This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zürn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body--its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds--animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales. Unica Zürn (1916-70) was born in Grünewald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration camps--a revelation which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of her life. After meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris, where she became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body of drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970.

In the midst of the American Civil War, Rita Goldstein, a beautiful, young cornetist, is abandoned in Cairo, Illinois by her faithless fianc Butch Lassiter, but she is a fierce and determined young woman who is not easily rejected and not easily discouraged. She sets out at once to bring him back and follows The Army of the Cumberland across Tennessee to find him. She is pursued by her heart-broken father, Ira, who wants to bring her home again. On their separate journeys, Ira and Rita are caught up in the hatred and destructiveness of two huge armies, one from the North and one from the South. However, both Ira and Rita find consolation in the power of music.

An autobiographical novel that reads more like an exorcism than a novel. In terse and lucid prose, Zurn traces the roots to her obsessions: the exotic father whom she idolized, the impure mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described 'the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood.' Dark Spring is the story of a girls's simultaneous initiation to sexuality and madness, revealing a dark side of the 'mad love' so championed and romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists.

Since its first publication in 1970, A Survey of Israel's History has established itself as a popular and useful text in Bible colleges and seminaries. This revision by David O'Brien, which brings A Survey of Israel's History up to date, is certain to add to its value and continue its popularity. A chapter on the Intertestamental Period has been added. Numerous line-maps, charts, and diagrams help to clarity details. An extensive chronological chart provides an overall summary of names and dates. Authoritative, thoroughly biblical, factually sound, and movingly human -- A Survey of Israel's History will prove enormously helpful to the student of the Bible, and to anyone in search of a definitive history of the chosen people.