Code of Shadows – A Cybersecurity Thriller of Conspiracy, Mind Control, and Digital ManipulationWhat if the device you trust most becomes your deadliest enemy?In London, a senior government official dies under mysterious circumstances, staring at their smartphone until their final breath. Soon after, journalists, researchers, and everyday citizens meet the same terrifying fate. Accident? Suicide? Or the work of an invisible enemy who has turned technology i...

Code of ShadowsA High-Tech Thriller of Manipulation and CybersecurityA high-stakes technology thriller that will make you look at your devices in a whole new way.When the technology you trust becomes the deadliest weapon…A senior government official dies under mysterious circumstances, staring at a smartphone until their last breath. Accident? Suicide? Soon, a chilling possibility emerges: behind every screen lurks a tool capable of controlling...

In this companion volume to Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser brings together leading experts who explore the integral role animals play in American poetry. The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America’s best-known and most beloved poets.The book highligh...

WELCOME TO COOPERS VALLEY, MR. MORROW. GOOD LUCK MAKING SENSE OF IT. Coopers Valley, Indiana. A peculiar town. Hard to pinpoint on a map. Inhabited by people who aren’t quite there. And carefully watched over by . . . someone. To this fabled “Town of a Thousand Stories” comes Matt Morrow, a reporter investigating two unsolved missing persons cases. His real purpose? To restore a ruined reputation and redeem himself for a tragic mistake. He soon finds himself in the company of beautiful Mrs...

Fourteen Southern storytellers reveal their influences, methods and daily routines, and struggles with the writing processJan Nordby Gretlund has been studying the literature of the American South for some fifty years, and his outsider's perspective as a European scholar has made him an intellectually acute witness of both the literature and its creators. Whether it is their language and reflexive storytelling or the craft and techniques by which writers transform ...

Who Killed Eve Hollander?Indianapolis, 1955. Early spring, a little before one in the morning.Thats when beautiful, rich, cruel Eve Hollander goes off her penthouse roof . . . and lands in the lap, as it were, of her next-door neighbor, Dr. Lou Baltimore. The quirky college professor with a knack for detection might let it go at thatexcept that five of Eves circle want to pin her death on him. Did Eve fall? Or was she pushed? And by whom? And why?

Pick a card. Any card. With this trademark phrase, along with a wink, a winning grin and a handful of entertaining card tricks, Mr. Mercury Ecks has come to town. Windmill, Indiana, to be exact. And while the citizens of this 1950s Midwest farm town are naturally wary of strangers, they soon fall prey to the drifters principal charm. For Mr. Ecks knows things . . . Things about the people in town: Things that can help them: Help solve their problems. Relieve their fears. Remove their obsta...

Summoning Our Saints: The Poetry and Prose of Brenda Marie Osbey celebrates and illuminates the poetry and prose of one of the South’s and the nation’s most notable writers. A native of New Orleans and a former poet laureate of Louisiana who served magnificently in that function during the dark days after Hurricane Katrina, Osbey has summoned up a magical, beguiling, sometimes chilling and appalling portrait of the myriad chapters of New Orleans, Southern, and hemispheric history. Her dazz...

Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revi...

WHY IS COOPERS CROSSING GROWING SO FAST? JACK VAN CAMP, charming mayor of the booming Indiana town, isn’t telling where all his new townsfolk are coming from. He likes to think of it as his little secret. BUT WHEN attractive visitor Mrs. Zimmer expresses an interest in settling there, he reveals some of the town’s stranger aspects in a day-long tour. A tour complete with “tales“ of twelve of its more interesting “citizens.“ Quite strange tales, in fact. They might even be true. ONLY AT THE...

The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the U.S. South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an advanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the U.S. South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage...

Winter, Chicago, 1920: They planned to meet at midnight. They would run off together and marry. But something went wrong. A story of two lovers . . . For young Nathan Devlin and Julia Tharpe, that missed meeting cleaves their relationship and sunders their lives. Nathan goes to prison, bitter, blaming Julia for lack of resolve. Julia continues with her career, equally bitter, blaming him for unfaithfulness. Years later, Julia learns the truth of that nights failed elopement, and of the dec...