About the BookWhen a teenage boy is accused of murder, one private investigator must find enough evidence to support a “justifiable homicide” defense. Hard Secrets, Soft Heart sheds light on the universal subject of child abuse, a topic is still often taboo, especially in the African American community. But no matter how shattering, if some secrets are kept, there can be even more dire consequences.About the AuthorR. E. Blythe is now in his fifties, but he has wanted t...

The Worm Ouroboros is a grand romance of heroic fantasy, staging the war between Demonland and Witchland in a world at once archaic, ceremonial, and vividly imagined. Eddison's prose is famously opulent: Jacobean in cadence, Norse in temper, and Homeric in its appetite for battle, feasting, oaths, and glory. Published in 1922, it stands near the foundations of modern secondary-world fantasy, yet it resists modern realism in favor of mythic recurrence, aristocratic valor, and the intoxicati...

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Health literacy addresses a range of social dimensions of health, including knowledge, navigation and communication, as well as individual and organizational skills for accessing, understanding, evaluating and using information. Particularly over the past decade, health literacy has globally become a major public health concern as an asset for promoting health, wellbeing and sustainable development.This comprehensive handbook provides a...

This is not a dry scholarly book on Zen. It is a fascinating introduction into a study of self-enlightenment and inner reason that has been a driving force of all Japanese culture. Written by Reginal Horace Blyth (1898-1964) this is a volume free of the dry pedantry that has hobbled so many well meaning French and English studies of Zen. It is free also of the breathless mystery-mongering that unfortunately has bloated American Zen.Blyth reads easily. The questions he poses; the vi...

In the shadowed world of demon bindings and ancient curses, Sable Voss, a non-binary shadow-witch, has three weeks left to live. Every Voss dies before thirty, consumed from within by devouring darkness. Desperate and defiant, Sable performs a forbidden ritual, summoning far more than they bargained for: Azrael, an exiled demon prince of breathtaking beauty and terrifying power.What begins as a dangerous bargain to break the family curse evolves into something deeper—an intoxicatin...

In the fog-shrouded hills of Glencar, Ireland, medium Elias Kane confronts his past at haunted Blackthorn Manor—where a desperate job offer triples his rate to cleanse a gothic sentinel that devours souls.Broke and haunted by unpaid bills, Elias reluctantly enters the manor's icy embrace. But the spirit waiting isn't some faceless ghost—it's Rowan, his lost lover, dead fifteen years from a crash on these very grounds. Their final fight drove Rowan to chase him thro...

Mountains, Carl von Clausewitz said, introduce a “retarding element” into warfare. To fight in mountains, armies must overcome this challenge via survival strategies and mobility. But the techniques and technologies for doing so are best found in civilian skiing and mountaineering communities, a situation almost unique to mountain warfare. Ski, Climb, Fight looks at how the 10th Mountain Division of World War II met this challenge and how the U.S. military does so today. The first...

Never before published letters and uncollected short writings of R. H. Blyth, champion of Zen and the person who brought haiku to the world.Poetry and Zen assembles a remarkable literary feast: the letters, articles, translations, reviews, and selections from the papers of Reginald Horace Blyth (1898–1964). Following on the landmark success of Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1942), Blyth’s voluminous writings on Zen, Japanese cult...

Based on actual events, this biographical novel follows Chris Harwood's journey after leaving school, having failed entry to veterinary school in the UK.Determined to overcome obstacles and remain focused on his one true goal, surgery, he finds a little-known route to train as a foot surgeon under the newly formed Podiatry Association.Chris is supported by his first boss to travel to study in the USA, opening up a kaleidoscope of skills not taught in British schools. Return...

George Gissing's Our Friend the Charlatan (1901) is a late-Victorian comedy of manners sharpened into social diagnosis. Centered on Dyce Lashmar, an eloquent opportunist who converts fashionable "bio-sociological" language into a ladder for political and romantic advancement, the novel anatomizes a culture hungry for clever formulas and public personalities. Gissing's lucid realist prose, edged with irony rather than melodrama, places the book among fin-de-siècle critiques of ambition, pse...

Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy! (1827) is a remarkable early work of speculative fiction, subtitled A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. Reanimating the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops, Loudon combines Gothic resurrection motifs with futuristic satire, imagining technological marvels such as automated vehicles, climate control, and advanced social systems. Written in the wake of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the novel belongs to the Romantic-era fascination with science, antiquity, and the limits of hu...

First published in 1925, The Game of Life and How to Play It is a concise classic of New Thought literature, presenting life as a spiritual "game" governed by laws of faith, speech, intuition, and divine right action. Florence Scovel Shinn writes in a direct, aphoristic style, combining Biblical allusion, anecdote, and practical affirmations. Its literary context lies within early twentieth-century metaphysical self-help, alongside works that sought to reconcile Christian language with men...