Her love died on a battlefield. He carries a torch for a woman he's never met. Can the tragic death of a soldier entwine the souls of two strangers? Colorado, 1920. Josephine Barnes wrote every day to her beloved fiancé battling in the trenches of the Great War. Devastated when he's killed in action, she vows never to marry and buries her grief in the construction of the town's first library. But she's left breathless when she receives a request from a gracious gentleman to visit and return the letters containing her declarations of desire. Philip Baker survived the war but returned home burdened with a distressing secret. Though he knows it's wrong, he can't stop reading through the beautiful sentiments left among his slain comrade's possessions. Plagued by guilt, he's unable to resist connecting with the extraordinary woman who captured his heart with her words. When Josephine invites Philip to join her gregarious family for the holidays, she's torn by her loyalty to a ghost and her growing feelings for the gallant man. And as Philip prepares to risk everything by telling her the truth about her dead fiancé, he fears he could crush Josephine's blossoming happiness forever. Will they break free from their painful pasts to embrace a passion meant to be? The Spinster is the second book in the heartwarming Emerson Pass historical romance series. If you like staunch heroines, emotional backdrops, and sweeping family sagas, then you'll adore Tess Thompson's wholesome tale. Buy The Spinster to read between the lines of destiny today!

From evil vampires to a mysterious pack of wolves, new threats of danger and vengeance test Bella and Edward's romance in the second book of the irresistible Twilight saga. For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is even more dangerous than Bella could ever have imagined. Edward has already rescued Bella from the clutches of one evil vampire, but now, as their daring relationship threatens all that is near and dear to them, they realize their troubles may be just beginning. Bella and Edward face a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy's reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga is well on its way to literary immortality. It's here! #1 bestselling author Stephenie Meyer makes a triumphant return to the world of Twilight with the highly anticipated companion, Midnight Sun: the iconic love story of Bella and Edward told from the vampire's point of view. "People do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there." -- Time "A literary phenomenon." -- The New York Times

The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.

Adorno's magnum opus, in which he summarises his life's thinking on concepts of beauty, the ugly and the sublime.

Der Politiker Aldo Moro wurde 1978 von der terroristischen Organisation "Rote Brigaden" entfuhrt und getotet. Im Verlauf der Ereignisse stilisierten die Medien Moro zum "Staatsmartyrer". Der Band geht der hochaktuellen Frage nach, welche Rolle das ursprunglich christliche Konzept des Martyrers in der Spannung zwischen demokratischem Staat und Terrorismus spielt. Was leistet dieser Begriff aus der christlichen Antike im modernen gesellschaftspolitischen Diskurs? Welche Veranderungen hat der Terminus "Martyrer" in der Europaischen Religions- und Kulturgeschichte durchgemacht? Anhand von medialen Quellen zum Fall Moro wird eine wesentliche Phase der nachkriegszeitlichen Politik in Italien rekonstruiert. Die Studie eroffnet einen interdisziplinar angelegten theoretischen Horizont, um die Rolle religioser Motive im gesellschaftspolitischen Kontext zu verstehen. Sie bringt eine zentrale neue Dimension in die Sakularisierungsdebatte ein, bei der Sakularisierung als neue Konfiguration von Politik und Religion verstanden wird.

The setting for his collection of eighteen stories by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the Adriatic seaport of Pescara and its hinterland in the Italian region of Abruzzo, the author depicting events and personalities from the time of his youth, but also drawing from bygone incidents that were yet memorable in the area's folk history. Pescara may not have had the cachet of celebrated cities such as Venice or Florence, but sympathetically and wryly revealed here by the pen of one of Italy's great writers it lives and breathes with a vitality probably best compared to that of James Joyce's 'dear dirty Dublin'. Indeed Joyce, who admired D'Annunzio, may well have been inspired by the Italian's cameos of small-town life, his parade of saints, voluptuaries and reprobates, their repressions, obsessions, individual dissolutions, collective explosions of anarchy, and their aptness for bizarre behavior that extended from the catatonic to the manic. D'Annunzio came to recognize just how exotic his native region was after he had left it for Rome, where he worked for some years as a journalist and essay writer in the employ of various literary magazines. His Abruzzo articles, and especially those in which he records examples of extraordinary devotional behavior (akin to what Mark Twain was witnessing at that time on the banks of the Ganges), became the basis of the stories in this collection. D'Annunzio was a published poet at the age of sixteen, and his verse has never been absent from the Western Canon since. Something of his painterly style, the layered brushwork of his descriptions, the gorgeous romantic renderings of rural scenes and the moods of the sea, his celebrations of sensuality, his aesthete's fascination with all the possible bodily conditions, from the virginal-voluptuous to the decayed and moribund (he has been hailed as 'the body's poet'), will amaze and delight the reader even in the blandest and most dictionary-dependent translation. The present one is no such, however. Vladislav Zhukov is an experienced translator who has rendered works from four languages into English, including a substantial book of poetry, three volumes of short stories, and a novel (all available on Amazon.com). His knowledge of Italian is that of someone who acquired the language while living in Italy during his youth.

In an effort to save mankind, Stel Caine embarks to do what hasn't been done in millennia: walk on the Earth's surface. But before she can rise from the depths of the ocean, she must first help her son rise from the suffocating darkness in which he wallows.

The illegitimate son of a fortune teller, Ezio Comparoni (1920-52) never knew his father, rarely left his home town, and admitted no one to his home. His deliberate obscurity was compounded by his use of many pseudonyms, including Silvio d'Arzo, under which he wrote the remarkable novella and three stories collected in The House of Others. The novella The House of Others is among the rare perfect works of twentieth century fiction. In a desolate mountain village an old woman visits the parish priest, ostensibly to ask about dissolving a marriage. Gradually, as she probes for information on "special cases"--cases in which what is obviously wrong can also be irrefutably right--it becomes clear her true question is whether or not she might take her own life. The question is metaphysical, involving not only the woman's life but the priest's; and to it he has no answer.