Two old women were boarders in the home of R. Anthony Joseph when he was a child in New Orleans, Lousiana. He later learned that they were witches. Some of the things he saw as a child he thought were normal. The occult, psychic development, aura reading, tarot cards, magick and life on the fringes of reality give us a glimpse into this San Jose businessman's world.

Meant as a companion piece for those already familiar with Johnson's music and myth - journey through Texas with Shane Ford as he leads the way to honor the legend, Blind Willie Johnson. Included is new research and pictures, never-before-seen.

The poignant story of Blind Willie Johnson--the legendary Texas musician whose song "Dark Was the Night" was included on the Voyager I space probe's Golden Record Willie Johnson was born in 1897, and from the beginning he loved to sing--and play his cigar box guitar. But his childhood was interrupted when he lost his mother and his sight. How does a blind boy make his way in the world? Fortunately for Willie, the music saved him and brought him back into the light. His powerful voice, combined with the wailing of his slide guitar, moved people. Willie made a name for himself performing on street corners all over Texas. And one day he hit it big when he got a record deal and his songs were played on the radio. Then in 1977, his song--"Dark Was the Night"--was chosen to light up the darkness when it was launched into space on the Voyager I space probe's famous Golden Record. His immortal song was selected for the way it expresses the loneliness humans all feel, while reminding us we're not alone.

Biography of a blind man who made light of his disability, who exploded every stereotype about blues musicians.

The late Victorians had an insatiable appetite for the macabre and sensational: stories of murder and suspense, ghosts, the supernatural and the inexplicable were the stuff of life to them. The two writers in this volume well represent the last decade of the nineteenth century, and are of interest in themselves as well as for their contribution to the chilling of the Victorian spine. Mrs. Alfred Baldwin attempted as a child to contact her dead sister through a seance, and took to writing when stricken by a mysterious illness six weeks after marriage. She was also the mother of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Lettice Galbraith is herself no less mysterious than the stories she wrote. She appeared on the literary scene in 1893, published a novel and two collections of stories in that year, a further story ("The Blue Room") in 1897, and then nothing more. Readers of 'The Empty Picture Frame', 'The Case of Sir Nigel Otterburne', 'The Trainer's Ghost' and 'The Seance Room' will recognise the Victorian spirit at its finest.

“Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from”​ (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the voices in Benjamin Hale’s The Fat Artist and Other Stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life. “A steadily growing…talent” (Kirkus Reviews), Hale’s prize-winning fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling, earning accolades from writers such as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation, “the audacious imagination evident in Hale’s acclaimed debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, shines again in this…provocative collection that takes a unique view of the human condition” (Booklist).

"Blues guitarist Blind Willie Johnson led a hardscrabble life, but in 1977, NASA's Voyager spacecrafts were launched, carrying a golden record to introduce planet Earth to the cosmos, and one of his songs became the defining anthem"--]cProvided by publisher.

A comprehensive book on Bob Dylan's song lyrics, this volume arranges the more than 300 songs by the date they were actually written rather than when they appeared on albums.

Kevin Canty is a master of the short story, a writer whose work has been compared to that of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, but always with the understanding that Canty's is strikingly new, cool, and real. Now in Honeymoon, after two novels, Kevin Canty returns to short fiction, his first collection since his debut A Stranger in this World, a book that was hailed as "Superb: These tautly structured stories breathe with sharp, distilled intelligence." Honeymoon is a book about love, about lovers and would-be lovers exploring unlikely alliances, all of them toeing a certain eventful edge, a decision between rational restraint and something altogether different. In the title story, a man leaves his lover's wedding with the bride's ex-girlfriend; in "Flipper" a young escapee from "fat camp" discovers a different kind of hunger while enjoying a pregnant teen's gifts of forbidden chocolate; in "Aquarium," a thirty-eight-year old woman who claims to "follow the straight and narrow" tries to resist seducing her fifteen-year-old nephew again. Revealing the hidden longings and quirky needs of both men and women with a tough sensitivity and deep, sometimes biting humor, Honeymoon presents a masterful writer purely at home in his form, yet continuing to push himself and his stories to their limits with enthusiasm and daring.