Jay Desmarteaux raised a whole lot of hell in New Jersey after he was released from prison after 25 years for the murder of a rapist bully at his school. Now he's on the run in his home state of Louisiana, where he traces his roots to an evil family tree that's grown large and lush, watered with the blood of the innocent. Jay's hunt for his parents will take him to the doors of stately plantation homes built by the enslaved, through the deadly and gorgeous heart of the bayou, to his greatest nightmare-a cell in the infamous state prison, where his only escape is the wildest show in the South-the Angola Prison Rodeo. Scarred and shell-shocked, Jay Desmarteaux faces his deadliest adversaries yet: the demons within himself and the brutality wrought by his privileged ancestors. The Boy from County Hell is coming home... Praise for THE BOY FROM COUNTY HELL: "Thomas Pluck's The Boy From County Hell is raucous and rollicking, just like The Pogues song it adapts its name from. There are echoes of James Lee Burke, Barry Gifford, and Joe R. Lansdale, but Pluck's book burns hot and bright with its own indomitable punk spirit. Joyous, wild, dark fun." -William Boyle, author of City of Margins, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, The Lonely Witness, and Gravesend "Blistering, violent, and written with Technicolor flourishes that are Pluck's unmistakable signature. The Boy from County Hell is a hell of a book." -Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase "Pluck has crafted a hard-charging thriller that stomps the pedal from page one and never lets up. Crackling with exciting characters and language that pops off the page, The Boy From County Hell is a mad tale of rage, retribution, and no small helping of heart and soul. I loved it." -Bill Loehfelm, author of the Maureen Coughlin series "Wow. The Boy from County Hell by Thomas Pluck is as wild as a night in a cage with an amorous monkey. So smart and tense and relentless. Pluck decides on his premise, and stays true to it until the rowdy end, but the real star here is his control of style, both hardboiled and poetic at the same time. Impressed." -Joe R. Lansdale "The Boy from County Hell is a harrowing and at times deeply philosophical journey through the heart of rage. Thomas Pluck is our trustworthy tour guide through that undiscovered country. With deft prose and an eye towards redemption and revelation Pluck accomplishes an amazing feat. We find ourselves feeling sympathy for the boy from county Hell" -SA. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of Razorblade Tears

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanjing and launched six weeks of carnage that would become known as the Rape of Nanjing. In addition to the deaths of Chinese POWs and civilians, tens of thousands of women were raped, tortured, and killed by Japanese soldiers. In this traumatic environment, both native and foreign-born inhabitants of Nanjing struggled to carry on with their lives. This volume collects the diaries and correspondence of Minnie Vautrin, a farmgirl from Illinois who had dedicated herself to the education of Chinese women at Ginling College in Nanjing. Faced with the impending Japanese attack, she turned the school into a sanctuary for ten thousand women and girls. Vautrin's firsthand accounts of daily life in Nanjing and the intensifying threat of Japanese invasion reveal the courage of the occupants under siege--Chinese nationals as well as Western missionaries, teachers, surgeons and business people--and the personal costs of violence in wartime. Thanks to Vautrin's painstaking effort in keeping a day-to-day account, present-day readers are able to examine this episode of history at close range through her eyes. With detailed maps, photographs, and carefully researched in-depth annotations, Terror in Minnie Vautrin's Nanjing: Diaries and Correspondence, 1937-38 presents a comprehensive and detailed daily account of the events and of life during the horror-stricken days within the city walls and in particular on the Ginling campus. Through chronologically arranged diaries, letters, reports, documents, and telegrams, Vautrin bears witness to those terrible events and to the magnitude of trauma that the Nanjing Massacre exacted on the populace.

Read what Bloom had to say on the world's great novelists including Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemmingway and more.

"When the Japanese soldiers ordered Vautrin to leave the campus, she replied: "This is my home. I cannot leave." Facing down the bloodstained bayonets constantly waved in her face, Vautrin shielded the desperate Chinese who sought asylum behind the gates of the college. Vautrin exhausted herself defying the Japanese army and caring for the refugees after the siege ended in March 1938.".

Editors' Preface Dan Edelstein and Bettina Lerner Mythomania and Modernity Part I: From Nation to Republic Bettina Lerner Michelet, Mythologue Leon Sachs Teaching to the Choir: The Republican Schoolteacher and the Sanctity of Secularism Tyler Stovall The Myth of the Liberatory Republic and the Political Culture of Freedom in Imperial France Part II: Reading Revolution" " Marie-Helene Huet The Face of Disaster Dan Edelstein The Modernization of Myth: From Balzac to Sorel Edward Berenson Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand Part III: Mythical Selves Goran Blix Heroic Genesis in the "Memorial de Sainte-Helene "Natacha Allet Myth and Legend in Antonin Artaud's Theater Jean-Marie Apostolides Herge and the Myth of the Superchild Lawrence Kritzman De Gaulle's Memoires: Self-Portraiture and the Rhetoric of the Nation

Reproduction of the original: Vautrin by Honore de Balzac