This extravagant novel marks the English-language debut of one of France's most exciting and controversial writers. At the center is a mysterious excavation site in southwest France, where the skull of a 500,000-year-old man has been discovered. Simon, a journalist assigned to do a story on the cave, is a voluptuary keenly responsive to his surroundings, finding an erotic patina over everything he sees, hears, touches, imagines.

Aglow from a distance was the Pearly Gate. The Pearly Gate was a mile long. Armed Cherubs stood guard by the holy gate. They were three thousand warrior-angels in number. A male Archangel, whose name was Ironodum, was their leader. His Deputy, a female Cherub, was an esteemed heavenly messenger with a Deputy-Arch attached to her title. And her name was Gateagu. Based on her meritorious valor and steadfast loyalty, she was rapidly elevated from a cherub to a seraph, and then to the Deputy Archangel. The King gave them their names, meant to reflect their serious responsibilities as the leaders of the Gate Guards. Seven roads made their way from the wide gate to both the Holy Shrine and the Most-Esteemed Thrones.

A beautiful, atmospheric novel set in the heat of Crete from the author of the highly acclaimed THE HOUSE OF DUST AND DREAMS. It is the late 1960s and after her strict English boarding school, Angel is delighted to be back on Crete, the island she loves. She and her friend Chrissi are planning to spend the long summer days as they've always done before, hanging out together, playing pranks on their unsuspecting neighbours and generally running wild on the mountainside. But when tragedy strikes at the heart of Angel's family, she and Chrissi resolve to run away together. For two girls on the brink of womanhood, the turmoil that is Greece at that time makes it a dangerous place to be. As Angel falls in love, tragedy strikes a second time... Following the success of THE HOUSE OF DUST AND DREAMS, Brenda Reid draws us back to Crete in this delightful coming of age story.

Twenty years ago, in England, author Richard Leviton "discovered the planet." Following quite specific guidance, he began a long process that amounted to an apprenticeship. "My mentors dispatched me to various specific locations in the Somerset landscape, and at all hours of the night and day. I sat on hills and valleys and rocks under sunlight, moonlight, rain, snow, and fog, and had visions. I started to see another landscape behind the apparent landscape. It was an apparitional landscape with stars, planets, galaxies, angels, spirits of Nature, mythic deities, divinity." As time went on, he found himself talking with angels, visiting celestial cities, and following gnomes. He came to understand that at one level we are the planet, and that both we and it have an intimate relationship with our galaxy. "I found myself living inside the myths of the world as if they were expert scripts for real-life inner adventures. I never once thought I was crazy. Why should I? Quite the opposite. I believed I was finally getting grounded in something real. But it would take me twenty years to make sense of it. That sense is embodied in The Emerald Modem." The Emerald Modem includes: direct correspondences between human chakras and the Earth's energy features--and the galactic originalstables listing locations of sacred sites around the planet where you may experience this relationshipexplanations of world myths, which provide clues to this unsuspected visionary world around us This is the first book to synthesize all the fragments of geomantic perception (sacred sites, energy points, vertexes, etc.) into a global interactive model that ties human consciousness directly to it. Leviton describes 85 subtle features in the planetary landscape, places you can go for mystical experiences. They are features of the Earth's energy body, almost all invisible to conventional sight. But psychic cognition can be trained, and you can usefully interact with any of these types of sites today without seeing what you're doing. Your intent to interact for the benefit of yourself and the planet is all that's required. Just as modems dial us into the Internet, so the features of the Earth's energy body described in The Emerald Modem help us get online with the galaxy. You can learn to visit Grail Castles, experience a Mount Olympus, or walk through the stars in a landscape zodiac--and you can learn enough to become confident that you're not traveling alone.

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.