




The Star Fraction


Book Description

Moh Kohn is a security mercenary, his smart gun and killer reflexes for hire. Janis Taine is a scientist working on memory-enhancing drugs, fleeing the US/UN's technology cops. Jordan Brown is a teenager in the Christian enclave of Beulah City, dealing in theologically-correct software for the world's fundamentalists-and wants out. In a balkanized twenty-first century, where the "peace process" is deadlier than war, the US/UN's spy satellites have everyone in their sights. But the Watchmaker has other plans, and the lives of Moh, Janis, and Jordan are part of the program. A specter is haunting the fight for space and freedom, the specter of the betrayed revolution that happened before. . . . With The Star Fraction, Ken MacLeod burst onto the SF scene and began the Fall Revolution sequence that continued with The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road.




The Stone Canal


Book Description

Life on New Mars is threatened with the arrival of a clone of the man blamed for starting World War III.




Mouth of the Donkey


Book Description

The Hebrew Bible is filled with animals. Snakes and ravens share meals with people; donkeys and sheep work alongside us; eagles and lions inspire us; locusts warn us. How should we read their stories? What can they teach us about ecology, spirituality, and ethics? Author Laura Duhan-Kaplan explores these questions, weaving together biology, Kabbalah, rabbinic midrash, Indigenous wisdom, modern literary methods, and personal experiences. She re-imagines Jacob’s sheep as family, Balaam’s donkey as a spiritual director, Eve’s snake as a misguided helper. Finally, Rabbi Laura invites metaphorical eagles, locusts, and mother bears to help us see anew, confront human violence, and raise children who live peacefully on the land.




The Wildlands


Book Description

Named one of BuzzFeed's Best Fiction of 2018 "Geni's character–driven environmental thriller—think Silent Spring by way of Celeste Ng—centers on the survivors of a tornado that destroys an Oklahoma farm and kills the family's father." —O, The Oprah Magazine When a Category Five tornado ravaged Mercy, Oklahoma, no family in the small town lost more than the McClouds. Their home and farm were instantly demolished, and orphaned siblings Darlene, Jane, and Cora made media headlines. This relentless national attention in the tornado’s aftermath caused great tension with their brother, Tucker, who soon abandoned his sisters and disappeared. On the three–year anniversary of the tornado, a bomb explodes in a cosmetics factory outside of Mercy, and the lab animals trapped within are released. Tucker reappears, injured from the blast, and seeks the help of nine–year–old Cora. Caught up in the thrall of her charismatic brother, whom she has desperately missed, Cora agrees to accompany Tucker on a cross–country mission to make war on human civilization. Cora becomes her brother’s unwitting accomplice, taking on a new identity while engaging in acts of escalating violence. Darlene works with Mercy police to find her siblings, leading to an unexpected showdown at a zoo in Southern California. The Wildlands is another remarkable literary thriller from critically acclaimed writer Abby Geni, one that examines what happens when one family becomes trapped in the tenuous space between the human and animal worlds.




Magical Realism


Book Description

On magical realism in literature




God of Mercy


Book Description

“Nwoka’s debut feels like a dream, or a fable, or something in between . . . Recommended for fans of Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control or Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune.” —Ashley Rayner, Booklist "[God of Mercy] owes a debt to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, revising that novel's message for the recent past . . . A well-turned dramatization of spiritual and social culture clashes." —Kirkus Reviews Homegoing meets Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Okezie Nwọka’s debut novel is a powerful reimagining of a history erased. God of Mercy is set in Ichulu, an Igbo village where the people’s worship of their gods is absolute. Their adherence to tradition has allowed them to evade the influences of colonialism and globalization. But the village is reckoning with changes, including a war between gods signaled by Ijeoma, a girl who can fly. As tensions grow between Ichulu and its neighboring colonized villages, Ijeoma is forced into exile. Reckoning with her powers and exposed to the world beyond Ichulu, she is imprisoned by a Christian church under the accusation of being a witch. Suffering through isolation, she comes to understand the truth of merciful love. Reimagining the nature of tradition and cultural heritage and establishing a folklore of the uncolonized, God of Mercy is a novel about wrestling with gods, confronting demons, and understanding one's true purpose.




Magical Realism and Literature


Book Description

Magical realism can lay claim to being one of most recognizable genres of prose writing. It mingles the probable and improbable, the real and the fantastic, and it provided the late-twentieth century novel with an infusion of creative energy in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, and many others harnessed the resources of narrative realism to the representation of folklore, belief, and fantasy. This book sheds new light on magical realism, exploring in detail its global origins and development. It offers new perspectives of the history of the ideas behind this literary tradition, including magic, realism, otherness, primitivism, ethnography, indigeneity, and space and time.




God, Mystery, and Mystification


Book Description

In God, Mystery, and Mystification, Denys Turner presents eight essays covering the major issues of philosophical and practical theology that he has focused on over the fifty years of his academic career. While a somewhat heterogeneous collection, the chapters are loosely linked by a focus on the mystery of God and on distinguishing that mystery from merely idolatrous mystifications. The book covers three main fields: theological epistemology, medieval and early modern mystical theologies, and the relation of Christian belief to natural science and politics. Turner develops the implications of a moderate realist account of theological knowledge as distinct from a fashionable, postmodernist epistemology. This modern realist epistemology is embodied in connections between theoretical, speculative theologies and the practice of the Christian faith in a number of different ways, but mainly as bearing upon the practical, lived connections between faith and reason, between reason and the mystical, between faith and science, and among faith, prayer, and politics. Scholars and advanced students of theology, religious studies, the history of ideas, and medieval thought will be interested in this book.




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