The corpse of the title is that of William Hennessy, a universally disliked teacher at U. S. Grant High School, who turns up dead in one of the school’s science lab. There is no end of suspects, and when Charlotte Hill (Charlie to her friends), the principal of the school, discovers that a group of students has been using the lab to make illegal drugs, and that the newly deceased had been blackmailing these enterprising chemists, there is the hope of a quick solution. However, this hope is dashed when the students admit the drug making, but insist the teacher was already a corpse upon their arrival to meet with him. Suspicion then turns to various others: a recent graduate and boyfriend of a student who has been sexually abused by Hennessy, the school custodian, one of the janitors. When the janitor is found dead in his car the police are happy to call it a suicide and to write finis to Hennessy’s murder, but Charlie has her doubts, and sets about to find the answers. Eventually she does, but not before her life is threatened and the threat almost becomes a reality. 1

“Deliciously macabre and utterly decadent.” —Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper In this dark and twisty feminist historical mystery, a teenage girl starts a new life as a grave robber but quickly becomes entangled in a murderer's plans. Soon after her best friend Kitty mysteriously dies, orphaned seventeen-year-old Molly Green is sent away to live with her "aunt." With no relations that she knows of, Molly assumes she has been sold as a maid for the price of an extra donation in the church orphanage's coffers. Such a thing is not unheard of. There are only so many options for an unmarried girl in 1850s Philadelphia. Only, when Molly arrives, she discovers her aunt is very much real, exceedingly wealthy, and with secrets of her own. Secrets and wealth she intends to share—for a price. Molly's estranged aunt Ava, has built her empire by robbing graves and selling the corpses to medical students who need bodies to practice surgical procedures. And she wants Molly to help her procure the corpses. As Molly learns her aunt's trade in the dead of night and explores the mansion by day, she is both horrified and deeply intrigued by the anatomy lessons held at the old church on her aunt's property. Enigmatic Doctor LaValle's lessons are a heady mixture of knowledge and power and Molly has never wanted anything more than to join his male-only group of students. But the cost of inclusion is steep and with a murderer loose in the city, the pursuit of power and opportunity becomes a deadly dance.

Why can't we look away? Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies." His examples are legion, and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human—for better and for worse.

Kishinuma and Shinozaki may have escaped the cursed Tenjin Elementary School, but the rest of their surviving classmates are still trapped. Will they trade their safety for the lives of their friends? Meanwhile, Morishige's corpse obsession reaches a point past all return and Kizami shows his true colors to Yuka--will her big brother come to save her before it's too late?

A blistering debut that does for the Iraqi perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan what Phil Klay’s Redeployment does for the American perspective “[A] wonderful collection.” —George Saunders, The New York Times Book Review The first major literary work about the Iraq War from an Iraqi perspective—by an explosive new voice hailed as “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive” (The Guardian)—The Corpse Exhibition shows us the war as we have never seen it before. Here is a world not only of soldiers and assassins, hostages and car bombers, refugees and terrorists, but also of madmen and prophets, angels and djinni, sorcerers and spirits. Blending shocking realism with flights of fantasy, The Corpse Exhibition offers us a pageant of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib and as difficult to look away from, but shot through with a gallows humor that yields an unflinching comedy of the macabre. Gripping and hallucinatory, this is a new kind of storytelling forged in the crucible of war.

This is a zany romp through the modern American landscape, with the tour guide one Bingo Sherman, a possible descendant of the controversial Civil War general. Bingo, a joyous cross between Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Kafka’s Joseph K attacks life with a zest that belies his Florida Panhandle origins. In this coming of age novel the action moves briefly from Miami’s South Beach to New York’s Upper West Side then back to South Beach again. Bingo is a seeker with a difference: he has absolutely no idea what he is seeking and knows only what he is not ready to settle for. The characters he encounters along the way serve to both open his eyes as well as to toughen him up for life’s many trials still ahead. Throughout the novel looms the almost mythical figure of Ronald McDonald, Bingo’s childhood hero for whom he still harbors a soft spot in his heart. Everyone Loves Ronald McDonald strikes just the right tone between irreverence and acute observation, and promises a rollicking good experience for anyone with common or even uncommon good sense.

 In a prolific career spanning six decades, actor Burt Reynolds was one of the world's most famous stars of film and television. As much a folk hero as a Hollywood celebrity, he began as a stuntman and bit player in B Westerns and TV shows before landing a starring role on NBC's Riverboat (1959-1961). His breakthrough role in Deliverance (1972) made him famous and the sleeper hit Smokey and the Bandit (1977) made his name a household word. This first critical overview of Reynolds' work examines his complete filmography, featuring candid discussions with costars and collaborators, exclusive behind-the-scenes photos and a wealth of film stills.

It's true, everyone loves a cowboy. Handsome, strong, and more than a little stubborn, there's just something about that rugged rancher. What woman could tame a wild cowboy - and what woman would want to! Now get four of the best Western romances around at one low price. This bundle includes Lucky in Love and Getting Lucky from Carolyn Brown and Cowboy Trouble and One Fine Cowboy from Joanne Kennedy. Saddle up and get ready with your spurs - you're in for a wild ride! Praised as a writer who "will keep you reading until the very last page" (Romantic Times), Carolyn Brown delivers sass, colorful characters, and a rollicking sense of humor. Simply described by one reviewer as "romance, mystery, and spurs! Yum!!" (Wendy's Minding Spot), Joanne Kennedy brings a fresh take to the contemporary Westerns, at once charming and filled with razor-sharp wit. Don't miss being the next to discover today's best voices in Western romance. Lucky in Love by Carolyn Brown: It was a night of passion that has always haunted "Lucky Beau" Luckadeau. The mysterious beauty he seduced at a cousin's wedding disappeared. He's always been lucky at cards, lucky with cattle, and lucky with land, but he's never been lucky in love. Now Milli Torres has come to southern Oklahoma to help out on her grandfather's ranch. A cut fence and a big, mean Angus bull in the pasture are bad enough, but then she looks up and sees Beau Luckadeau. Great God Almighty, how did he get from Louisiana to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and what in the hell is she going to do if he recognizes her? Getting Lucky by Carolyn Brown: After being the center of nasty gossip in her last hometown, all Julie Donovan wants in Saint Jo, Texas, is a quiet, uneventful life for her and her daughter, Annie. But when a sexy cowboy walks into her classroom with a daughter who looks like Annie's twin, suddenly the whole town is looking for explanations... Devoted single dad Griffin Luckadeau will do anything to protect his own, and no sassy redhead is going to get in his way. When he thinks Julie is scheming to steal his ranch out from under him to benefit her own daughter, sparks really begin to fly... Julie and Griffin can't seem to cross paths without a scuffle. But when the dust settles, these two Texas hotheads may realize they've actually found something worth fighting for... Cowboy Trouble by Joanne Kennedy: Fleeing her latest love life disaster, big city journalist Libby Brown's transition to rural living isn't going exactly as planned. Her childhood dream has always been to own a chicken farm-but without the constant help of her charming, sexy, cowboy neighbor; she'd never have made it through her first Wyoming season. Handsome rancher Luke Rawlins is impressed by this sassy, independent city girl. But he yearns to do more than help Libby out with her ranch...he's ready for love, and he wants to go the distance. When the two get embroiled in their tiny town's one and only crime story, Libby discovers that their sizzling hot attraction is going to complicate her life in every way possible... One Fine Cowboy by Joanne Kennedy: Nate Shawcross is perfectly content to spend his days training wild horses. So when a beautiful greenhorn unexpectedly shows up for a seminar from the famous "Horse Whisperer" of Wyoming, all Nate wants to do is send her packing... Graduate student Charlie Banks came to the ranch to learn about horse communication, but when she meets the ruggedly handsome cowboy, she starts to fantasize about another connection entirely... Nate needs to stay focused if he's going to save his ranch from foreclosure, but he can't help being distracted by the brainy and breathtakingly sexy Charlie. Could it be that after all this time Nate has finally found the one woman who can tame his wild heart?

"It is widely recognized that the Hebrew Bible is filled with rape and sexual violence. However, feminist approaches to the topic remain dominated by Phyllis Trible's 1984 Texts of Terror, which describes feminist criticism as a practice of "telling sad stories." Pushing beyond Trible, Texts after Terror offers a new framework for reading biblical sexual violence, one that draws on recent work in feminist, queer, and affect theory and activism against sexual violence and rape culture. In the Hebrew Bible as in the contemporary world, sexual violence is frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky. Fuzzy names the ambiguity and confusion that often surround experiences of sexual violence. Messy identifies the consequences of rape, while also describing messy sex and bodies. Icky points out the ways that sexual violence fails to fit into neat patterns of evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Building on these concepts, Texts after Terror offers a number of new feminist strategies and approaches to sexual violence: critiquing the framework of consent, offering new models of sexual harm, emphasizing the importance of relationships between women (even in the context of stories of heterosexual rape), reading biblical rape texts with and through contemporary texts written by survivors, advocating for "unhappy reading" that makes unhappiness and open-endedness into key feminist sites of possibility. Texts after Terror also discusses a wide range of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 43), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Lot's daughters (Gen. 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1 and 2), and the Levite's concubine (Judg. 19)"--