Lucinda Cole’s Imperfect Creatures offers the first full-length study of the shifting, unstable, but foundational status of “vermin” as creatures and category in the early modern literary, scientific, and political imagination. In the space between theology and an emergent empiricism, Cole’s argument engages a wide historical swath of canonical early modern literary texts—William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Abraham Cowley’s The Plagues of Egypt, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, the Earl of Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park,” and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Journal of the Plague Year—alongside other nonliterary primary sources and under-examined archival materials from the period, including treatises on animal trials, grain shortages, rabies, and comparative neuroanatomy. As Cole illustrates, human health and demographic problems—notably those of feeding populations periodically stricken by hunger, disease, and famine—were tied to larger questions about food supplies, property laws, national identity, and the theological imperatives that underwrote humankind’s claim to dominion over the animal kingdom. In this context, Cole’s study indicates, so-called “vermin” occupied liminal spaces between subject and object, nature and animal, animal and the devil, the devil and disease—even reason and madness. This verminous discourse formed a foundational category used to carve out humankind’s relationship to an unpredictable, irrational natural world, but it evolved into a form for thinking about not merely animals but anything that threatened the health of the body politic—humans, animals, and even thoughts.

View our feature on Mark Del Franco's Uncertain Allies. After a night of riots and fires, the Boston neighborhood known as the Weird is in ruins. And when a body is found drained of its essence, ex-Guild investigator Connor Grey is drawn into the case against his will. And he has reason to be wary. Because the case will lead to an explosive secret that threatens to tear apart the city-and the world.

Laura Black is a druid who can change her appearance. She is both the Fey Guild's public relations director and a secret agent for the International Security Agency. And now she'll have to choose where her loyalties lie when a political war breaks out between the fey and human populations...

Connor Grey is a druid consultant for the Boston PD on their "strange" cases. So his world is turned upside down when he suddenly finds that he himself has become one. Wrongly accused of a terrorist attack that rocked the city to its core, Connor evades arrest by going underground, where rumors of war are roiling. A final confrontation between the Celtic and Teutonic fey looks inevitable-with Boston as the battlefield...

Mathews uses a limited definition of paranormal, and examines works set, for the most part, in a relatively realistic modern world inhabited by both humans and paranormal beings.

Autobiographies from beyond the grave are rare things,for obvious reasons. One cannot demonstrate a spiritual and mortal coexistence outside the human mind. It's the logical conclusion, eternal life can only exist in an individual s psyche but logic doesn't explain why we are here, the enigma of time and space and people s belief in God. Soul Man gives a view that breaks many of these self-imposed barriers, opening the mind to possibilities that could exist outside our known universe, a new existence, a new world leading to experiences the likes of which I doubt you will have ever read before. Optimistic people will tell you anything may be possible,imaginative people will say anything is possible.