Fresh out of graduate school, CIA psychologist, Trace Curran works his dream job providing trauma-based psychotherapy and researching the threat level of Antifa-based organizations. While domestic terror escalates, Trace’s world is rocked, when an agent on his caseload commits a murder-suicide. Then, the death of his father and the split with his fiancé, leave him dealing with a breakdown. On leave from CIA duties, Trace returns home to bartend at the family’s tavern. The daily duties serve as a reminder of just how much life has unraveled, and he barely keeps the will to go on. The start of a new relationship sheds some light into his existence but the continued escalation of Antifa-related domestic terror keeps Trace connected to the CIA. When he’s called back to debrief, his supervisor’s questions leave him suspicious. It becomes clear that the terrorism is not what it appears and that someone could be manipulating events, to not only blame Antifa, but to profit from a reeling market. When Trace realizes his fears are justified, the terror turns towards him. Now, he must face his fears and save everything that is important to him—including himself.

Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern c

Probing study of how literature can redeem the revelatory, redemptive powers of language. In this probing look at Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and the stories of W. G. Sebald, Redeeming Words offers a philosophical meditation on the power of language in literature. David Kleinberg-Levin draws on the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno; the idealism and romanticism of Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling; and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows how Döblin and Sebald—writers with radically different styles working in different historical moments—have in common a struggle against forces of negativity and an aim to bring about in response a certain redemption of language. Kleinberg-Levin considers the fast-paced, staccato, and hard-cut sentences of Döblin and the ghostly, languorous, and melancholy prose fiction of Sebald to articulate how both writers use language in an attempt to recover and convey this utopian promise of happiness for life in a time of mourning.

In this irresistible collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns culled from his best-loved pieces in Southern Living and Garden & Gun, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rick Bragg muses on everything from his love of Tupperware to the decline of country music; from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck; and from the best way to kill fire ants to why any self-respecting Southern man worth his salt should carry a good knife. An ode to the stories and the history of the South, crackling with tenderness, wit, and deep affection, Where I Come From celebrates “a litany of great talkers, blue-green waters, deep casseroles, kitchen-sink permanents, lying fishermen, haunted mansions, and dogs that never die, things that make this place more than a dotted line on a map or a long-ago failed rebellion, even if only in some cold-weather dream.” Evoking the beauty and the odd particularity of humble origins, Bragg's searching vision, generous humor, and richly nuanced voice bring a place, a people, and a world vividly to life.

In 1990, Fr. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and monastic from New Zealand, exiled to Zimbabwe because of his anti-apartheid work in South Africa, opened a package and was immediately struck by the blast of an explosion. The bomb suspected to be the work of the apartheid-era South African secret police blasted away both his hands and one of his eyes. His memoir tells the story of this horrendous event, backing up to recount the journey that led him there particularly his rising awareness of the radical social implications of the gospel and his identification with the liberation struggle and then the subsequent journey of the last two decades. Returning to South Africa, Lapsley saw a whole nation damaged by the apartheid era. So he discovered his new vocation to become a wounded healer, drawing on his own experience to promote the healing of other victims of violence and trauma.