This book deals with Christian lament in the late Reformation by exploring the efforts of a talented yet little-known layman to cope with the death of his beloved wife. A work of haunting candor and searching faith, The Pious Meditations furnishes insight into life in the past as well as resources for life in the present.

A loving father explores with honesty and intensity all facets of his grief at the death of his 25-year-old son.

Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author’s poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.

In this volume Robin Parry not only builds on traditional scholarship to interpret the book of Lamentations within its ancient context but also ventures further, exploring how the book can function as Christian Scripture. Parry provides the first systematic attempt to read Lamentations in light of the cross and resurrection. --from publisher description

The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why. The contributors, suggesting new ways of interrogating gendered discourses of genre, identities, and sanctity, offer a complex picture of gender in early modern Italian literature and culture. Read in dialogue with one another, their pieces provide a fascinating survey of currents in gender studies and early modern Italian studies and point to exciting future directions in these fields.

If you have ever experienced a deep sadness over the loss of a close loved one, you will recognize the poems in The Wounds of Grief as snapshots of many of the intense emotions that you felt but perhaps were never quite able to describe in words. Instead of allowing himself to be bullied into following societys schedule to get over it and to move on, Jerry Vornholt has used his poems to warmly recall how many of the very ordinary events that he and his wife took for granted have now become some of his most precious memories. Jerry and his wife, Sharon, frequently referred to themselves as a team throughout the forty-eight years that they had the privilege to be together. Several of the poems in this book focus on his intense desire for that relationship to be continued in heaven.