Edmund Lea perpetually rides a ghost train -- except every seven years on Christmas Eve, when he is allowed to revisit his home town. Like Wagner's Flying Dutchman, Edmund is condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age and watching the world grow older. He tries in vain to break the spell by way of true love, repentance, hedonism; he tries to change the world and he tries to die. Characters move in and out of Maxwell's story like Dante's figures in Hell, but Edmund's own Virgil is a careless and unhelpful poet, a portrait of the author as a student. The tale is told in formal terza rima, but its language and tone, its humor and sense of homesickness, are decidedly contemporary. It is a brilliant achievement.

"Torn between grief and anger, Shakespeare learns that the fire was no accident, and that he is being stalked by a person obsessed with bringing his life to ruin. Hope soon comes in the form of a small boy, a would-be actor who happened to witness the arson. As quickly as hope appears, it is snuffed out when the boy is violently murdered. Worse yet, Shakespeare is the primary suspect." "Out on bail, Shakespeare finds himself in a desperate race to uncover the truth behind the murder. With his reputation and life itself on the line, Shakespeare must put down his quill and brace himself for an adventure like no other."--BOOK JACKET.

The author of the highly acclaimed Golden Chronicles embarks upon an exhilarating new series filled with suspense, deception, and romantic adventure in Georgian England. In this first compelling tale from Patricia Veryan Time's Fool, Captain Gideon Rossiter returns to England after a six-year absence with one goal in mind: to marry and settle down with his betrothed, the enchanting Lady Naomi Lutonville, the thought of whom has sustained him through many a trial of war. It is not, however, a happy homecoming that waits the captain. Rossiter is shocked to find his fortune lost, his father accused of fraud, and his family name disgraced entirely. Worst of all misfortunes, Lady Naomi's family has dissolved the engagement, and the lady herself is of no mind to ask that it be reinstated...

Time’s Fool: Essays in Context is a collection of essays on a broad range of topics, from Gilgamesh to James Joyce – and beyond: to Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Yaşar Kemal, Cormac McCarthy, Abdulrahman Munif, and many others. Time’s Fool is a memorial to the life work of A. Clare Brandabur, who walked away from a tenure-track teaching position at the University of Illinois to embark on a career of teaching in Middle Eastern universities in Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, occupied Palestine, Cyprus, Ankara, and finally Istanbul, where she taught for the last decade and a half of her life. Had Clare stayed with a career at a “Research I” university in the United States, her scholarship would have been far less rich and free-wheeling – more narrow, concentrated, and specialized – and she would not have been able to help and inspire her graduate and undergraduate students from the Near East and, especially during her last five or six years at Fatih University, from around the world. The essays are organized into five main groups, from “Gender and Family Relations” and “Ecocriticism,” to “Colonialism and Post-Colonialism,” “Colonialism and Ireland,” and “Colonialism, Palestine, Genocide”; and a final ‘catch-all’ section of “Miscellaneous Essays” that includes Gilgamesh, T.E. Lawrence, Yaşar Kemal, Graham Green, and modern theory. There are also sub-categories that transcend the six sections, such as Arab Literature, Catholicism, Women’s Studies, and Mythology – something for everyone, in short. Clare’s essays give a sense of her breadth of scholarship and her very rich play of mind, but the real monument to her life’s work is in the hearts and minds of the students from around the world whom she influenced.

A graphic biography of the real-life sideshow performer who inspired Zippy the Pinhead: “An uplifting, wonderfully humane book.” —The New York Times From Coney Island and the Ringling Bros. Circus to small-town carnivals and big-city sideshows, Nobody’s Fool follows the long, legendary career of Schlitzie, today best known for his appearance in the cult classic film Freaks, the making of which is a centerpiece of the story. In researching Schlitzie’s life, Griffith has tracked down primary sources and archives throughout the country, conducting interviews with those who worked with him and had intimate knowledge of his personality, his likes and dislikes, how he responded to being a sideshow “freak,” and much more. This graphic biography provides never-before-revealed details of his life, offering a unique look into his world and contributions to popular culture, including the immortal phrase “Are we having fun yet?” “Virtuoso comic-strip artist Bill Griffith gives voice to a true outcast—the sideshow attraction born Simon Metz (probably) in the Bronx (probably) in 1901.” —The New York Times “The underlying message of Nobody’s Fool? I get it—underneath our grandiose opinions of ourselves we’re all pinheads and freaks . . . The best graphic novel of the year.” —R. Crumb “A captivating labor of love that integrates American sideshow history and autobiographical segments . . . an astonishing life, beautifully told. Or, as Schlitzie would say, it’s boffo!” —Booklist (starred review) “A masterpiece of absurdity and humanity. After all these years Schlitzie still triggers laughter and tears.” —Steve Heller, Print

We live forever, barring accidents. Just like everyone else in the universe. The Doctor travels back to the Ancient Days, an era where life flourishes and death is barely known... Then come the Kotturuh – creatures who spread through the cosmos dispensing mortality. They judge each and every species and decree its allotted time to live. For the first time, living things know the fear of ending. And they will go to any lengths to escape this grim new spectre, death. The Doctor is an old hand at cheating death. Now, at last, he can stop it at source. He is coming for the Kotturuh, ready to change everything so that Life wins from the start. Not just the last of the Time Lords. The Time Lord Victorious.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls returns to North Bath, the Rust Belt town first brought to unforgettable life in Nobody’s Fool. Now, ten years later, Doug Raymer has become the chief of police and is tormented by the improbable death of his wife—not to mention his suspicion that he was a failure of a husband. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Sully has come into a small fortune, but is suddenly faced with a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he only has a year or two left to live. As Sully frantically works to keep the bad news from the important people in his life, we are reunited with his son and grandson . . . with Ruth, the married woman with whom he carried on for years . . . and with the hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends. Filled with humor, heart, and hard-luck characters you can’t help but love, Everybody’s Fool is a crowning achievement from one of the great storytellers of our time. Look for Everybody’s Fool, available now, and Somebody’s Fool, coming soon.

The role of the fool is to provoke the powerful to question their convictions, preferably while avoiding a beating. Fools accomplish this not by hectoring their audience, but by broaching sensitive topics indirectly, often disguising their message in a joke or a tale. Writers and thinkers throughout history have adopted the fool’s approach, and here Ralph Lerner turns to six of them—Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Gibbon—to elucidate the strategies these men employed to persuade the heedless, the zealous, and the overly confident to pause and reconsider. As Playing the Fool makes plain, all these men lived through periods marked by fanaticism, particularly with regard to religion and its relation to the state. In such a troubled context, advocating on behalf of skepticism and against tyranny could easily lead to censure, or even, as in More’s case, execution. And so, Lerner reveals, these serious thinkers relied on humor to move their readers toward a more reasoned understanding of the world and our place in it. At once erudite and entertaining, Playing the Fool is an eloquently thought-provoking look at the lives and writings of these masterly authors.

This warm, richly detailed biography brings the beloved saint alive in all his human and profoundly spiritual dimensions.