Reader beware--you choose the scare! GIVE YOURSELF GOOSEBUMPS! Late one night you and your friends visit the old fairgrounds. They're putting up rides and booths for the annual carnival. But this year things look really different. Really odd. Really scary. The place is lit up by a hundred fiery torches. And spooky music is coming from the main tent. Then you meeting Big Al, the creepy carnival manager. He's invited you in to test some of the rides. Will you brave the terrifying Supersonic Space Coaster? Risk the horrors of the Reptile Petting Zoo? Slice through the oily waters of Booger Bog? Or confront the evil Snake Lady? The choice is yours in this scary GOOSEBUMPS adventure that's packed with over 20 super-spooky endings!

This book provides an exploration of the historical conditions that gradually defined subordinating symbols and conflictual values in social relations between the sexes. It reveals how snakes and the gelid eyes of Medusa—the archetypical snake-woman—have reverberated across the visual arts and written sources throughout the ages in association with negative emotions: fear, anger, scorn and shame. The outcomes and implications of the disturbing correlation between the dangerous female gaze, the malignitas of the snake and the lethal power of menstruation that have been woven through the fabric of the Western imaginary are analysed here. This analysis reveals an intriguing history of female reptilian hybrids—from the pleasing Minoan snake goddesses to the depressing Gorgon, Echidna, Amazons, Eve, Melusine, Basilisk, Poison-Damsel, Catoblepas and Sadako/Samara—and gives the reader an opportunity to explore things that never happened but have always been.

A picture book, focusing on the Asia Paciflic region.

Science fiction, fantasy, comics, romance, genre movies, games all drain into the Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful articles about disreputable art-media and genres that are a little embarrassing. Irredeemable. Worthy of Note, but rolling like errant pennies back into the gutter. The Cultural Gutter is dangerous because we have a philosophy. We try to balance enthusiasm with clear-eyed, honest engagement with the material and with our readers. This book expands on our mission with 10 articles each from science fiction/fantasy editor James Schellenberg, comics editor and publisher Carol Borden, romance editor Chris Szego, screen editor Ian Driscoll and founding editor and former games editor Jim Munroe.

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

"[This book] comprises images sourced from the darkest recesses of the artist's extensive archive. The project continues Strand's decades-long engagement with the scrapbooks, magazines and photographs that she has drawn together since her mid-teens. In this iteration of Strand's ongoing research and reflection, women and girls are pictured holding, playing with and gazing fondly at snakes. Key to understanding the intention of the imagery is the inclusion of original accompanying text attached to the reverse, revealing stories of the bizarre and the erotic, alongside Myth and Credo."--Publisher's website.

Jane Levitsky is a bright light in the field of 19th-century Russian literature. Seizing her ticket to academic superstardom, she sets in motion a chain of events that will come perilously close to unraveling both her marriage and her career.