To escape the wrath of a deceived husband, Miguel Saavedra, a poet of sorts, abandons the good-time existential vacuum of MiamiÍs uprooted younger Cubans for New York. There he is caught in a web of plots spun by pro- and anti-Castro agents. The surrealistic flow of days and nights which follow lead the protagonist from university lecture hall to transvestite bar, from the arms of a beautiful woman to the dark regions of a basement santerÕa temple. As the barriers between dream and reality, fact and fiction disappear, the ultimate purpose of MiguelÍs life is unveiled before him: Miguel, like St. Michael, must confront the eternal foe: angels and archangels of evil incarnate. Omar TorresÍ Fallen Angels Sing, an English recreation by the author of his novel Apenas un bolero, is a magnificent tour de force that keeps the reader hanging on by a thread through to its unexpected ending.

Hearing the Angels Sing is a wonderfully inspiring book. Peter Sterling, in telling his uplifting story of encountering the angels and being shown his destiny as one of God's harpists, encourages readers to open to the deeper dimensions of life for themselves. There is authentic humility in suggesting that if the author seeks and receives such profound guidance from the angels, anyone can do it. In writing so openly and courageously about his life, Peter demonstrates the commitment required to work with angels as well as the rich spiritual rewards of finding one's true path. In a troubled world, reuniting with the angels is becoming a potent way for people to reconnect and reclaim their spiritual essences. Peter's exquisite Harp Magic provides a portal through which the reality of the angels can be felt and experienced. One of the pleasures of reading his book is following the author's trail of synchronicities and angelic guidance through the challenges, distractions, revelations, and obstacles to emerge as a world-class harpist in service to the angels. It is exhilarating and deeply encouraging to learn how intimately and creatively the angels can interact with our lives if we just let them. Hearing the Angels Sing is a must-read for anyone drawn to the angels, and for those who already know what a salve Peter's music is to the souls of the openhearted and the spiritually minded, the book will yet further deepen your enjoyment of Harp Magic. --Timothy Wyllie Author of Dolphins, ETs & Angels, The Return of the Rebel Angels, and coauthor of Ask Your Angels

Featuring tools and professional guidance on how to draw the dark world of fallen angels, including angel wings, accessories, the angel of death, a good angel and bad angel, a Steampunk angel, and many more!

In this study, Erin Minear explores the fascination of Shakespeare and Milton with the ability of music-heard, imagined, or remembered-to infiltrate language. Such infected language reproduces not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects. Shakespeare's and Milton's understanding of these effects was determined, she argues, by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. They portray music as uncanny and divine, expressive and opaque, promoting associative rather than logical thought processes and unearthing unexpected memories. The title reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the study: the lingering and infectious nature of musical sound; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer's allusions to another. Minear argues that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics. Analyzing Milton's account of Shakespeare's 'warbled notes,' she demonstrates that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean, but nonetheless lingers hauntingly in the mind. Obsessed with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his own, including his father's profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject Shakespeare's form of musical poetics in his own quest to 'join the angel choir.' Offering a new way of looking at the work of two major authors, this study engages and challenges scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern culture.

The Cuban revolution of 1959 initiated a significant exodus, with more than 700,000 Cubans eventually settling in the United States. This community creates a major part of what is now known as the Cuban diaspora. In Cuban-American Literature of Exile, Isabel Alvarez Borland forces the dialogue between literature and history into the open by focusing on narratives that tell the story of the 1959 exodus and its aftermath. Alvarez Borland pulls together a diverse array of Cuban-American voices writing in both English and Spanish--often from contrasting perspectives and approaches--over several generations and waves of immigration. Writers discussed include Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernandez, Achy Obejas, and Cristina Garcia. The author's analysis of their works uncovers a movement from narratives that reflect the personal loss caused by the historical fact of exile, to autobiographical writings that reflect the need to search for a new identity in a new language, to fictions that dramatize the authors' constructed Cuban-American personae. If read collectively, she argues, these sometimes dissimilar texts appear to be in dialogue with one another as they all document a people's quest to reinvent themselves outside their nation of origin. Cuban-American Literature of Exile encourages readers to consider the evolution of Cuban literature in the United States over the last forty years. Alvarez Borland defines a new American literature of Cuban heritage and documents the changing identity of an exiled literature.

A Cuban refugee raised in Miami, Maria Cristina Garcia presents a comprehensive and revealing account of the unprecedented Cuban migration into South Florida since Fidel Castro came to power. Garcia's exploration of the complicated realm of Cuban American identity sets a new standard in social and cultural history.

Milton and Music is the first study to juxtapose John Milton’s poetry on music with later musical adaptations of his work. In Part I: Milton on Music, Seth Herbst shows that writing about music galvanized Milton’s intellectual development towards animist materialism, the belief that everything in the universe—even the human soul—is made of matter. The Milton who emerges is a forward-thinking visionary who leaped past his contemporaries in conceiving music as a material phenomenon that exists simultaneously as sound and metaphor. Part II: Milton in Music follows two daring composers in investigating whether Milton’s visionary concept of music can be realized in actual musical sound. In Samson, an oratorio adaptation of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Handel resists Miltonic music theory, suggesting that music struggles to function as both sound and metaphor. By contrast, the twentieth-century Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki composes an iconoclastic opera of Paradise Lost that develops a soundworld of fractured dissonance in which music acts as both sound and metaphor. Recovering Milton’s own high estimation of music from a critical tradition that has subordinated it to the poet’s political and religious convictions, Herbst reveals Milton as an interdisciplinary thinker and overlooked figure in the study of words and music. Driven by bold claims about the comparative treatment of literature and music, Milton and Music revises our understanding of what makes this canonical poet an intellectual revolutionary.