Possessed by a mysterious darkness and driven by jealousy, Jacob commandeers a city ran by Drones (humanoid robots) to annihilate his brother’s city of Sunshine Valley and the magic-wielding Freaks who live there. With age, their abilities deteriorate, forcing the children ages six through eighteen to stand as Sunshine Valley’s last line of defense. As the shadow of war looms, the children soon realize that war is far bloodier than they imagined.

"Tranfusion examines the medical discourse that surrounded the real nineteenth-century practice of human-to-human blood transfusion alongside literary works that exploited the operation's sentimental, satirical, sensational, and gothic potentials. This study explores transfusion's role in now-canonical works such as H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Bram Stoker's Dracula as well as in an array of lesser-known short stories and novels." --

Fears and stories about an underground religion devoted to Satan, which demands and carries out child sacrifice, appeared in the United States in the late twentieth century and became the subject of media reports supported by some mental health professionals. Examining these modern fantasies leads us back to ancient stories which in some cases believers consider the height of religious devotion. Horrifying ideas about human sacrifice, child sacrifice, and the offering to the gods of a beloved only son by his father appear repeatedly in Western traditions, starting with the Greeks and the Hebrews. In Flesh and Blood: Interrogating Freud on Human Sacrifice, Real and Imagined, Beit-Hallahmi focuses on rituals of violence tied to religion, both imagined and real. The main focus of this work is the meaning of blood and ritual killing in the history of religion. The book examines the encounter with the idea of child sacrifice in the context of human hopes for salvation.

In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, Hematologies broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the authors offer new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a "bloodscape of difference": different sovereignties; different proportionalities; and different temporalities. These entryways allow the authors to explore the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.

“A richly woven story laced with unforgettable characters….A beautiful book.” —Therese Walsh, author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy “The Life You’ve Imagined is a terrific novel about love and loss, letting go and holding on. A book to share with family and friends—I loved it.” —Melissa Senate, author of The Secret of Joy From Kristina Riggle, author of the brilliant debut Real Life & Liars, comes The Life You’ve Imagined, an astonishing new novel about love, loss, life, and hope. It’s the story of four former high school friends who are forced to examine what happened to their high school dreams which are now at odds with their grown-up reality.

Explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

Saymour Lincoln's story gives us a fascinating look into the world of a young man trying to survive the tumultuous streets of Ghent in Belgium. A talented skateboarder with a lust for smoking weed, he made the mistake of 'frying his brains" by drinking liquid LSD. Arrested after running naked through the streets, he woke up naked in a police cell and was then sent for psychiatrist treatment. Unfortunately, pictures went viral on Facebook and he had to deal with the fallout; achieving widespread notoriety as "that crazy naked guy". He battles to save his reputation while studying for a degree on Social Work; while dealing with a life fuelled by Marijuana and the challenges facing a celebrated skateboarder and observer of human nature. Will Saymour make it in the end?