From the international bestselling and Booker Prize nominated author of The Slap comes a blazingly brilliant new novel. Winner of the 2006 Age Fiction Prize Winner of the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award Part long-forgotten myth, part meditation on the violence and tragedy of contemporary Europe, Dead Europe is an unsettling story about blood lust and blood revenge; a novel of blazing brilliance from the acclaimed author of The Slap. Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father's stories, the Europe at the centre of civilization and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalized contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. In the mountain village in the Balkans where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.

The Strange Death of Europe is the internationally bestselling account of a continent and a culture caught in the act of suicide, now updated with new material taking in developments since it was first published to huge acclaim. These include rapid changes in the dynamics of global politics, world leadership and terror attacks across Europe. Douglas Murray travels across Europe to examine first-hand how mass immigration, cultivated self-distrust and delusion have contributed to a continent in the grips of its own demise. From the shores of Lampedusa to migrant camps in Greece, from Cologne to London, he looks critically at the factors that have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their alteration as a society. Murray's "tremendous and shattering" book (The Times) addresses the disappointing failures of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt, uncovering the malaise at the very heart of the European culture. His conclusion is bleak, but the predictions not irrevocable. As Murray argues, this may be our last chance to change the outcome, before it's too late.

Explores the variety of bonds that are formed between writers and the figure of the dead lover

Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the middle ages. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland and Spain. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

This volume of essays provides a comprehensive treatment of a very significant component of the societies of late medieval and early modern Europe: the dead. It argues that to contemporaries the 'placing' of the dead, in physical, spiritual and social terms, was a vitally important exercise, and one which often involved conflict and complex negotiation. The contributions range widely geographically, from Scotland to Transylvania, and address a spectrum of themes: attitudes towards the corpse, patterns of burial, forms of commemoration, the treatment of dead infants, the nature of the afterlife and ghosts. Individually the essays help to illuminate several current historiographical concerns: the significance of the Black Death, the impact of the protestant and catholic Reformations, and interactions between 'elite' and 'popular' culture. Collectively, by exploring the social and cultural meanings of attitudes towards the dead, they provide insight into the way these past societies understood themselves.

Death was a constant, visible presence in medieval and renaissance Europe. Yet, the acknowledgement of death did not necessarily amount to an acceptance of its finality. Whether they were commoners, clergy, aristocrats, or kings, the dead continued to function literally as integrated members of their communities long after they were laid to rest in their graves. From stories of revenants bringing pleas from Purgatory to the living, to the practical uses and regulation of burial space; from the tradition of the ars moriendi, to the depiction of death on the stage; and from the making of martyrs, to funerals for the rich and poor, this volume examines how communities dealt with their dead as continual, albeit non-living members. Contributors are Jill Clements, Libby Escobedo, Hilary Fox, Sonsoles Garcia, Stephen Gordon, Melissa Herman, Mary Leech, Nikki Malain, Kathryn Maud, Justin Noetzel, Anthony Perron, Martina Saltamacchia, Thea Tomaini, Wendy Turner, and Christina Welch

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.