Penny Lanes afterlife adventures continue at the elite Apollo Academy. Now the bonds of true friendship and loyalty are tested as she faces the hardest lesson of her afterlife. PENNY LANE SURE HAS GONE through a lot since her death. Shes mastered the job of melting, has served as a counselor in a ghost retrieval unit, and had even been thrown into involuntary time travel. Now she is in for the biggest adventure of her life: she is going to school! Penny and her handsome friend, Avery, have been handed their new assignments as students at the elite Apollo Academy, but the biggest lesson for Penny isnt one assigned by any teacher. Penny is about to learn that things dont always go the way she hopes they will. Her closest friend, the archangel Eric, has been sent away on a mysterious mission, and now Avery seems to have lost interest in her. Poor Penny cant ?gure out why all of her other friends back home have mysteriously abandoned her. But not all hope is lost. As Penny struggles to understand why she has found herself suddenly alone, she is comforted by her new companions, classmates Elly and Alexander. She must try and ?nd the answers before her despair sends her to the underground.

Poor Penny Lane-the afterlife just isn't getting any easier. She has barely had time to recover from her grueling life lesson (let alone her own murder) and a brutal course in mortal mapping. She now finds herself thrown unexpectedly into her craziest mission yet. The aliens are at it again, fighting a civil war that threatens to tear their society apart-as surely as the tremors, fires, and other instigated disasters menace their separate afterlife world. Fortunately, Roy, the cowboy archangel, has a plan. He has gathered a select army of humans, aliens, and angels to bring peace to this embattled world. They seek to settle the dispute between the warrior aliens and their weaker counterparts and to subdue the powers of their tyrant leaders. Along with every friend she has made since her murder, Penny is reunited with her ghost retrieval team, including the handsome and charismatic Avery and the groovy archangel, Eric, for a mission that is equal parts unique and dangerous. The humans and angels are forced to venture out across a mysterious and unpredictable landscape-the once-experimental and ancient plane of existence of the Titans and Olympians. In Ancient Gods and the Angel Café, Penny Lane's chaotic yet hope-filled journey continues, and this time, she is sharing her epic adventure with all of her favorite fellow adventurers.

Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, The Melancholy Assemblage examines how the interpretive experience of emotion produces social bonds. Placing readings of early modern painting and literature in conversation with psychoanalytic theory and assemblage theory, this book argues that, far from isolating its sufferers, melancholy brings people together.

An impressive study that prompts the reader toward philosophical reflection on the hermeneutics of melancholy in its relation to maturing theological understanding and cultivation of a profound self-consciousness. Melancholy has been interpreted as a deadly sin or demonic temptation to non-being, yet its history of interpretation reveals a progressive coming to terms with the dark mood that ultimately unveils it as the self's own ground and a trace of the abysmal nature of God. The book advances two provocative claims: that far from being a contingent condition, melancholy has been progressively acknowledged as constitutive of subjectivity as such, a trace of divine otherness and pathos, and that the effort to transcend melancholy-like Perseus vanquishing Medusa-is a necessary labor of maturing self-consciousness. Reductive attempts to eliminate it, besides being dangerously utopian, risk overcoming the labor of the soul that makes us human. This study sets forth a rigorous scholarly argument that spans several disciplines, including philosophy, theology, psychology, and literary studies.

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An outsider who can travel between worlds discovers a secret that threatens the very fabric of the multiverse in this stunning debut, a powerful examination of identity, privilege, and belonging. WINNER OF THE COMPTON CROOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD • “Gorgeous writing, mind-bending world-building, razor-sharp social commentary, and a main character who demands your attention—and your allegiance.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—NPR, Library Journal, Book Riot Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s just one catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying—from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun. Cara’s life has been cut short on 372 worlds in total. On this dystopian Earth, however, Cara has survived. Identified as an outlier and therefore a perfect candidate for multiverse travel, Cara is plucked from the dirt of the wastelands. Now what once made her marginalized has finally become an unexpected source of power. She has a nice apartment on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. She works—and shamelessly flirts—with her enticing yet aloof handler, Dell, as the two women collect off-world data for the Eldridge Institute. She even occasionally leaves the city to visit her family in the wastes, though she struggles to feel at home in either place. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, Cara is on a sure path to citizenship and security. But trouble finds Cara when one of her eight remaining doppelgängers dies under mysterious circumstances, plunging her into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and her future in ways she could have never imagined—and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her world but the entire multiverse. “Clever characters, surprise twists, plenty of action, and a plot that highlights social and racial inequities in astute prose.”—Library Journal (starred review)

Can money, power, and prestige sustain happiness? Can a surgeon trained in the scientific method believe in God when many friends and patients are atheists? Relying on his intelligence and perseverance, at age forty-two, Dr. Sottosanti achieved the American dream--money, power, fame, and a clifftop house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Finding himself mired in the Seven Deadly Sins (his "mortal adhesions") and helpless to extricate himself, he cried out in despair, "God, if you are up there, all I want is inner peace." And with that one submission, his life changed, resulting in a cascade of improbable and unbelievable events, culminating in a salvific miracle experienced in the tomb of a medieval saint during a pilgrimage on Spain's Camino de Santiago. Faith, happiness, and inner peace followed. Readers will travel with him to learn life's lessons in an inspiring, riveting, fast-paced memoir.

This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications. Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?