Emma Fisher was five years old when a shadow stepped through a burning doorway and left her an orphan. She saw a face bent low in the firelight. She has spent fifteen years trying to unsee it.Jake McKellar came east from Colorado with a brother's death on him and a compass he has no right to carry. He works the Appalachian ridges alone, keeping his life small enough to survive.At a remote winter shelter, four people are waiting to be found. Not all of them are alive.

There's a sense in Walker Abel's poetry that life is always a little bigger than we can know, that each moment contains more mystery, that the earth has endless capacity to open us into an ever more expansive sense of beauty and realization. Perhaps part of an American lineage that would include Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver, among others, Abel's poems explore with lyrical and sensuous language the openhearted self that is broken, mended, and can find a grace beyond ego and human drama. Lik...

Most of the time, your deepest darkest desires and wants are suppressed. They are kept in check. Bound by morals or restraint or public opinion. Bound by the concept of consequences. So what if, all to these things were gone? What would you do then?What if, there was a place truly like that?The largest Virtual Massively Multiplayer Online Simulation Game. Where you can be anything, anyone, anywhere, or anytime.Rich eccentric billionaire with a superhero alter-ego? C...

As middle classes in developing countries grow in size and political power, do they foster stable democracies and prosperous, innovative economies? Or do they encourage crass materialism, bureaucratic corruption, unrealistic social demands, and ideological polarization? These questions have taken on a new urgency in recent years but they are not new, having first appeared in the mid twentieth century in debates about Latin America. At a moment when exploding middle classes in the global So...