A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Pranab Chakraborty was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the shores of Central Square. Soon he was one of the family. From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a staggeringly beautiful and precise story about a Bengali family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the impossibilities of love, and the unanticipated pleasures and complications of life in America. “Hell-Heaven” is Jhumpa Lahiri’s ode to the intimate secrets of closest kin, from the acclaimed collection Unaccustomed Earth. An eBook short.

Over half of Americans believe in a literal heaven, in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. Ehrman shows that eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament, and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught. He recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. Ehrman shows that competing views were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. -- adapted from jacket

A riveting portrait of a rural Pennsylvania town at the center of the fracking controversy Shale gas extraction—commonly known as fracking—is often portrayed as an energy revolution that will transform the American economy and geopolitics. But in greater Williamsport, Pennsylvania, fracking is personal. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet—whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet—is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend "up to heaven and down to hell," which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America’s ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors’ liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all.

Takarabe Toriko’s autobiographical novel Heaven and Hell is a beautiful, chilling account of her childhood in Manchukuo, the puppet state established by the Japanese in northeast China in 1932. As seen through the eyes of a precocious young girl named Masuko, the frontier town of Jiamusi and its inhabitants are by turns enchanting, bemusing, and horrifying. Takarabe skillfully captures Masuko’s voice with language that savors Manchukuo’s lush forests and vast terrain, but violence and murder are ever present, as much a part of the scenery as the grand Sungari River. Masuko recounts the “Heaven” of her early life in Jiamusi, a place so cold in winter her joints freeze as she walks to school. She accepts this world, with its gentle ways and terrible brutality, because it is the only home she has known. Masuko feels at ease wandering among the street vendors hawking their hot and sticky steamed cakes or watching the cook slaughter ducks for dinner, and takes pleasure in following the routines of her Chinese, Russian, and Japanese neighbors. Her world is shattered in 1945, when she and her family must flee their adopted home and struggle, along with other Japanese settlers, to return to Japan. This second half of the book, the “Hell” of refugee life, is heartbreaking and disturbing, yet described with ferocious honesty.

"One of the most inventive and prolific cartoonists working today."—Vulture In the past ten years, Michael DeForge has released eleven books. While his style and approach have evolved, he has never wavered from taut character studies and incisive social commentary with a focus on humor. He has deeply probed subjects like identity, gentrification, fame, and sexual desire. In “No Hell,” an angel’s tour of the five tiers of heaven reveals her obsession with a haunting infidelity. In “Raising,” a couple uses an app to see what their unborn child would look like. Of course, what begins as a simple face-melding experiment becomes a nightmare of too-much-information where the young couple is forced to confront their terrible choices. “Recommended for You” is an anxious retelling of our narrator’s favorite TV show—a Purge-like societal collapse drama—as a reflection of our desire for meaning in pop culture. Each of these stories shows the inner turmoil of an ordinary person coming to grips with a world vastly different than their initial perception of it. The humor is searing and the emotional weight lingers long after the story ends. Heaven No Hell collects DeForge’s best work yet. His ability to dig into a subject and break it down with beautiful drawings and sharp writing makes him one of the finest short story writers of the past decade, in comics or beyond. Heaven No Hell is always funny, sometimes sad, and continuously innovative in its deconstruction of society.

An old soul trips through its many lives and incarnations trying to escape the present. When we are born, we still retain the memories of all the lives we lived as well as the afterlife. This remembering slowly fades as we become more and more immersed and trapped in this construct that we call reality or life. This is the story, told in poetry, connecting narrative and photographs of an old soul beginning its current incarnation. Its the experience of an infinite consciousness struggling to hang on to the memories and many identities of countless lifetimes. This consciousness pieces the different events of his/her former lives and tries to hang on to who he or she really is before forgetting and playing the latest game of life.

It has forever been said that we are ruled by our emotions, but this today is truer than ever. Yet, the emotions are utterly neglected by our system of education, leading to millions of mis-lived lives. This book proposes to redress the balance, exploring over 30 emotions and drawing some powerful and astonishing conclusions along the way.

We live in a world of choices. Despite all of the choices and philosophies strewn about the landscape of our day, there remains ONE important choice for every individual. The choice is between two kingdoms -- the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness, the kingdom of God and the dominion of Satan.Dr. Bill Bright presents the most compelling contrast of the reality of Heaven and Hell. So what do you choose? Your earthly destiny and your eternal destination are determined by what you choose to believe.

Will heaven be boring? How can a good and loving God send people to hell? Is there such a place as purgatory? If so, why is it necessary, if we're saved by grace? Questions about the afterlife abound. Given what is at stake, they are the most important questions we will ever consider. Recent years have seen a surge of Christian books written by people claiming to have received a glimpse of the afterlife, and numerous books, films, and TV shows have apocalyptic or postapocalyptic themes. Jerry Walls, a dynamic writer and expert on the afterlife, distills his academic writing on heaven, hell, and purgatory to offer clear biblical, theological, and philosophical grounding for thinking about these issues. He provides an ecumenical account of purgatory that is compatible with Protestant theology and defends the doctrine of eternal hell. Walls shows that the Christian vision of the afterlife illumines the deepest and most important issues of our lives, changing the way we think about happiness, personal identity, morality, and the very meaning of life.