In Night Burial, Kate Bolton Bonnici mourns her mother’s death from ovarian cancer by tracing the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the maternal body. Opening with an epigraph from Julia Kristeva’s Stabat Mater, which recognizes the “abyss that opens up between the body and what had been its inside,” Night Burial moves from breastfeeding to laying sod on a grave, weaving together Alabama pine forests, fairy tales, philosophy, classical and Renaissance literatures, church practices, and hospice care. Through centuries-old and newly imagined poetic forms, Night Burial crafts a haunting litany for the dead. These poems ask the essential questions of grief, intertwined with family and place: how do we address the absent beloved and might the poem become its own conjuring whereby the I can once again speak to the you?

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tv=ti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?

Mr. Finch Letchworth has two occupations that he does for a living. By day, he works at the New Jersey Hospital in Roswell, New Jersey, as a state-licensed medical autopsy examiner. But by night, he performs a special ceremony in honoring a client's departed loved one called a night funeral for anyone who comes to see him at his business residence called Finch Letchworth Funeral Home.

First published in 1984, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England traces how and why the modern reaction to death has come about by examining English attitudes to death since the Middle Ages. In earlier centuries death was very much in the midst of life since it was not, as now, associated mainly with old age. War, plague and infant mortality gave it a very different aspect to its present one. The author shows in detail how modern concern with the individual has gradually alienated death from our society; the greater the emphasis on personal uniqueness, the more intense the anguish when an individual dies. Changes in attitudes to death are traced through alterations in funeral rituals, covering all sections of society from paupers to princes. This gracefully written book is a unique, scholarly and thorough treatment of the subject, providing both a sensitive insight into the feelings of people in early modern England and an explanation of the modern anxiety about death. The range and assurance of this book will commend it to historians and the interested general reader alike.

Adapted by the author as the streaming limited-series THE SISTER! Neil Cross's Burial is the story of one man's obsession with redemption. Everyone makes mistakes. But what if your biggest mistake was something you could never live down? Something so awful and despicable that it weighs daily on your soul? Nathan has never been able to forget the worst night of his life. Only he and an old acquaintance know what really happened and they have made a pact to keep silent. Now, years later, a knock on his door brings terrifying news. Old wounds are suddenly reopened, threatening to tear Nathan's whole world apart, as he comes face to face with the bleak landscape of lies and deception that has become his life. Can you ever really bury your guiltiest secret? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Mysterious Plus opens with a situation recently in the news: the murder of an American embassy official in a North African country. The aim of the novel, however, is broader than an individual act of violence. Its murder becomes a symbol of the fanatic-inflamed divisions between Muslim Middle East and Judeo-Christian West, which are fraying the ties that bond humanity. The hero of The Mysterious Plus straddles both worlds. To save his sister, Omar Naaman, nineteen, betrayed comrades and country during Algeria’s fight for independence from colonial rule. At the war’s end, the defeated French, grateful for his double-dealing service, whisked him to France, bestowing a new identity, Remy Montpellier. Years later, Remy is coerced by the French DGSE (their intelligence service) to return incognito to Algeria, where as Omar he is still branded as a traitor, in fact, as the last of the “Seven Devils,” the first six “great collaborators” having been tracked down and killed by Algerian agents. Sent to investigate the gay-bashing murder of an American embassy attaché, who (DGSE suspected) was trafficking classified documents, Remy gradually moves from pursuer to pursued. Will he fulfill the true purpose of his returning to Algiers, or will his treasonous past overtake him? How does the “Mysterious Plus” control the answers to these two questions and hence the resolution to the novel? In his previous book, The Saint of Sodomy (GLB, 1999), William Tarvin, who lived in the Middle East for two decades, satirized Muslim sexual hypocrisies. Though the same barbed wit infuses The Mysterious Plus, it is counterpoised by a darker strain, that materialistic/spiritual differences between West and Middle East threaten to sever the cords bonding humanity. Addendum: Since the novel incorporates ideas from around one thousand philosophical, religious, literary, social, psychological, historical, and political works, Tarvin has provided some commentary and definitions in end-of-chapter footnotes.