Christina Powers American Goddess I welcome you to take a fantastic roller coaster ride of raw emotions, as you read the most proclaimed and controversial novel of the twenty first century, Christina Powers American Goddess! This is a fiery, sophisticatedly provocative adult novel which tells the dramatic, heart-felt story of the rise to power of a true American Goddess! You will immediately fall in love with the enchanted starring character, Christina Powers, as you meet a beautiful eight-teen-year old rising movie and pop star, who seems to have it all. Then you will be crushed with her as you watch her evil uncle, the notorious Frank Salerno, destroy this innocent rose of pure beauty with such viciousness, it leaves her shunned by the entire nation. Be prepared to be swept away with tears, laughter, pain, and triumph by this once innocent child, as she vows and works toward her revenge. In her all-consuming drive to destroy her uncle, she becomes the perfect 'black widow', devouring every man and obstacle that gets in her way. Supernaturally chosen by the extraterrestrial alien beings who guide her steps, watch as she schemes her victory over her uncle, through a road of fortune and world-renowned fame. In her drive for revenge, her alien guides force her to become aware of her own true spiritually, as well as the needs of the people and the world around her. As she grows in popularity, this awareness of the pain and suffering of others begins to eat away at her hardened heart, so much so, she finds her passions building to help those less fortunate than herself. Thus, she decides to use her wealth and popularity with her fans to catapult herself as a world advocate for human rights and a cleaner environment. That's when the fire really begins to burn! She uncovers an international plot by a group of united Arab nations, headed by the newly anointed King of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Fehd, and the governments of Russia and China to under-mine the economies of the western world. Their plans include the destruction of the nation of Israel and the economic enslavement of the entire world under the King's oil rich thumb. With this discovery, Christina finds herself fearfully compelled by her extraterrestrial guides and this ruthless world leader's plot, to run for the office of President of the United States of America, in order to stop this madman and save the world! Now please sit back, hold on, and enjoy the adventure, because you are about to be swept away, by the mesmerizing, 'Christina Powers'.

Although Christina Stead is best known for the mid-century masterpiece set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, The Man Who Loved Children, it was not her only work about the America. Five of Christina Stead’s mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality. In this examination of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity. This is the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”, and that Stead’s account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

Deanna Fernie analyzes the significance of sculpture in Hawthorne's fiction through the recurring motif of the fragment in its double guise as ruin and project. Her book casts new light on Hawthorne's memorable ruined and unfinished images, from the rough-hewn figurehead of 'Drowne's Wooden Image' (1844) to the tattered letter 'A' in the unfinished loft of the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the unfinished bust of Donatello in The Marble Faun (1860). Fernie shows how the tension between the formed and unformed enabled Hawthorne to interrogate the origins and the distinctive possibilities of art in America in relation to established European models. At the same time, she suggests that sculpture challenged and provoked Hawthorne's shaping of his own specifically literary art, stimulating him to develop its capacities for expressing irresolution and change. Fernie establishes the intellectual contexts for her study through a discussion of sculpture and fragmentary form as revealed in American, British, and Continental thought. Her book will be an important text not only for American literature scholars but also for anyone interested in British and Continental Romanticism and the intersections of art and literature.

This book studies Native American and Chicano/a writers of the American Southwest as a coherent cultural group with common features and distinct efforts to deal with and to resist the dominant Euro-American culture.

Shamanism can be defined as the practice of initiated shamans who are distinguished by their mastery of a range of altered states of consciousness. Shamanism arises from the actions the shaman takes in non-ordinary reality and the results of those actions in ordinary reality. It is not a religion, yet it demands spiritual discipline and personal sacrifice from the mature shaman who seeks the highest stages of mystical development.

Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident. Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible. He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever he the same...