Celebrated for their books on Eugene O’Neill and enjoying access to a trove of previously sealed archival material, the Gelbs deliver their final volume on the stormy life and brilliant oeuvre of this Nobel Prize–winning American playwright. This is a tour through both a magical moment in American theater and the troubled life of a genius. Not a peep show or a celebrity gossip fest, this book is a brilliant investigation of the emotional knots that ensnared one of our most important playwrights. Handsome, charming when he wanted to be: O’Neill was the flame women were drawn to—all, that is, except his mother, who never let him forget he was unwanted. By Women Possessed follows O’Neill through his great successes, the failures he was able to shrug off, and the long eclipse, a twelve-year period in which, despite the Nobel, nothing he wrote was produced. But ahead lay his greatest achievements: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Both were ahead of their time and both received lukewarm receptions. It wasn’t until after his death that his widow, the keeper of the flame, began a fierce and successful campaign to restore his reputation. The result is that today, just over 125 years after his birth, O’Neill is a towering presence in the theater, his work—always in performance here and abroad—still electrifying audiences. Perhaps of equal importance, he is the acknowledged father of modern American theater, the man who paved the way for the likes of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and a host of others. But, as Williams has said, at a cost: “O’Neill gave birth to the American theater and died for it.”

Who was Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved'? After Ludwig van Beethoven’s death, a love letter in his writing was discovered, addressed only to his ‘Immortal Beloved’. Decades later, Countess Therese Brunsvik claims to have been the composer’s lost love. Yet is she concealing a tragic secret? Who is the one person who deserves to know the truth? Becoming Beethoven’s pupils in 1799, Therese and her sister Josephine followed his struggles against the onset of deafness, Viennese society’s flamboyance, privilege and hypocrisy and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars. While Therese sought liberation, Josephine found the odds stacked against even the most unquenchable of passions...

Although military concepts in Homeric poetry have been studied since Alexandrian times, there has not been until now an extended study of the concept of alke, "defensive strength", as it unfolds intertextually within the Iliad and the Odyssey and archaic Greek poetry generally. Derek Collins uses evidence from Homeric poetry to reveal that alke, unlike other concepts of strength in archaic Greek, plays a central role in defining a warrior at the peak of his prowess, which can be related in turn to its application to kings and to its use by Zeus and Athena as divine emblems of warfare. Just as importantly, Collins shows how alke functions poetically as a plot device for the Odyssey as the poem retrospectively views the Iliad. Finally, by integrating evidence from linguistics, anthropology, and comparative literature, Collins argues that the meaning of alke cannot be divorced from the oral-traditional media from which it emerges, and that its conceptual structure depends as much on archaic Greece as it does on the poetic demands of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Ye Fei, who brought along his father's flying immortal from outer space, came to the continent after surviving for 500 years. Even though he was called an idiot by others, his family love and love made him truly feel the warmth of his family.

A fascinating and unnerving book, Afraid is a must-read that equips all Christians to recognize the devil's influence in our society and to act on it. Robert Bennett describes real events and actual confessions people have shared with him of demonic encounters-in America, in our modern age. Summoning demons, interacting with "ghosts" and holding séances led to what many may call horrifying hallucinations and even schizophrenia. But for many Americans, these things are their spirituality. How can we break free from the despair and crushing fear that such encounters can bring? How do we come to the aid of our neighbors who are lost in Satan's deceptions? Bennett points us to the only way out: God's grace and the medicines He gives to His people. Book jacket.

An exclusive J.D. Robb short story. 'The devil killed my body. I cannot fight. I cannot free her. You must. You are the one.' A dying Romanian woman's words send a chill down Lieutenant Eve Dallas' spine. And soon Eve notices some interesting side-effects: visions of the deceased and even fluency in Russian. Against her better judgment, Eve is convinced the spirit of the old woman is inside her, unable to rest until she's found her great-granddaughter who vanished two months ago. Desperate to be back to normal, Eve realises a string of young women have gone missing, and if Eve doesn't find them, no one will. Set between Indulgence in Death and Treachery in Death.

In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood. Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens--and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things." As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."