Mu Chengxue was a freshman at school. She had participated in a school and organized a sketch at a place called Hongcun. The plot of a ghost envoy caused her to break the seal that had been left on her for thousands of years to release the evil spirits.

Samantha Sinclair has had visions her entire life. And for most of her life, she has kept the visions to herself. Until recently. At the beginning of the semester Sam's colleague, Dr. Susan Epstein, went missing. A few days ago, she showed up at the community college where they both work, missing a shoe and half of her face. Sam is the only one who can see Dr. Epstein's decomposing corpse wandering the halls, and it is wreaking havoc on her appetite - and her sleep. She has information that will help the police find Dr. Epstein's killer, but can she trust the detective investigating the disappearance of Dr. Epstein? The visions complicate everything in Sam's life, including her relationships. Finn, the guy she's dating, has secrets of his own. Secrets that could change Sam's life forever.

Wade Whitehouse, divorced, estranged from his young daughter, spends his days as a well-driller, snow-plow operator, and policeman, his nights in a wind-swept trailer park. But when a union boss is killed in an apparent hunting accident near Wade's home, and he is convinced that it is murder, he seizes the event as a chance to right many wrongs—unaware that as he unravels the mystery he himself will become unravelled. Soon his hunger for justice and self-respect become inseparable from a desperate violence.

Witten presents a startling new theory of the Salem Village witch-hunts, which is certain to put this 300-year-old unsettled mystery to rest. Part parable, part star-crossed romance, and part supernatural venture, this is an intuitive human--and inhuman--history spun with a modern twist.

Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal—putting resources, relationships, and even one’s world into jeopardy? A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.

In the old days of town meetings training days town schools and Puritans bells took a more prominent part in public affairs than they do to-day.