The law of succession rests on a single brute fact: you can't take it with you. The stock of wealth that turns over as people die is staggeringly large. In the United States alone, some $41 trillion will pass from the dead to the living in the first half of the 21st century. But the social impact of inheritance is more than a matter of money; it is also a matter of what money buys and brings about. Law and custom allow people many ways to pass on their property. As Friedman's enlightening social history reveals, a decline in formal rules, the ascendancy of will substitutes over classic wills, social changes like the rise of the family of affection, changing ideas of acceptable heirs, and the potential disappearance of the estate tax all play a large role in the balance of wealth. Dead Hands uncovers the tremendous social and legal importance of this rite of passage, and how it reflects changing values and priorities in American families and society.

Dead Hands traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions, the author situates this familiar gothic convention in its rich literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction.

A young man rushes to reach the bedside of his dying father, but arrives too late. His younger brother was present at the death, but his attitude is strangely ambiguous, and the elder brother becomes suspicious. The intentions of the dead man's mistress are also unclear. The mourners become increasingly consumed by feverish imagining, building a powerfully tense atmosphere as their characters start to disintegrate. This new play by international dramatist, poet and theorist, Howard Barker, toured in a production by The Wrestling School theatre company in 2005.

"From the exquisitely odd to the disquietingly familiar ... Six tales - lifting the frayed edges of our multi-textured times to reveal hidden regions rarely seen - where dislocated lives drift, struggle, and try to flee - betwen layers of shifting reality."--Back cover blurb

In this post-apocalyptic horror tale, a team of zombie catchers must determine the fate of a band of survivors they find hiding in an urban wasteland. The world is dead, devoured by a plague of reanimated corpses. Cahz and his squad of veteran soldiers are tasked with flying into abandoned cities and retrieving zombies for scientific study. Deep in infected territory, hundreds of miles from their support vessel, the ever-present dangers weigh heavily on Cahz’s mind as he shepherds his team to make quick, clean extractions. Then the unbelievable happens. After years of encountering nothing but the undead, the team discovers a handful of disheveled survivors in a fortified warehouse with dwindling supplies. Surrounded by hordes of ravenous corpses, Cahz is faced with the terrible responsibility of determining the five passengers who will escape in the helicopter. While those left stranded must continue to fight off the infected and starvation long enough to be rescued. Praise for Remains of the Dead “Absolutely superb.” —Joe McKinney, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Dead City and the Deadlands series “Believable characters trapped in a nightmare scenario—Remains of the Dead is a breathless, high-octane zombie thriller. [McKinnon has] written another great book here.” —David Moody, author of Hater and Dog Blood

I left the United States to find inner peace. Instead, I find myself confronting a malicious ghost. Astyr Salt is a spiritual and emotional empath who moved to England with the intent to forget about a traumatic, supernatural event that occurred during her freshman year of college. However, when she takes a spiritual cleansing assignment in a haunted country home in Essex, she is isolated with all her own pent-up emotions. These emotions energize the ghosts inhabiting the country home, helping them draw their own tragedies to the surface. Searching for the truth, Astyr is forced to relive the past. And the deeper she dives into the country home’s horrific history, the more the intertwined memories place her in the path of an evil and demented predator. A blend of contemporary fantasy, horror, and mystery, Bly is inspired by Henry James’s classic novella, The Turn of the Screw.