Cooked Chickens Falling from the Sky is a collection of short, offbeat children's stories, with fine, wonderful illustrations and interesting, unusual tales. From “One-on-One with Mister Tree” to “Nature Has a Funny Way,” these stories should entertain, enlighten and mesmerize all types of children, even the wild, raucous, brazen whippersnappers.

On the night of January 5, in certain areas of southern Tuscany, a costumed, singing troupe of characters visits residents' homes, expecting to be fed and feted. This is the Befanata, a mumming tradition centered in Tuscany, whose main character--the Befana--is a kindly old woman or grandmotherly witch who delivers toys, candies, and gifts. The Befana Is Returning is a deeply researched, deftly insightful presentation of this living tradition that adds a large missing piece to the array of contemporary ethnographic scholarship on mumming.

Dora Toyan fell in love up in the mountains, fell in love with a man named Theodore, a man instrumental in helping her and her family build the New Toyan Ranch and construct it to the exact designs of the Toyan ranch that preceded it by nearly twenty years.

San Francisco crime reporter and investigator Joshua Sloat endures the greatest challenge of his career when San Francisco comes under siege and everyone looks to him to find a way out.

Which path will you choose? Which road will you take? Do you want to be like college students Aileen and John T., who care only for their sexual desires for each other, who betray their friends and sink into a pit of deception and denial with Leila in order to continue their affair, who wander around Reno and Tahoe in a perpetual state of insiduous sin, lust, gambling, sex in the woods, and a little violence. Or like James and Edward who let alcohol and marijauna absorb them. Be careful what you decide to do and make your choices wisely.

Cynical reporter Joshua Sloat accepts an unpaid investigative assignment, a seemingly typical case of a man leaving his wife for someone more glamorous and interesting. With his newspaper job at stake, he follows all leads in the matter of Ana's husband, which takes him from San Francisco to Thailand, Zimbabwe, Russia and Finland. His love to his editor in jeopardy, his money dwindling, ruffians beating the hell out of him because of what he unearths, and implications of multi-national interference and cover-ups cannot force him away from the misery and mystery of a woman named Lisa Larkin.

Watch the man named Steem run away in terror from the prospect of the police capturing him and charging him with murder plus mayhem. See his young lover Jessica C. wait for his return, hoping for romantic days together at the Hotel del Coronado. Then the wretched man named Davito Senner.

With over twenty percent more material, a must for any lover of distinctive words. This entertaining and informative reference features sophisticated and surprising alternatives to common words together with no-fail guides to usage. Avoiding traditional thesauruses’ mundane synonym choices, Peter E. Meltzer puts each word—whether it’s protrepic, apostrophize, iracund, or emulous—in context by using examples from a broad range of contemporary books, periodicals, and newspapers. His new introduction makes the case for why we should widen our vocabulary and use the one right word. This groundbreaking thesaurus remains a unique venture, one that enriches your writing while helping you find the perfect word.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers’ hands is a playful exploration of how people’s desires, fantasies, and emotions shape political events and social phenomena. It highlights the mythical sources of today’s political projects, the power of political imagination, and the function of symbolism in political thought. Eszter Salgó argues that the driving force for the formation of political communities is fantasy – ‘illusions’ in a Winnicottian sense, ‘phantasies’ in a Lacanian sense, ‘phantoms’ as described by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and ‘dreams’ as interpreted by Sándor Ferenczi. She introduces the metaphor of the ‘fantastic family’ as a symbolic representation of political communities, both to reflect on people’s deeply felt desire to find in public life the resolution, love, and wholeness of early childhood, and to unveil the political elite’s readiness to don the mask of the ‘ideal parent’. The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book explores the theories of Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan: the matrimony on the stage of politics between the ‘good-enough mother’ and the Symbolic Father which inaugurates the story of democracy’s ‘fantastic family’. The second part presents the ‘fantastic families’ of selected countries such as Hungary, Italy, and the world community to explain the proliferation of cosmogony projects, and to document the failure of the political elites to offer a satisfactory performance of their maternal and paternal functions. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Politics: Fatherlands in mothers’ hands presents a new way of considering the art of politics, based on the understanding that people perceive reality through imagination and unconscious fantasy. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, and academics from across the disciplines of politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literature, and art.

A vampire ancestor, a five-clawed golden dragon, a Flaming Mirror of Emperor, a Sorrowful God Sword, and a young man in white clothes floating over from Hua Xia, stepping into the underworld with a sword. In this great dark yellow world, laughing at the buddhas of the world, wanting to break the will of heaven to die, to live to the end of time, until the mountains and rivers are reborn, until the universe is cleared, the gods are silent, the sky is clear, the end of cultivation, we cultivators will bear the burden of our hearts! 