Taut free verse tells the little-known story of the first contraband camp of the Civil War—seen by some historians as the "beginning of the end of slavery in America." One night in 1861, three escaped slaves made their way from the Confederate line to a Union-held fort. The runaways were declared "contraband of war" and granted protection. As word spread, thousands of runaway slaves poured into the fort, seeking their freedom. These "contrabands" made a home for themselves, building the first African American community in the country. In 1863, they bore witness to one of the first readings of the Emancipation Proclamation in the South—beneath the sheltering branches of the tree now known as Emancipation Oak.

This early collection of eight short stories and a novella is vintage Wendt. Stories convey the unease of traditional island community caught up in the rapid changes of the modern world. Wendt writes with enviable directness and with deep feeling: comedy and tragedy are often hard to distinguish as his characters struggle to come to terms with their changing world.

Have you ever desired to escape and live simply? Have you ever fantasized about moving to a small town? Having spent half of my forty-three year career as a high school principal and volunteer pastor in small towns and counties with less than five thousand people, I learned that bliss was superficial. No matter how positive, people resisted change, especially with a newcomer serving as the agent of change. Kinfolk mattered more than issues. To survive, newcomers walked a fine line and had to learn who controlled and who was related to whom. Relationships mattered more than issues. Good versus evil became obvious. In Freedom's Tree, Rock Creek Valley resembled Canaanite cities with heavily fortified bulwarks. Interstate highway construction had decimated the economy and school reorganization altered valley culture. Perceived as invaders, newcomers arrived in Rock Creek at God's direction, while a murderer escaped detection and residents presumed another's guilt.

From Russia comes this ironic, satirical, multi-layered, modern pop-art parable by Vassily Aksyonov. Your Murderer is a richly grotesque hodgepodge of different linguistic levels that defies all rules and mixes a powerful cocktail out of traditional slogans, invented obscentities, foreign words and phrases, terminology from sports and heavy drinking, and pure nonsense. Daniel Gerould is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theater and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. He is the Editor of Slavic and East European Performance and of harwood academic publishers's Polish and East European Theater Archive series. Your Murderer comes from Russia and is an ironic, satirical, multi-layered, modern pop-art parable - richly grotesque and on different linguistic levels. that defies all rules, mixing a powerful cocktail out of traditional slogans, invented obscentities, foreign words and phrases, terminology from sports and heavy drinking, and pure nonsense.

ONLY THROUGH TERROR CAN A SOUL TRULY APPRECIATE LIFE In the wake of her victory over the evil goddess Eifa and the Senators of Vitus, Cecilia is ready to focus on rebuilding, but where there should be peace and light, she finds uncertainty and dread. The Prophecy is incomplete. With dark forces growing in the south, the war to rid the world of evil has only just begun. Cecilia and Amalardh are forced onto separate journeys. While Amalardh travels to faraway lands in search of answers, Cecilia must discern who to trust and how to keep the world safe from a threat beyond anything she has faced before. The Cecilia Series is an epic love story between a headstrong young woman who refuses to accept the status quo of her fractured world and an emotionally bankrupt assassin struggling to find his humanity.

Albert Wendt is the leading writer and exponent of Pacific literature. His work is consistently different in style, politically challenging, and ranges across essays, plays, poems, stories and novels, two of which have been filmed. This book is the first full-length study of his work. There is an introduction to Pacific literature as a whole and Wendt's Samoan background. Chapters offer readings of all Wendt's major texts in chronological sequence, relating them to his essays, to literary movements of the time and to key motifs from Polynesian culture. There is an extensive bibliography of works by and about Wendt.

Price of Freedom was written to honor those who gave their lives protecting the freedoms we hold so dear. That they may be remembered for the sacrifices they made so that we of today might live in a freedom-loving country.