For over sixty years, Malcolm Boyd has written truthfully about his own journey to fullness. From theologian to civil rights pioneer to coffee house troubadour to gay rights icon, Boyd has courageously and whole-heartedly shown the way to a deeper, more honest examination of all our lives, leading by example. White Crane Books is proud to re-release Boyd's classic spiritual biography and coming out story, Take Off the Masks, for a new generation of readers hungry for its insight, honesty and soulful perception. With a new introduction by Boyd's life partner, Mark Thompson, and a newly added postscript by Rev. Canon Boyd himself.

In 1921 a Pennsylvania preacher hauled his four teen-agers from a prosperous Pennsylvania farm to a bleak and arid spot on the Saskatchewan prairie. The young people had to cope with unexpected economic devastation, October blizzards, the mental illness of their mother, and the inability of their aloof and inept father to attend to anything other than leading a tiny fellowship of Pietist-Anabaptists. This book tells the story of the foursome's enduring mutual support as each struggled to survive emotionally and materially, and tried to retain fragments of the culture they had absorbed in Gettysburg. One of the four, the father of this book's author, decided at the age of thirty to begin an education so he could become a minister. His siblings supported his journey though adult high school, college, and seminary, but Albert Hollinger, Jr., found the urban society of the early 1950s alien. Unable to function in it as a minister, he became a house-painter. Always haunted by his failure to achieve voice, he took comfort from a poem prophesying confident speech in afterlife, "When this mask of flesh is broken." He and his siblings were all determined to be childless for fear of mental illness, but there was one by accident. This book's author eventually learned that he was the result of an unintended pregnancy. All four came together again in their last decades, living near one another in the church-intensive town in Southern California where the author's father had attended college in the 1930s.

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

The original romantic comedy with zombies, following an unusual gentleman by the name of Asmodeus Dusk, and his efforts to survive as the world succumbs to apocalypse. His journey leads him across much of Colorado, through multiple locations in and around the Rocky Mountains, and to a hidden military research base coined YESRAD near Mayday. Amid the stench of mobile corpses, he finds love gazing at him from behind the barrel of a .357 Magnum Is she more than meets the eye? How long will civility hold true? Are there unseen forces at work? What answers, if any, could YESRAD have?

Bestselling author Tanya Huff presents an all-new world of action and intrigue, where survivors of a disastrous war have outlawed all magic in favor of shared knowledge—but all is not as it seems. Ryan Marsan was never meant to be Heir to the Lord Protector. But his brothers are dead, and for the first time in decades, the Black Flame that protects his people is flickering. Ryan must retrieve its fuel from the mage-destroyed wastes of the Broken Lands, leading Scholars with more knowledge, warriors with more experience, and an ambitious cousin with the morals of a cat. His authority rests with the weapon. The only mage-crafted artifice to survive the wars, it responds to the command of the heirs of Marsanport. While its capabilities are mysterious, its brutality is legend. Except Ryan soon discovers some mysteries are really omissions. The weapon is more than it appears and the Broken Lands will reveal secrets, lies, and the horrors of twisted sorcery. Even his companions hide more than he knows. With Marsanport’s future at risk, Ryan can only race forward, hoping to survive, keep his friends alive—and see truth where it is, not where he wants it to be...

The gods and goddesses are dead, killed two hundred years ago. With their destruction the moon split apart, the sun dwindled and the land was devastated. Civilisation has re-emerged from the carnage, but twisted creatures still prowl the savage Wildlands between the city-states. In the skies above the city of Vasini, a falling star, a fragment of the dead moon goddess Serindra, heads to earth. In the Palace district, Dame Vittoria Emerson, darling of the city, has been found dead, lying amongst her own vomit. As Captain Marcus Fox of the Inspectorate hunts the killer, Dr. Elizabeth Reid searches for the remnants of Serindra determined to make sure the poisonous quicksilver it contains is not used. With Vittoria's death threatening to draw the city's political elite into a war of assassins, Fox and Reid must rush to expose the secrets that lie within Vasini before they tear the city-state apart. The Silver Mask is the opening part of The Vasini Chronicles, a series of flintlock-and-alchemy fantasy novels set in the city-state of Vasini.

In post-Franco Spain, a re-shaping of notions of the masculine has been under way for some time. The authors of "Live Flesh" demonstrate how contemporary Spanish films, during this modern period, have contributed to this process. They do so by visualizing the ways in which Spanish men have been abandoning old self images and adopting new ones, and they explain and explore the complexity and diversity of these fresh cinematic creations of masculine identities. The book's point of focus is Spanish films of the democratic period, both popular and auteur, made by directors of national and international prominence, such as Pedro Almodovar, Alejandro Amenabar, Bigas Luna or Julio Medem, as well as films featuring acclaimed actors who have contributed to the construction of contemporary ideas of the masculine in their country, including Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem. Using a fresh theoretical framework, embracing queer and feminist theory and concepts of nation, race and class, each chapter examines key films that represent the male body, highlighting notable elements - young, muscular, homosexual, (dis)abled, foreign and so on - and goes on to focus on recent case studies from the early 1990s to the present. An increasingly transnational Spanish cinema is a most promising field in which to explore questions of how male bodies are represented - and mediated - in film. "Live Flesh" more than fulfils this promise and goes further, to reveal how these representations have intervened in the Spanish cultural imagination.