A collection of three new novellas by Canadian Speculative Fiction author Randy McCharles. The collection includes: The Necromancer Candle Cassidy’s family has a secret. An ancient, ugly candle passed down through the generations until it is has been all but forgotten. But now someone is looking for it, or so Cassidy thinks. A victim of terminal brain cancer, Cassidy no longer trusts what she sees. But real or imagined, the upheaval of Cassidy’s life is moving quickly toward an end where Cassidy’ greatest wish is to die on her own terms. But is that long enough to solve the mystery of the necromancer candle? Full House When Jonas loses his job on the same day a neighbor is murdered, he finds his days at home more challenging yet rewarding than he ever imagined. Against a backdrop of healing family relationships and expounding upon life with his poker buddies, Jonas finds himself pressured to solve the murder. But the more he learns, the more Jonas sees that this is no simple murder, but a mystery that has spanned centuries. Merlin’s Silver Joan gets more than she bargained for when she buys an expensive tea service at auction to shake up a lackluster marriage. It seems the tea service is sought by black magicians who will stop at nothing to get it, with only a peculiar little man named Odds Bodkins standing in their way. But who can Joan trust? The mysterious voice on the phone offering to buy the tea service? Her best friend Sally who offers to take it off her hands? Or Odds Bodkins, whose designs grow more unfathomable by the hour?

"This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay. Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China."

Good Press presents to you this meticulously edited Alexander Hamilton collection. Contents: Novels: Adam Bede The Mill on the Floss Silas Marner Romola Felix Holt, the Radical Middlemarch Daniel Deronda Short Stories: Scenes of Clerical Life The Lifted Veil Brother Jacob Poetry: The Spanish Gypsy The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems: The Legend of Jubal Agatha Armgart How Lisa Loved the King A Minor Prophet Brother and Sister Stradivarius A College Breakfast-Party Two Lovers Self and Life Sweet Endings Come and Go, Love The Death of Moses Arion O May I Join the Choir Invisible Other Poems: Count that Day Lost Farewell On Being Called a Saint Sonnet Question and Answer Mid my Gold-Brown Curls Mid the Rich Store As Tu Va la Lune se Lever In A London Drawing Room Arms! To Arms! Ex Oriente Lux In the South Will Ladislaw's Song Erinna I Grant you Ample Leave Mordecai's Hebrew Verses Making Life Worth While Essays: Impressions of Theophrastus Such Three Months in Weimar Carlyle's Life of Sterling Woman in France: Madame de Sablé Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming German Wit: Henry Heine The Natural History of German Life Silly Novels by Lady Novelists Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young The Influence of Rationalism The Grammar of Ornament Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt George Forster Margaret Fuller How to Avoid Disappointment The Wisdom of the Child A Little Fable with a Great Moral Hints on Snubbing From the Note-Book of an Eccentric Leaves from a Note-Book Translations: The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals – Biography