What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.

'The Little White Horse was my favourite childhood book. I absolutely adored it. It had a cracking plot. It was scary and romantic in parts and had a feisty heroine.' - JK Rowling - The Bookseller In 1842, thirteen-year-old orphan Maria Merryweather travels to her family's ancestral home, Moonacre Manor, to live with her uncle Sir Benjamin. She immediately feels right at home with her kind and funny uncle and meets a wonderful set of new friends — but she quickly learns that beneath all this beauty and comfort, a past feud haunts Moonacre Manor and it’s her destiny to right the wrongs of her ancestors and restore the peace to Moonacre Valley. A beautifully written fantasy story filled with magic, a Moon Princess, and a mysterious white horse. Little White Horse and the delightful heroine, Maria Merryweather, are sure to be loved by all children.

Twelve-year-old Hayder Hennessey wants to be a good son for his struggling mother and have a new start at a normal life, especially after the deaths of his father and baby sister. But when his mother moves them from Dallas to the small town of Black Knot, Oklahoma, Hayder figures out pretty fast things are a little bit different here. A little bit off. Enter Cora Corbucci, Hayder’s new next-door neighbor. The sole survivor of a grisly mass murder, Cora has been seeing and hearing a lot of unsettling things lately. Soon, Hayder begins to see and hear things too—unreal things that can’t be disbelieved. Meanwhile the citizens of the Knot drift through their lives, blissfully unaware of the slow poisoning of their souls. Of their blood. Hayder and Cora join forces with Juston Matheson, the town sheriff, to unearth the source of these horrors, exhuming dreadful secrets about their hometown better off having stayed forgotten. An ancient family of witches, the Fulcis, seek to open a door into another realm, a door hidden away in the dark forests and hollers around Black Knot, allowing the awakening of a sleeping horror who seeks to bring about hell on earth. Only, the gang learns these witches may not be the only evil they must face to survive. For in the town of Black Knot, where every day feels like Halloween, of eternal twilight, Hayder and his friends are about to go to war. “The low-down, greasy tone of the narration...will appeal to bizarro and hardcore horror fans. For those readers, there’s plenty to love” —Publishers Weekly

The Dirty South examines the shifting significances of the South as a constructed, fantasized region in the American psyche, particularly its frequent association with tropes of dirt that emphasize soil, garbage, trash, grit, litter, mud, swamp water, slime, and pollution. Beginning with iconic works from the 1970s such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, James A. Crank traces the image of a “dirty” South into the twenty-first century to explore the social, political, and psychological effects of the region’s hold on the imaginations of southerners and nonsoutherners alike. With a focus on media forms through which southern identity gets articulated and questioned—including horror movies, Swamp Thing comics, and popular music by artists such as Waylon Jennings and OutKast—The Dirty South probes the sustained fascination with southern dirtiness while reflecting on its causes and consequences since the end of the civil rights era. Highlighting the period from 1970 to 2020, during which the South began to represent several new possible identities for the nation as a whole and for the area itself, Crank considers the ways that southerners have used depictions of dirt to create and police boundaries and to contest those boundaries. Each chapter pairs prominent literary or cultural texts from the 1970s with more contemporary works, such as Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, which recycle similar investments or, critically, challenge the inherent whiteness of the earlier images. By historicizing fantasies of the region and connecting them to the first decades of the twenty-first century, The Dirty South reveals that notions about southern dirtiness proliferate not because they lend authenticity or relevancy to the U.S. South, but because they aid so conspicuously in the zombified work of tethering investors (real and imagined) to a graveyard of ideas.

AP Exams – check SAT test – check College Application – check Date the wrong guy and ruin everything you’ve spent your whole life working for– check Super-achiever Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe has never had room to be anything less than perfect. But her quest for perfection is derailed when her boyfriend leaks secret pictures of her to the entire school—pictures no one was ever meant to see. Making matters worse, her parents might be getting divorced and now her perfect family is falling apart. For the first time, Vivi feels like a complete and utter failure. Then she gets a job working at the community pool, where she meets a new circle of friends who know nothing about her past. That includes Evan, a gorgeous and intriguing guy who makes her want to do something she never thought she’d do again—trust. For the first time in her life, Vivi realizes she can finally be whoever she wants. But who is that? While she tries to figure it out, she learns something they never covered in her AP courses: that it’s okay to be less than perfect, because it’s our imperfections that make us who we are. E. Katherine Kottaras once again captures what it means to be a teenager in The Best Possible Answer.

While staying with her Aunt Lydia at Cattingham Hall Maddie Johnson conducts a seance with her friend Sam. They make contact with Anna, a young girl who may be the ghost who haunts the Hall, and Maddie forms a deep bond with her despite the hundreds of years that separate them. Anna warns Maddie that the witches who trapped her long ago are hunting for new souls, and Maddie fears they might be after her because she can communicate with Anna across time. But although the witches attack Maddie it is not her they want. It is someone who is a natural witch. Who will help Lydia defend her beloved home from the evil witches who are using their deadly power and dark arts to attack the Hall? Can Anna finally be laid to rest in time? And how does the secret room help Lydia save the Hall from the clutches of her scheming brother-in-law?