The Black Book of Johnathan Knotbristle: A Devil's Parable & Guide for Witches offers an engaging, hands-on manual of old style Witchcraft disguised in the creatively woven words of the Devil's parable. Chris Allaun, drawing on his decades of experience in the study and practice of Witchcraft, utilizes storytelling to illustrate how a Witch could have found compact, and thus power, through communion with the figure known as the Devil. Each chapter is a new lesson told from the perspective of our main character, Johnathan Knotbristle, that he, in turn, learns from the Devil. The second part of the book is the actual grimoire that offers the reader step by step instructions for working the acts of magic referenced in part one. It includes workings to create the Devil's Stang, methods of entering trance, instructions on spirit conjuration, and much, much more.

Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to him at his birth and gave him a special purpose. Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him. Maggie Bright, a soprano who was once the talent of her generation, now sings in a San Francisco bar through a haze of whisky cut with sharp regret. She often finishes up in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who earns his living as part of a tunneling crew seventy feet beneath the Bay. He smells of sea silt and loam, as if he has been dredged from the deep bottom of the world - and his wounds run deep too. Thrown into this mysterious adult world, Duncan finds comfort in an ancient radio, from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts who never came home, and dreams of finding his real father. A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel, This Magnificent Desolation allows a child's perspective to illuminate a dark world, and explores the creeping devastation of war, the many facets of loneliness, the redemptive power of the imagination, and the possibility of a kind of grace.

Be careful what you wish for. Nathaniel is a magician's apprentice, taking his first lessons in the arts of magic. But when a devious hot-shot wizard named Simon Lovelace ruthlessly humiliates Nathaniel in front of his elders, Nathaniel decides to kick up his education a few notches and show Lovelace who's boss. With revenge on his mind, he summons the powerful djinni, Bartimaeus. But summoning Bartimaeus and controlling him are two different things entirely, and when Nathaniel sends the djinni out to steal Lovelace's greatest treasure, the Amulet of Samarkand, he finds himself caught up in a whirlwind of magical espionage, murder, and rebellion.

New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

"A fearless, angry, brutally funny poke in the eye of the American music machine and pop culture industry. Tom Matthews' memorable, highly readable first novel is that rare literary artifact - a satire with teeth." —Tom Perrotta on Like We Care Raising the Dad is a small masterpiece that charts the all-too-familiar forces hastening the decline of the average American family, and in it Tom Matthews has produced a classic novel of modern life. In Raising the Dad, the dysfunction in John Husted’s family is vexing enough: His marriage has slipped into a state of passionless functionality. His teenage daughter is growing distant and mean. His older brother—a washed-up heavy-metal singer—is fresh out of jail, and their mother may be slipping away to dementia. Things just seemed to veer off course since the death of the family patriarch many years earlier. But then John is stunned to learn that his father’s fate was not what he had long believed it to be. It falls upon John to decide if he should break the news to his family, knowing that the truth could make the family whole – or smash it to pieces. “Raising the Dad mines family dysfunction for all of its complex truths and wild emotions. Tom Matthews strikes the damnedest balance—aching loss, brutal humor—as his befuddled protagonist deals with mind-blowing circumstances.”—Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half-A-Life “The sensitivity and unexpected humor that Tom Matthews brings to this emotionally complex book extends to the protagonist’s rock singer brother.” —Producer Butch Vig (Nirvana, Foo Fighters)

Embrace off-grid green living with the bestselling classic guide to a more sustainable way of life, now with a brand new foreword from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. John Seymour has inspired thousands to make more responsible, enriching, and eco-friendly choices with his advice on living sustainably. The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency offers step-by-step instructions on everything from chopping trees to harnessing solar power; from growing fruit and vegetables, and preserving and pickling your harvest, to baking bread, brewing beer, and making cheese. Seymour shows you how to live off the land, running your own smallholding or homestead, keeping chickens, and raising (and butchering) livestock. In a world of mass production, intensive farming, and food miles, Seymour's words offer an alternative: a celebration of the joy of investing time, labour, and love into the things we need. While we aren't all be able to move to the countryside, we can appreciate the need to eat food that has been grown ethically or create things we can cherish, using skills that have been handed down through generations. With refreshed, retro-style illustrations and a brand-new foreword by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, this new edition of Seymour's classic title is a balm for anyone who has ever sought solace away from the madness of modern life.

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