The pressure of being a super – especially a teen super – can get to anyone, as Jim (aka Kid Sensation) has witnessed firsthand. Now he wonders if he himself might be succumbing to the strain in some way, as he can’t shake the feeling that he is now being watched by some new stalker. Moreover, despite his wide slate of powers, he hasn’t been able to discover to a single clue to substantiate the existence of this potential new enemy, making him wonder if it’s all in his head. Looking forward to a few days of R&R and hanging out with his friends, Jim’s downtime is interrupted by the unsettling news that Alpha Prime, the world’s greatest superhero (and Jim’s father), is missing. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Jim finds his world rocked by an even more ominous revelation: his deranged half-brother, Paramount, has escaped from confinement in a maximum security installation. In the course of investigating these events and trying to ascertain what connection, if any, there is between them, Jim becomes privy to information concerning a potent alien device capable of laying waste to the entire planet. But he’s not the only one - an enigmatic villain wants the alien technology for his own purposes, and it’s up to Jim to find a way to stop him before the world pays the ultimate price. teen, young adult, science fiction, fantasy, coming of age, superhero, paranormal, magic

Why was the story of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent so important to medieval literary culture? Eric Jager argues that during the Middle Ages the story of the Fall was incorporated into a comprehensive myth about language. Drawing on a wide range of texts, Jager shows how patristic and medieval authors used the Fall to confront practical and theoretical problems in many areas of life and thought—including education, hermeneutics, rhetoric, feudal politics, and gender relations. Jager explores the Fall's meaning for clergy and laity, nobles and commoners, men and women.Among the works Jager discusses are texts by Ambrose, Augustine, the early Christian poet Avitus, and scholastic authors; Old English biblical epics; Middle English spiritual writings; French courtesy books; and the poetry of Dante and Chaucer. Examples from the visual arts are included as well. Jager links medieval interpretations of the Fall to underlying cultural anxieties about the ambiguity of the sign, the instability of oral tradition, the pleasure of the text, and the many rhetorical guises of the tempter's voice. He also assesses the modern and postmodern legacy of the Fall, showing how this myth continues to embody central ideas concerning language.The Tempter's Voice will be essential reading for scholars and students in such fields as medieval studies, literary theory, gender theory, comparative literature, cultural history, and the history of religion.

"Military science fiction [concentrating] on the psychology and politics of societies in conflict." ---Analog, on The Confederated Worlds series The Confederated Worlds implanted in his brain the skills to make him a soldier. He had to learn for himself how to survive interstellar war. Tomas Neumann seeks escape from his backwater planet and overbearing mother, and a mentor to replace his long-dead father. "Taking the shilling"---enlisting in the Confederated Worlds military---promises both. But despite the soldier's skills implanted in his brain, combat against fellow humans, especially ones who should have welcomed him as a liberator, threaten to destroy him, in body and in spirit. Grieving for lost comrades, demoralized by harrowing combat, can Tomas learn what he needs to survive? Because soon, with the fates of thousands of his fellow soldiers in the balance, he will face his war's ultimate challenge.

In early modern Catholic Europe and its colonies priests frequently developed close relationships with pious women, serving as their spiritual directors during their lives, and their biographers after their deaths. In this richly illustrated book, Jodi Bilinkoff explores the ways in which clerics related to those female penitents whom they determined were spiritually gifted, and how they conveyed the live stories of these women to readers. The resulting popular literatures of hagiography and spiritual autobiography produced hundreds of texts designed to establish models of behavior for the Catholic faithful in the period between the advent of printing and the beginning of the modern age. Bilinkoff finds that confessional relations and the texts that document them reveal much about gender and social values. She uses life narratives, primarily from Spain, but also from France, Italy, Portugal, Spanish America, and French Canada, to examine the ways in which clerics presented female penitents as exemplary, and how they constructed their own identities around their interactions with exceptional women. These multilayered texts, she suggests, offer compelling accounts of individuals caught up in the pursuit of holiness, and provide a key to understanding the resilience of Catholic culture in an age of religious change and conflict.

Bloodline, One Drop Rules the World, is the fi rst book in a powerful series which tells the story of the Denson sisters, four sisters growing up in the South who are abandoned by their parents and left in the hands of a God-fearing grandmother they never knew existed. This novel, a powerful drama, will make you cry, laugh, grieve, yearn, learn and feel the redeeming power of forgiveness as you follow the lives of all four sisters, who endure the perils of betrayal, abandonment and hardship when they are forced to learn of their true heritage. This novel is phenomenal. You will not be able to put it down. You will never be the same after embarking upon a journey which will introduce you to the powerful grace of God! Bloodline is a remarkable story and a breath of fresh air for a generation of younger people who have chosen to walk a path of forgiveness and redemption.

The object of this book is to provide a running commentary on the Book of Revelation, elucidating its meaning. Other introductory and technical considerations are subordinated to this main quest. Though a scholarly work, it is written in a manner free from technicalities so as to make it useful to the general reader. It was written with the hope that a simple treatise on Revelation's meaning would help clergy and others who often have to deal with people who take it in a false and literal sense. When the Revelation was originally written it was naturally accepted as an account of current events and of events "shortly to come to pass"; that is how it describes itself (Rev 1:1, 3; 22:6, 10), and that is how it was naturally taken. Unfortunately, the key to its meaning was soon lost, and its mystical symbolism was taken as literal description. When it reflects events of history, it is current events that it reflects. The Revelation represents great principles working themselves out in actual history. The book is a literary unity stamped throughout by the mark of a great genius. It is one of the loftiest mystical poems the world has produced. Revelation insists that certain events of worldwide importance are coming immediately, following the same general lines as Christ's Olivet Discourse, which spoke to events of which the Lord himself declared: "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Matt 24:34).

The Book of Revelation has fired the imaginations of theologians, preachers, artists, and ordinary Christians across the centuries. The resulting number of commentaries on the book is enormous, and most studies can only touch upon, at most, a representative sample of this vast literature. As a consequence, many focus largely on the interpretation of the Apocalypse only within specific periods, such as the patristic period or during the Reformation. One result of this severe limitation given the vast literary corpus is how historical interpretations in critical commentaries of the Book of Revelations tend to prioritize authors from the modern period. In The Book of Revelation and Its Interpreters: Short Studies and an Annotated Bibliography, editors Richard Tresley and Ian Boxall fill a significant gap in the scholarly literature. At its heart is an extensive annotated bibliography, covering commentaries on the book up to 1700, including most of the early illuminated Apocalypses. Supporting the presentation of this survey of the historical interpretations of the Book of Revelation is an extended overview of Revelation’s often-colorful reception history by Christopher Rowland, together with a number of short studies on various aspects of the book. These include discussions of specific commentators, such as Sean Michael Ryan’s look at Tyconius and Francis X. Gumerlock exploration of Chromatius of Aquileia, alongside a more general treatment of Revelation’s impact on the figure of John of Patmos in an essay by Ian Boxall and the visual reception of Revelation in Natasha O’Hear’s article. The Book of Revelation and Its Interpreters provides a valuable bibliographical resource for those working in the field of Biblical Studies, history of Christianity, eschatology and apocalyptic studies. The accompanying essays orient the authors recorded in the bibliography within a larger context, offering specific examples of the Apocalypse’s capacity to speak in fresh and often surprising ways to diverse audiences throughout history.