Our oldest stories are about conflict. This collection draws together discussions of violence in storytelling from a number of perspectives. Historical contexts range from ancient Greece to postcolonial Africa to the American West, and topics considered include the role of the witness, how place affects our understanding of conflict, the aestheticization of violence, how trauma is written on the body, and contemporary war stories.

This Handbook brings together essays from an impressive group of well-established and emerging scholars from all around the world, to show the many different types of violence that have plagued Latin America since the pre-Colombian era, and how each has been seen and characterized in literature and other cultural mediums ever since. This ambitious collection analyzes texts from some of the region's most tumultuous time periods, beginning with early violence that was predominately tribal and ideological in nature; to colonial and decolonial violence between colonizers and the native population; through to the political violence we have seen in the postmodern period, marked by dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, neoliberalism, as well as representations of violence caused by drug trafficking and migration. The volume provides readers with literary examples from across the centuries, showing not only how widespread the violence has been, but crucially how it has shaped the region and evolved over time.

Love is like an avalanche. It hits hard, fast and without mercy. At least it did for me when Sculpt, the lead singer of the rock band Tear Asunder knocked me off my feet. Literally, because he's also a fighter, illegally of course, and he taught me how to fight. He also taught me how to love and I fell hard for him. I mean the guy could do sweet, when he wasn't doing bossy, and I like sweet. Then it all shattered. Kidnapped. Starved. Beaten. I was alone and fighting to survive. When I heard Sculpt's voice, I thought he was there to save me. I was wrong. *Warning: This book contains some disturbing situations, strong language and sexual content. Over 18 years.

In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. Bachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Instead, she argues, both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence. Examining such works as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad. The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachner's readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time.

Victorian novels, Garrett Stewart argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. In Novel Violence, he explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels. Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, Stewart uses his brilliant new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a powerful case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. He also maps his finely wrought argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe’s antinovelistic techniques. In the process, Stewart shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.

NOW WITH BONUS SCENE! To take back life, one must first face death . . . Conditioned in captivity to maim and kill, prisoner 818 becomes an unstoppable fighter in the ring. Violence is all he knows. Death and brutality are the masters of his fate. After years of incarceration in an underground hell, only one thought occupies his mind: revenge. Revenge on the man who wronged him, condemned him and turned him into this: a rage-fueled killing machine. Kisa Volkova, daughter of the head of New York's Russian bratva, lives a protected but unhappy life. As manager of The Dungeon, her father's underground fighting and gambling syndicate in Brooklyn, grief and pain fill her days. As well as her domineering father, Kisa's fiancé Alik controls every aspect of her life, dominating her every move, until one night changes everything. After a chance encounter with a beautiful, tattooed man on the street, Kisa stumbles into a world of feeling and desire as yet unknown to her. And when this man is announced as The Dungeon's newest fighter, her life is turned upside down. Kisa becomes obsessed with him, yearns for him, needs to possess this mysterious man beyond saving . . . the man they call Raze. #Raze #RazeHell

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

"A sharp fantasy thriller." --People "Swoonworthy." --Time "Sharp, dark, thoughtful and romantic." --Cassandra Clare, #1 New York Times bestselling author When their worlds collide, X and Zoe are pushed to the edge of everything in this much-buzzed-about tour de force YA fantasy from Entertainment Weekly veteran Jeff Giles. For the perfect love, what would you be willing to lose? It's been a shattering year for seventeen-year-old Zoe, who's still reeling from her father's shocking death in a caving accident and her neighbors' mysterious disappearance from their own home. Then on a terrifying subzero, blizzardy night in Montana, she and her brother are brutally attacked in the woods--only to be rescued by a mysterious bounty hunter they call X. X is no ordinary bounty hunter. He is from a hell called the Lowlands, sent to claim the soul of Zoe's evil attacker and others like him. X is forbidden from revealing himself to anyone other than his prey, but he casts aside the Lowlands' rules for Zoe. As they learn more about their colliding worlds, they begin to question the past, their fate, and their future. But escaping the Lowlands and the ties that bind X might mean the ultimate sacrifice for them both. Gripping and full of heart, this epic start to a new series will bring readers right to the edge of everything.

Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts—teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding. While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surface. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the practiced analytical eye—and the literary codes—of a college professor. What does it mean when a protagonist is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he’s drenched in a sudden rain shower? Thomas C. Foster provides answers to these questions as he explores every aspect of fiction, from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form. Offering a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower—he shows us how to make our reading experience more intellectually satisfying and fun. The world, and curricula, have changed. This third edition has been thoroughly revised to reflect those changes, and features new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, as well as fresh teaching points Foster has developed over the past decade. Foster updates the books he discusses to include more diverse, inclusive, and modern works, such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven; Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere; Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X; Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird; Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet; Madeline Miller’s Circe; Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls; and Tahereh Mafi’s A Very Large Expanse of Sea.

Through an exploration of the cultural processes that perpetuate the darker side of Latin America for global consumption, this book investigates the "condition" that has led writers, filmmakers, and artists to embrace (purposefully or not) the incessant violence in Colombian society as the object of their own creative endeavors.