The city of the dead, invaded by life. Sending Queen Tempest to a world of strife. Forced from her castle, robbed of her crown. The beloved ruler is chased underground. Her people enslaved, tortured and maimed. By one possessing the Legba name. A prophecy misread will pit sister against sister. While one unsuspecting ghoul becomes one's mister. War will rage if wedding bells chime. But can the Corpse Queen make it in time? In the shadows dark secrets loom. Will they free Carnage Crossing? Or seal its doom? "If Beetlejuice, The Good Place, and The Corpse Bride had a love child, it would be this book. Only it would be that funny middle child who makes everyone laugh. There's no rest for the wicked. And no bathroom breaks either. Stacey Rourke drags you into this hilariously fast-paced ride and doesn't let go. A must-read." - International Bestselling Author Tara Brown "Corpse Queen is a uniquely vibrant supernatural landscape of dead deliciousness that is sure to become your next obsession!" - USA Today Bestselling Author Rue Volley "With her usual flair, Rourke brings the dead to life in this wonderfully, macabre tale. With hints of Beetlejuice meets epic fantasy, Corpse Queen takes us on an amazing journey beyond the hidden veil. I can't wait for book two!" - Award-winning Author Tish Thawer "The afterlife isn't ready for Tempest Mortem. Biting sarcasm and gallows humor keep the pages turning as Rourke brings this world to life life few others can." - Award-winning Author Eric R Asher

A lavishly illustrated guide to the magnum opus of the great seventeenth-century anatomist, master embalmer, artist, and collector of specimens. Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Thesaurus Anatomicus. This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more. Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as "Rembrandts of anatomical preparation"; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art. Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences.

"In this anthology, which features some of Cocteau's major writings, Margaret Crosland illustrates the wide range of his creativity and shows that his entire production is closely integrated. She emphasizes his own insistence that he was a 'poet,' writing always as a poet in different media. She introduces also many pieces which have never before been published in English, and others that are relatively unknown."--Book jacket.

A path-breaking scholar's insightful reexamination of the resurrection of the body and the construction of the self When people talk about the resurrection they often assume that the bodies in the afterlife will be perfect. But which version of our bodies gets resurrected--young or old, healthy or sick, real-to-life or idealized? What bodily qualities must be recast in heaven for a body to qualify as both ours and heavenly? The resurrection is one of the foundational statements of Christian theology, but when it comes to the New Testament only a handful of passages helps us answer the question "What will those bodies be like?" More problematically, the selection and interpretation of these texts are grounded in assumptions about the kinds of earthly bodies that are most desirable. Drawing upon previously unexplored evidence in ancient medicine, philosophy, and culture, this illuminating book both revisits central texts--such as the resurrection of Jesus--and mines virtually ignored passages in the Gospels to show how the resurrection of the body addresses larger questions about identity and the self.

The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems – both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.