It's early May in 1956 in the small South Alabama town of Farmington, and eleven year old Bobby Crosby's life is about to change forever. He's still anguishing over the death of his father even though it's been five years, and he's come to despise the life centered around his mother's cafe, a place that turns into the revelrous hot spot of the community when the sun goes down.Bobby escapes his real world by sitting every night in the local movie theater, third row left down front. T...

It should have been a time for healing and rebirth…Forced to leave an earth devastated by the spread of Dark Energy, humans of the future head for the planet Zarmina to build a new life. But soon after their arrival, they are faced with another threat to their existence: syconoids. Created first as a unique convergence of thought when hubrid Stella, a cyborg with a human brain, accesses a network of computers back on Earth, this new form of artificial intelligence sees itself as a ...

Two thousand years in the future, Earth is dying. The atmosphere has been depleted and the oceans carried away by solar winds. The planet’s magnetic field has all but disappeared and humanity has moved to underground cities made from the remains of their former homes. Despite incredible technological advances, the world’s best minds have been unable to find either the cause of the devastation or a cure, humanity was on the edge of extinction.When a mysterious ship arrives carrying ...

Can rebirth come from intentional destruction? And when is it better to abandon a damaged world – or time – than to try to fix it? These are the questions that need to be answered for the future people of Earth, whose home world has been devastated and left without water by the unseen force of Dark Energy. In an attempt to revive the now evacuated planet and reintroduce water to it, scientists force a collision between earth and Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Will the planet be saved or must...

The Gayborhood: From Sexual Liberation to Cosmopolitan Spectacle explores the lived experiences of LGBT+ persons in an era of heightened visibility. Gay urban enclaves, known colloquially as gayborhoods, illustrate the evolution of LGBT+ political capacity building. Since their emergence after World War II, gayborhoods have homogenized at the expense of women, transgender, and nonwhite persons due to neoliberal policies promoted by urban planners. Thus, their popularization and economic vi...

"A thoroughly entertaining and engrossing book." Kirkus ReviewsEditor's Pick, BookLife ReviewsIn this compelling and richly layered memoir, a seasoned Texas attorney takes readers on a poignant journey through the personal and professional chapters of a life well-lived. From Cotton Fields to Courtrooms is a tale of grit, transformation, and tenacity-beginning with a boyhood on a small-town farm and culminating in a storied legal career in the bustling hear...

How California’s counterculture of the 1960s to 1980s profoundly shaped—and was shaped by—West Coast artistsThe 1960s exert a special fascination in modern art. But most accounts miss the defining impact of the period’s youth culture, largely incubated in California, on artists who came of age in that decade. As their prime exemplar, Bruce Conner, reminisced, “I did everything that everybody did in 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury. . . . I would take peyote and walk out ...

At the beginning of 1776, and then at the end, Thomas Paine published two highly influential pamphlets that form perfect bookends to that revolutionary year of American history. In January, Common Sense urged Americans to throw off their attachments to Great Britain,declare their independence, and form a government of their own. Then in December, The American Crisis No. 1 urged Americans to rise up during a desperate and dark time of the Revolutionary War to rededicate themselves t...

This outstanding new book shows why communitarian thought has had such a profound influence on contemporary American public policy, from strengthening our neighborhoods to fighting AIDS and educating our children. Edited by Amitai Etzioni, founder of the Communitarian Network and author of the best-selling books The Spirit of Community and The New Golden Rule, this comprehensive collection contains essays written by the nation's most respected thinkers. See why politician...

A travel guide to hauntings and the haunted, to lands with their own power, and to the communities that spring from these strange realms.In your hands is a guide to the strange and surreal. From arcades along a boardwalk and jetties at the edges of tourist towns, to a rural village in Pakistan and hollows hidden deep within a forest in Pennsylvania, strange things can happen no matter where you are. You can become lost in a city crowded with people, haunted within your own home, an...

"No soldier could ask for a sweeter resting place than on the field of glory where he fell. The land he died to save vies with the one which gave him birth in paying tribute to his memory, and the kindly hands which so often come to spread flowers upon his earthly coverlet express in their gentle task a personal affection."—General John J. PershingTo remember and honor the memory of the American soldiers who fought and died in foreign wars during the past hundred years, the America...

"Delightful . . . a superb guide to the ecological themes of Merton's life and writings." ? The Christian CenturyNature was always vital in Thomas Merton's life, from the long hours he spent as a child watching his father paint landscapes in the fresh air, to his final years of solitude in the hermitage at Our Lady of Gethsemani, where he contemplated and wrote about the beauty of his surroundings. Throughout his life, Merton's study of the natural world sh...