Strange Heaven is tearfully hilarious, as funny and appalling as reality. Bridget Murphy, almost eighteen, has come to Halifax from industrial Cape Breton, had her baby, and given it up for adoption. Transferred to the psych ward of the children's hospital, she's incarcerated with five seriously disturbed teenagers and a flock of wan children. She's depressed, they say. Apathetic. Bridget is a bit detached, but Four South is peaceful compared with the chaos back home. Her grandmother, Margaret P., raves and prays from her bed, banging the wall with her bedpan. Bridget's parents, Robert and Joan, take care of her and her mentally handicapped son, Rollie. Joan tries to keep the lid on, but she's no match for Robert's wild profanity, Margaret's dementia, and Rollie's efforts to join the fray. Uncle Albert, a kind man who saves his eloquent wrath for outsiders, springs Bridget from the hospital for Christmas. But home is more chaotic than ever, and she's sick of her boozy friends and the whining of the baby's father. She had half planned to hibernate at home till kingdom come, but it's become like a lurid movie she saw eons ago and she's forgotten the plot. Her future may be unclear, but she has a good idea of the direction it won't take.

Offering a glimpse into how the Incarnation placed Mary at the center of salvation history, an investigation into the mystery surrounding the Virgin Mary explores the many meanings of her life and legacy for all people. $15,000 ad/promo.

This haunting debut novel invites us to explore the boundaries between beliefs, desires, obsessions, and madness. Karen Salyer McElmurray's story is set in Mining Hollow, Kentucky, where we meet Ruth Blue Wallen; her husband, Earl; and their son, Andrew. Ruth longs to know God, the only escape she can find in a world that has shown her spiritual, emotional, and sensual defeat. Earl yearns for the music-making of his past, now lost as he makes a living as a coal miner. Andrew desires the affection of a boyhood friend, an expression of love considered sinful in rural Kentucky. And with the divinely inspired yet tormenting help of his mother, in a world of deeply and tragically conflicting desires, Andrew must choose to live or die--he must choose an uncertain love or nothing at all.

From the critically acclaimed author of In Darkling Wood comes a spine-tingling novel inspired by Frankenstein with more than a hint of mystery and suspense. One stormy June evening, five friends meet at Villa Diodati, the summer home of Lord Byron. After dinner is served, they challenge each other to tell ghost stories that will freeze the blood. But one of the guests--Mary Shelley--is stuck for a story to share. Then there's an unexpected knock at the front door. Collapsed on the doorstep is a girl with strange scars on her face. She has traveled a long way with her own tale to tell, and now they all must listen. Hers is no ordinary ghost story, though. What starts as a simple tale of village life soon turns to tragedy and the darkest, most dangerous of secrets. Sometimes the truth is far more terrifying than fiction . . . and the consequences are even more devastating. Praise for Emma Carroll's In Darkling Wood: "A haunting and poignant exploration of family, loss, and redemption." --Booklist, Starred "A tale brimming with emotion and atmosphere. . . . [In Darkling Wood] is absorbing and well written. Hand this to readers who enjoy fantasy, fairy tales, and magical realism."--School Library Journal, Starred "Magic and mystery adds appeal to this already compelling family drama...and Carroll manages to wrap all of the threads into a wholly satisfying ending."--Bulletin

A trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a young woman to evaluate the safety of a boy who may have been taken against his will to a New Mexico backwoods settlement, where the mercenaries encounter paranoia, mistrust, and insanity in the shadow of a monolithic idol.

Five original stories where strange changes occur, from a boy and a cat changing places and a young man learning the price of selfishness to an invisible princess finding herself.

An unknown masterpiece of visionary art—as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different—reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians Somewhere in Europe—we don't know where—around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks—nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear—shapes—even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint. Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs. This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources—Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete—always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment. What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.