From the author of The Water Dancers and Good Family, an exquisitely crafted novel, set in Ohio in the decades leading to the Civil War, that illuminates the immigrant experience, the injustice of slavery, and the debts human beings owe to one another, witnessed through the endeavors of one Irish-American family. Cheated out of their family estate in Northern Ireland after the Napoleonic Wars, the Givens family arrives in America in 1819. But in coming to this new land, they have lost nearly everything. Making their way west they settle in Cincinnati, a burgeoning town on the banks of the mighty Ohio River whose rise, like the Givenses’ own, will be fashioned by the colliding forces of Jacksonian populism, religious evangelism, industrial capitalism, and the struggle for emancipation. After losing their mother in childbirth and their father to a riverboat headed for New Orleans, James, Olivia, and Erasmus Givens must fend for themselves. Ambitious James eventually marries into a prosperous family, builds a successful business, and rises in Cincinnati society. Taken by the spirit and wanderlust, Erasmus becomes an itinerant preacher, finding passion and heartbreak as he seeks God. Independent-minded Olivia, seemingly destined for spinsterhood, enters into a surprising partnership and marriage with Silas Orpheus, a local doctor who spurns social mores. When her husband suddenly dies from an infection, Olivia travels to his family home in Kentucky, where she meets his estranged brother and encounters the horrors of slavery firsthand. After abetting the escape of one slave, Olivia is forced to confront the status of a young woman named Tilly, another slave owned by Olivia’s brother-in-law. When her attempt to help Tilly ends in disaster, Olivia tracks down Erasmus, who has begun smuggling runaways across the river—the borderline between freedom and slavery. As the years pass, this family of immigrants initially indifferent to slavery will actively work for its end—performing courageous, often dangerous, occasionally foolhardy acts of moral rectitude that will reverberate through their lives for generations to come.

‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn Hamdis (1055–1133) survives as the best-known figure from four centuries of Arab-Islamic civilisation on the island of Sicily. There he grew up in a society enriched by a century of cultural development but whose unity was threatened by competing warlords. After the Normans invaded, he followed many other Muslims in emigrating, first to North Africa and then to Seville, where he began his career as a court poet. Although he achieved fame and success in his time, Ibn Hamdis was forced to bear witness to sectarian strife among the Muslims of both Sicily and Spain, and the gradual success of the Christian reconquest, including the decline of his beloved homeland. Through his verse, William Granara examines his life and times.

FBI Special Agent Drew Cady is reluctantly drawn into investigating the assassination of a sitting United States Senator. Strangely, the senator's death is linked to a murdered Baltimore junkie with an identical M.O.-- a single stab wound to the heart and a typed eulogy left at the scene. As Agent Cady deals with a professional hit man known only as the Canadian, a breakthrough Alzheimer's drug, a misanthropic hacker, and a Mexican drug cartel, he peels back the layers of deceit and comes to realize that even the reddest of red herrings can bite. And unfortunately for all involved, the killings have just begun.

The Last Word investigates the debased art of eulogy. Through insightful, surprisingly playful readings of famous eulogies (from a scene in Love Actually to Jacques Derrida’s heart-rending essays on the deaths of his peers), Cooper argues against the socially sanctioned desire to avoid thinking about death that results in clichéd memorials, honoring neither the living nor the dead.

Focusing on the role of genre in the formation of dominant conceptions of death and dying, Desirée Henderson examines literary texts and social spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Henderson's study shows that an author's use or rejection of the conventions of memorial literature speaks to their positions within debates about gender, national identity and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the nature of democratic representation, and structures of authorship and literary authority.

Although the number of hymns composed in honour of the most popular member of the Vedic pantheon is nearly one- fourth of the total, a monograph on this important collection of religious poetry has up to now never been published. It has been the author's endeavour to ascertain and examine all relevant facts concerning their structure, the contents and composition of essential constituent parts of the hymns. Further, this study tries to understand how the poets presented their subject-matter and elaborated their themes; to illustrate by numerous (translated) quotations the character of their elements (praise, prayer, and references to sacrifices); to investigate how far these are kept separate; to examine numerous stylistic and phraseological particulars, and the various peculiarities of their versification as well as the syntactic aspects of this poetry.