Digging the Vein's unnamed narrator has a problem: He has a burgeoning drug habit and a wife he's only known for two days, but no job, no money, and no way out. As the narrator's life crumbles, the pills, booze, and problems multiply until he hits on a brilliant solution: heroin. Soon the narrator is associating with a cabal of street freaks. Just as the comedy is piling up, things go sour, making Digging the Vein a brutal look at a self-destructed, marginal life.

In the Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart, Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, draws from her remarkable teaching experience to help readers reach out into ever-broadening creative horizons. As in The Artist's Way, she combines eloquent essays with playful and imaginative experiential exercises to make The Vein of Gold an extraordinary book of learning-through-doing. Inspiring essays on the creative process and more than one hundred engaging and energizing tasks involve the reader in "inner play," leading to authentic growth, renewal, and healing.

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

I may be the villain of the story, but at least I get a leading role. Evil is a term thrown around history and literature as if it's something so easily definable. A concept to fight against. Evil doesn’t exist. Neither does ‘good.’ Vampires do, though. I just happen to be one. I’ve cruised through the centuries managing to avoid all the wars, supernatural and human, but still going to all the best parties. I would say I avoided bloodshed, but it’s kind of part of the whole ‘vampire’ thing. I’ve lived on the fringes of a society that considered cruelty and sadism favorable character traits for almost five hundred years. Now I'm in the middle of a war that might just put my nonbeating heart in a lot of danger. Battles, I can handle. The impossible attraction between me and the vampire slayer, not to mention the penetrating gaze of the king of our race, on the other hand? I might not get out undead.

"Ellen Glasgow considered Vein of Iron, published in 1935, to be her best work. "No novel has ever meant quite so much to me," she wrote a friend. The critics agreed; the book was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and outsold all but one other work of fiction in the year of its publication." "Opening in the years just before the First World War and laid in the Valley of Virginia, the book traces the experience of a family with four generations of strong women. Faced with a crisis when the bread-winner, a philosopher-minister, is defrocked for his unorthodox views, the women provide the "vein of iron" which carries the family through removal to Richmond (Queensboro in the book), through war and depression until the final return to the mountains."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Darkness isn't one shade, sweetheart." Three centuries ago, Molly Darling's ancestors signed a contract in blood-daemon blood-to protect themselves from harm. On the eve she turns nineteen, Molly leaves for her birthday party against her parent's wishes, sick of their warnings about her "betrothal to a demon." Except that she's very much betrothed, and he's very much a demon-one who's only agreed to the nuptials to use Molly's ancient daemon powers. Brash, arrogant, and built like a Greek god, Tensley Knight keeps showing up to save Molly from otherworldly attacks, only to insult her a moment later. As Molly learns more about the demon world, she realizes two things: that her family's safety depends on a successful marriage, while any chance of freedom she'll ever have calls for Tensley's demise. Yet sometimes Molly spots a tortured soul beyond those liquid grey eyes, and there's no denying the way her skin tingles when Tensley touches it. In Vein of Love, safety requires sacrifice, foe becomes lover, and one must decide whether to kiss...or to kill.