Apparently, this freaky phenomenon of stepping into someone else’s life—and their body!—has a name: Temp Lifer. Thanks to my dead grandmother, it’s happened again. So now I’m hungover and gazing in the mirror at ... my boyfriend’s sister. Grammy, help!

Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

"As far as I'm concerned, Richard S. Prather was the King of the paperback P.I writers of the 60s. Shell Scott should be in the Top Ten of any readers list of favorite private eyes." --Robert J. Randisi For four decades, Richard S. Prather published over 40 works of detective fiction, most featuring his clever, cad-about-town hero, Shell Scott. Known for their arched humor, punchy dialogue, and sunny Southern California locale, the Shell Scott books represent one of the greatest private eye collections ever produced. This case couldn't have been more up Shell Scott's alley. Twelve naked, luscious beauties, one for each month of the year, were Scott's next assignment. They were called the "Wow" pinup girls and, man, were they wow! Scott's mission: find four freckles. Four freckles located on one of these tomatoes' tushies. That was the only clue Scott had to help him solve this murder. But not to worry, it's the perfect mixture of business and pleasure for Shell Scott, P.I. Honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Private Eye Writers of America! "(Shell Scott is) as amusingly blithe a figure as the field has seen since the Saint." --Anthony Boucher Dance with the Dead is the 21st book in the Shell Scott Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Mechele is young, attractive, and looking to cash in on her aesthetic assets when she moves from New Orleans to Alaska in 1994 to earn money for college tuition. Her charms ensnare the affections of three men, and the combined effects of jealously, lust, and greed take a deadly turn in this true crime story. Before a murder in the woods shatters her contented life, Mechele works as an exotic dancer at the Alaska Bush Company, where she spends her days pleasing a procession of hard-working men. John, Scott, and Kent are simultaneously smitten with Mechele, and offer affection in the form of lavish gifts and ultimately engagement rings. While the three men begin their affairs on the same path, violent murder blasts apart their parallel lives. One of the trio is shot in the back; another is accused of the murder. Dead Man's Dancer follows this murder case from 1996 throughout Mechele's tumultuous trial in 2006 that becomes a nationwide sensation. Shocking in its detailed portrayal of murder and convoluted love affairs, Dead Man's Dancer excites horror in readers that lingers far after the last page is turned.

This is the story of Barbara Ann Radnofsky's campaign to win the 2006 Texas race for the U.S. Senate seat held by senior senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Barbara Ann is the first woman in history to win the Texas Democratic Party's nomination for U.S. Senate.

Elina Gertsman's multifaceted study introduces readers to the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death, an extraordinary subject that first emerged in western European art and literature in the late medieval era. Conceived from the start as an inherently public image, simultaneously intensely personal and widely accessible, the medieval Dance of Death proclaimed the inevitability of death and declared the futility of human ambition. Gertsman inquires into the theological, socio-historic, literary, and artistic contexts of the Dance of Death, exploring it as a site of interaction between text, image, and beholder. Pulling together a wide variety of sources and drawing attention to those images that have slipped through the cracks of the art historical canon, Gertsman examines the visual, textual, aural, pastoral, and performative discourses that informed the creation and reception of the Dance of Death, and proposes different modes of viewing for several paintings, each of which invited the beholder to participate in an active, kinesthetic experience.