Twenty-three-year-old psych graduate student Margharita Louverture is reading her textbook on a bench in Washington Square Park when she realizes she left her cigarettes at home. She spots a dignified old man walking a dog and asks for a smoke. Little does she know that meeting Andreas Bathory in the park ignites a flame that will burn them both. A liaison between Margharita and Andreas unfolds, and repressed psychological longings and denied spiritual agendas are revealed. A bond is created that goes beyond conventionality, as they see in the other a guide out of their inner labyrinths. It becomes obvious their souls are cursed. Restoration is only possible if they delve deeper and deeper into their murky hearts. The relationship becomes a journey into Hell, but at the end of the path they reach an exit, a longed for denouement. In this incendiary emotional cliffhanger, an impassionate, combustible woman meets an arsonist of the heart and shares a flaming encounter. After the blaze is extinguished, redemption rises from the ashes.

Rural communities depend on the health of the agrarian cultures that compose them. These cultures grow out of the symbiotic relationship between a particular landscape and the human community that lives on and uses the land. Agrarian cultures had their origin in the development of agriculture and gave birth to the civilizations and empires of history. Based on the exercise of hierarchical power characteristic of their nature, empires and civilizations are always a threat to the welfare of their agrarian cultures, that by nature tend to be local, relational, reciprocal, and ecological. This is the story of the three Anabaptist agrarian cultures--Swiss German, Low German, and Hutterian--of the Freeman, South Dakota, rural community, and their sojourn within the empires of civilization through the centuries. More specifically, this is the story of their birth, growth, maturation, and death (or rebirth?) in the particular landscape of the Great Plains to which they came from Russia in the 1870s. Here we see the agrarian cultures' struggle to adapt to the new environment of the Great Plains and to maintain their unique identity while living within American society. This is the drama of a rural community's life cycle!

Rick and Lisa have stumbled onto an ancient mystery that has been kept concealed for purpose. What will they do with it, though? Join them on their adventurous and risky quest.

Autobiography is a long-established literary modality of self-exposure with commanding works such as Augustine’s Confessions, Rousseau’s book of the same title, and Salvador Dalí’s paradoxical reformulation of that title in his Unspeakable Confessions. Like all genres with a distinguished career, autobiography has elicited a fair amount of critical and theoretical reflection. Classic works by Käte Hamburger and Philippe Lejeune in the 1960s and 70s articulated distinctions and similarities between fiction and the genre of personal declaration. Especially since Foucault’s seminal essay on "Self Writing," self-production through writing has become more versatile, gaining a broader range of expression, diversifying its social function, and colonizing new media of representation. For this reason, it seems appropriate to speak of life-writing as a concept that includes but is not limited to classic autobiography. Awareness of language’s performativity permits us to read life-writing texts not as a record but as the space where the self is realized, or in some instances de-realized. Such texts can build identity, but they can also contest ascribed identity by producing alternative or disjointed scenarios of identification. And they not only relate to the present, but may also act upon the past by virtue of their retrospective effects in the confluence of narrator and witness.

The romanticized image of the heroic male resistance fighter in World War II belies a truth that is both darker and more personal. This literary history explores, for the first time, the reality of European women’s roles in fighting Nazism. By comparing the resistance literature of French and German authors—both famous and more obscure—this innovative book links the traditional gender expectations for women and the conventions of their everyday lives with their unique forms of resistance. Theirs was an opposition grounded in the ordinary, beyond the sphere of political violence. Women were long regarded as outsiders to combat and politics, with no stake in upholding resistance myths. Women authors therefore freely rendered the personal and moral landscape of the resister’s world in a new vocabulary. They revised standard rhetoric and replaced heroism and bullets with the values of home, human relationships, and candid acknowledgement of the sorrow, fear, and uncertainty of war. A groundbreaking study for students of European history, women’s studies, peace studies, or comparative literature, this volume is also accessible to a general audience interested in the role of women in World War II.

Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.