When her best friend goes missing at the same time four murders occur during a brutal Los Angeles heat wave, shattered sometime-actress Nikki Easton is compelled to uncover corruption between Hollywood and the highest levels of government.

How do poets use language to render the transcendent, often dizzyingly inexpressible nature of the divine? In an age of secularism, does spirituality have a place in modern American poetry? In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O’Leary reads a diverse set of writers to argue for the existence and importance of religious poetry in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. He traces a poetic genealogy that begins with Whitman and Dickinson and continues in the work of contemporary writers to illuminate an often obscured but still central spiritual impulse that has shaped the production and imagination of American poetry. O’Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of the modernist, late-modernist, and postmodern poets Robinson Jeffers, Frank Samperi, and Robert Duncan, as well as the contemporary poets Joseph Donahue, Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Pam Rehm, and Lissa Wolsak. Examining how these poets drew on a variety of traditions, including Catholicism, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, and mysticism, the book considers how modern and contemporary poets have articulated the spiritual in their work. O’Leary also argues that an anxiety of misunderstanding exists in the study and writing of poetry between secular and religious impulses and that the religious nature of poets’ works is too often marginalized or misunderstood. Examining the works of a specific poet in each chapter, O’Leary reveals their complexity and offers a defense of the value and meaning of religious poetry against the grain of a secular society.

A discussion of Philip Sidney as a creator of fictions, a critic, and a poet, who adopted a variety of personae to teach his readers how they could fool themselves into forgetting who they were, both in the context of the psychic inner world and in the outer realm of social position. Included in this study are Sidney's court entertainments now known as The Lady of May, the Defence of Leicester, Defence of Poetry, and the Arcadias.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. He was a German writer and statesman. His works include: four novels; epic and lyric poetry; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; and treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. This collection includes the following: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1794) Elective Affinities (1809) Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1821) The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) A Tale (1797) The Good Women (1797) The Wayward Lover (1768) The Fellow Culprits (1769) Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) Clavigo (1774) Egmont (1788) The Brother and Sister (1776) Stella (1776) Iphigenia in Tauris (1779) Torquato Tasso (1790) The Natural Daughter (1803) Faust: Part One (1808) Faust: Part Two (1832) The Poems of Goethe Reynard the Fox (1794) The Siege of Mainz (1793) Theory of Colours (1810) Introduction to ‘The Propyläen’ (1798) Winckelmann and His Age (1805) The Travel Writing Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy (1816) The Criticism Goethe the Writer by Ralph Waldo Emerson Goethe by C. E. Vaughan Goethe by John Cowper Powys Goethe’s Faust by George Santayana Shakespeare and Goethe by David Masson Goethe’s Theory of Colors by John Tyndall Extracts of Correspondence by Sir Walter Scott The Autobiography Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life (1811) The Biographies Conversations with Goethe (1836) by Johann Peter Eckermann The Life of Goethe by Calvin Thomas (1886) Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe by James Sime (1888)

The first memoir from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Interview with a Vampire—a "very affecting story of a well-known prodigal’s return ... [a] vivid, engaging tale of the journey of a soul into light” (Chicago Sun-Times). Anne Rice was raised in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. Here, she describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life. She used her novels—beginning with Interview with a Vampire—to wrestle with otherworldly themes while in her own life, she experienced both loss (the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice) and joys (the birth of her son, Christopher). And she writes about how, finally, after years of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and re-embracing of her faith that lie behind her most recent novels about the life of Christ.