Is life really worth it? She always wonders if other people come to the same conclusion as her. Probably not. But why does it matter anyway? It isn't like life has grand plans for her. It isn't like she is missing out on anything. She can just continue living in fictional worlds and figure the rest out later. That is if life doesn't catch up to her first. Because just when she is about to give up, a mysterious person appears and reminds her of things she has long forgotten. Her story is one of suffering and hope in a world where all hope seems lost sometimes. It is a story of falling and rising again. It is a story of beauty, of strength, and of never giving up. A story we all need to hear sometimes.

John C. Maxwell, #1 New York Times bestselling author, helps readers take the first steps to living a life that matters inIntentional Living. We all have a longing to be significant. We want to make a contribution, to be a part of something noble and purposeful. But many people wrongly believe significance is unattainable. They worry that it's too big for them to achieve. That they have to have an amazing idea, be a certain age, have a lot of money, or be powerful or famous to make a real difference. The good news is that none of those things is necessary for you to achieve significance and create a lasting legacy. The only thing you need to achieve significance is to be intentional. And to do that, all you need to do is start. You can't make an impact sitting still and doing nothing. Every major accomplishment that's ever been achieved started with a first step. Sometimes it's hard; other times it's easy, but no matter what, you have to do it if you want to get anywhere in life. In Intentional Living, John Maxwell will help you take that first step, and the ones that follow, on your personal path through a life that matters.

In a quiet English town, a college student lives on the margins of life, their world confined by the walls of chronic illnesses, and the whispers of a life they long to live. They seek refuge under the Willow tree, and within the dusty corners of the old college library, where the stories of others become their only escape. But one day, they stumble upon something unexpected, something that feels different from everything they have always known. It's a discovery that connects them to a world they never imagined - a world where they are not as alone as they once believed. This story is filled with sadness and glimpses of hope. Will they surrender to the shadows, or rewrite their story and discover the courage to live on their terms? Join them in this moving tale that proves that even in the face of a lifelong illness, one can find strength, solace, and the will to live.

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

Unlike most screenwriting guides that generally analyze several aspects of screenwriting, Constructing Dialogue is devoted to a more analytical treatment of certain individual scenes and how those scenes were constructed to be the most highly dramatic vis á vis their dialogue. In the art of screenwriting, one cannot separate how the scene is constructed from how the dialogue is written. They are completely interwoven. Each chapter deals with how a particular screenwriter approached dialogue relative to that particular scene's construction. From Citizen Kane to The Fisher King the storylines have changed, but the techniques used to construct scene and dialogue have fundamentally remained the same. The author maintains that there are four optimum requirements that each scene needs in order to be successful: maintaining scenic integrity; advancing the storyline, developing character, and eliciting conflict and engaging emotionally. Comparing the original script and viewing the final movie, the student is able to see what exactly was being accomplished to make both the scene and the dialogue work effectively.

A young family encountered a terrible misfortune during the travel - their beloved daughter fell sick! The small city of Anapa cannot boast of an abundance of hospitals, so the couple entrusted the health of their child to the only available facility. However, the parents encountered tremendous concerns towards their decision from locals. In the sunny lands of frowning mountains, the lasts are the ones to dictate the rules and beliefs. And only an approach shapes the difference between the two.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”