Netta Fornario always held a special fascination for me and it bothers me that people only remember her for how she died, and not for the Mysteries she served, and sadly her life's work has now faded to a few surviving pieces under the name of Mac Tyler. Knowing that she loved a fairy opera called The Immortal Hour, I wanted to create for her, her own story to star in. Even as this book encompasses two separate stories, one about Netta in the past and another about a writer in the future trying to unravel this enigma, it is a tale about what happens when worlds gently touch or violently collide together, such as cultural and/or religious oppositions, emotion and reason, real and unreal, fact and fiction, love and hate, life and death, and ultimately how we seek to reconcile or transcend them. As what happens any time I ever try to write about an Initiate, and she was a Co-Mason as well as a member of Alpha et Omega, the story is never what I set out to write and it becomes something more. This book is unusual because it seeks to hide fact in fiction and fiction in fact, and only in the interplay from one world to the other do we sometimes find what we are seeking.

For a thirteen-year period, the reclusive Scottish writer Fiona Macleod enthralled the Victorian reading public with a deluge of stories, novels, poems and essays drawn from the wildly romantic Highland and Island landscape. Although it was later revealed that these works had issued from the pen of William Sharp, it was clear that Fiona Macleod was more than a pseudonym; to Sharp she was very much an autonomous entity. What's more, the wealth of previously unknown and unheard of myths, names, traditions and beliefs in her writings, while shone through a Celtic prism, show every sign of having emanated from the Realm of Faery. Steve Blamires presents a ground-breaking assessment of the Faery lore within Fiona Macleod's literary output as part of his ongoing study of this enigmatic writer. Building on the established groundwork of his biography of Sharp, The Little Book of the Great Enchantment, he explores the mythology and traditions of Faery, their symbolic and magical significance, and the devices employed by Fiona in the transmission of Faery teachings and inspirations. Using examples from Fiona's rich and resonant body of work, his detailed interpretation will enable the reader to tease out the Faery gems that are still to be found woven into the lines and verse of her writings.

The English composer Rutland Boughton (1878-1960) is remembered as the composer of The Immortal Hour, the opera which enjoyed the greatest number of consecutive performances the world has ever known. But his contribution to modern music goes beyond this famous piece. In 1914 he established his own Beyreuth at Glastonbury where, against all odds, he ran a series of increasingly ambitious festivals until, in 1927, he allowed his socialist principles to undermine everything he had achieved. His unconventional views on life and marriage earned him notoriety in his lifetime and made him one of England's most colorful and courageous composers. Michael Hurd has radically revised and significantly expanded his 1962 biography of Boughton. With the help of his friends and colleagues, including a hilarious series from George Bernard Shaw, he charts the career of the most significant and innovative British opera composer of his day. Catalogues of Boughton's compositions and literary works, together with complete cast lists of the Glastonbury Festivals, 62 music examples, and numerous photographs, complete this definitive account of an extraordinary man and his music.

Travis Hugh Culley came to Chicago to work and live as an artist. He knew he'd have to struggle, but he found that his struggle meant more than hard work and a taste for poverty. In becoming a bike messenger, he found a sense of community and fulfillment and a brotherhood of like-minded individualists. He rode like a postmodern cowboy across the city's landscape; he passed like a shadow through its soaring office towers; he soared like a falcon through the roaring chaos of the multilayered streets of Chicago. He became an invisible man in society, yet at the same time its most intimate observer. In one of the most dangerous jobs on dry land, he found freedom. In The Immortal Class, Culley takes us in-side the heart and soul of an urban icon the bicycle messenger. In describing his own history and those of his peers, he evokes a classic American maverick, deeply woven into the fabric of society from the pits of squalor to the highest reaches of power and privilege yet always resolutely, exuberantly outside. And he celebrates a culture that eschews the motorized vehicle: the cult of human power. The Immortal Class, Culley's vivid evocation of a bicycle messenger's experience and philosophy, sheds a compelling light on the way human beings relate to one another and to the cities we inhabit. Travis Hugh Culley's voice is at once earthy and soaringly poetic a Gen-X Tom Joad at hyperspeed. The Immortal Class is a unique personal and political narrative of a cyclist's life on the street.

Who was Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved'? After Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, a love letter in his writing was discovered, addressed only to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Decades later, Countess Therese Brunsvik claims to have been the composer’s lost love. Yet is she concealing a tragic secret? Who is the one person who deserves to know the truth? Becoming Beethoven’s pupils in 1799, Therese and her sister Josephine followed his struggles against the onset of deafness, Viennese society’s flamboyance, privilege and hypocrisy and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. While Therese sought liberation, Josephine found the odds stacked against even the most unquenchable of passions...

A magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers—a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn. On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife—that “the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.