But it seems the world around her won't cooperate -- she keeps getting involved with the wrong friends, the wrong older man, even the wrong Mr. Right. Her relationship with her family is downright dysfunctional -- while her mother is a holdover from the 1950s, her father embraces the go-go 1970s with abandon. So Taylor, left to her own devices, determines her life's road map -- a plan that will get her out of her house and out of Houston. A plan that will get her somewhere. "The Way to Somewhere" traces Taylor's odyssey as she moves from teenager to woman, with equal parts awkwardness, conflict, and resolve. All the while, Taylor struggles to shape reality into her dreams of the forever after. When a complex romantic entanglement leads to a fascination with furniture restoration, Taylor seems to have found the precise balance of science and logic that she desperately seeks. Yet somehow, her experiences continue to be more surprising and disastrous than smoothly aligned, until eventually all of these wrong turns set her life further on its own true course.Resonant and moving, funny and wise, "The Way to Somewhere" charts Taylor's growth as she flings herself headlong into sex, love, relationships, and renewal. In the end, Taylor's happiness hinges on learning not only to accept but to embrace those elements of her life that she had once tossed aside in search of better things.With the quick wit of Tom Perrotta's "Bad Haircut" and the emotional timbre of Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone," Angie Day's "The Way to Somewhere" is an exceptional exploration ofthat fragile bridge between adolescence and adulthood, and what shores us up -- or breaks us apart.

    Created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life, a reflection of simpler times that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of development and of the growth of material production, consumption, and technology decried what they perceived as the isolation and backwardness of the place and sought to "uplift" the mountain people through education and industrialization.Ronald D Eller has worked with local leaders, state policymakers, and national planners to translate the lessons of private industrial-development history into public policy affecting the region. In Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945, Eller examines the politics of development in Appalachia since World War II with an eye toward exploring the idea of progress as it has evolved in modern America. Appalachia's struggle to overcome poverty, to live in harmony with the land, and to respect the diversity of cultures and the value of community is also an American story. In the end, Eller concludes, "Appalachia was not different from the rest of America; it was in fact a mirror of what the nation was becoming."

    Powys thought Porius his masterpiece, but because of the paper shortage after World War II and the novel's lengthiness, he could not find a publisher for it. Only after he cut one-third from it was it accepted. This new edition not only brings Porius back into print, but makes the original book at last available to readers. Set in the geographic confines of Powys's own homeland of Northern Wales, Porius takes place in the course of a mere eight October days in 499 A.D., when King Arthur - a key character in the novel, along with Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin - was attempting to persuade the people of Britian to repel the barbaric Saxon invaders. Porius, the only child of Prince Einion of Edeyrnion, is the main character who is sent on a journey that is both historical melodrama and satirical allegory. A complex novel, Porius is a mixture of mystery and philosophy on a huge narrative scale, as if Nabokov or Pynchon tried to compress Dostoevsky into a Ulyssean mold. Writing in The New Yorker, George Steiner has said of the abridged Porius that it "combines [a] Shakespearean-epic sweep of historicity with a Jamesian finesse of psychological detail and acuity. Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which I believe to be the American masterpiece after Melville, is a smaller thing by comparison." This new, and first complete, edition of the novel substantiates both Steiner's judgement and Powys's claim for Porius as his masterpiece.

    “The group of beliefs which constituted what for convenience' sake is called the Egyptian religion in an existence of some thousands of years passed through nearly every phase known to the student of comparative mythology. If the theologians of ancient Egypt found it impossible to form a pantheon of deities with any hope of consistency, assigning to each god or goddess his or her proper position in the divine galaxy as ruling over a definite sphere, cosmic or psychical, it may be asked in what manner the modern mythologist is better equipped to reduce to order elements so recondite and difficult of elucidation as the mythic shapes of the divinities worshipped in the Nile Valley.”

    It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tom�s, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished."Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is--one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

    Feeding Desire analyses this beauty ideal in the context of Islam, conceptions of health, and notions of desire Full description

    Despite their numerical smallness the author contends that they made a major contribution to Western civilization. The author originated the Radio 4 programme "Bookshelf" and the Frank Delaney series on BBC television. His previous books are "James Joyce's Odyssey" and "Betjeman Country".

    Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness.Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement--how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics.Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America.

    Nowhere does it survive in more starkly archaic form than in the voraciously uninhibited episodes of the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, recorded here in full. Anthropological and psychological analyses by Radin, Kerenyi, and Jung reveal the Trickster as filling a twofold role: on the one hand he is an archetypal psychic structure" that harks back to "an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level" *Jung); on the other hand, his myth is a present-day outlet for the most unashamed and liberating satire of the onerous obligations of social order, religion, and ritual.Cover illustration by Susana Krause

    He demonstrates that beneath both language & myth there lies an unconscious "grammar" of experience, whose categories & canons aren't those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical "logic" is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, & that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous Power over even our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry & myth. The author analyzes such seemingly diverse (yet related) phenomena as the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, the Melanesian concept of Mana, the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, modern poetry, Ancient Egyptian religion & symbolic logic. He covers a vast range of material that is all too often neglected in studies of human thought. These six essays are of great interest to the student of philosophy or the philosophy of science, the historian, or the anthropologist. They are also timely for students of literature, what with the enormous emphasis placed upon "myth" in modern literary speculation. This book isn't superficial speculation by a dabbler, but a penetrating study by one of the most profound & sensitive philosophic minds of our time.

    The stories are vivid, dramatic and often humorous. Carolyne Larrington has made a representative selection, which she re-tells in a simple, direct way which is completely faithful to the style and spirit of her sources. Most collectors of local legends have been content merely to note how they may serve to explain some feature of the landscape or to warn of some supernatural danger, but Carolyne Larrington probes more deeply. By perceptive and delicate analysis, she explores their inner meanings. She shows how, through lightly coded metaphors, they deal with the relations of man and woman, master and servant, the living and the dead, the outer semblance and the inner self, mankind and the natural environment. Her fascinating book gives us a fuller insight into the value of our traditional tales.

    immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the 20th century.Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and imported contract workers.She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the illegal alien, a new legal and political subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social reality but a legal impossibility--a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal status created new challenges for liberal democratic society and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.Ngai's analysis is based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the 20th century.

    This classic of Japanese literature invites you to take your choice if you dare.In Ghostly Japan collects twelve ghostly stories from Lafcadio Hearn, deathless images of ghosts and goblins, touches of folklore and superstition, salted with traditions of the nation. While some of these stories contain nightmare imagery worthy of a midnight creature feature, others are not ghostly or ghastly at all. "Bits of Poetry" offers an engaging study on verse, and "Japanese Buddhist Proverbs" explains the meaning of several aphorisms based on Japanese cultural references.Whether you're looking to spot the demons that walk among us, or simply to enjoy the prose of a legendary craftsman, In Ghostly Japan affords countless delights. Stories include:"Fragment" about a young pilgrim who encounters a mountain of skulls"Ingwa-banashi" about a dying wife who bequeaths a rival a sinister legacy"A Passional Karma" about a spectral beauty who returns for her handsome samurai lover

    Always spectacular and, today, precisely predicable, eclipses have allowed us to know when the first Olympic games were played and, long before the first space probe, that the Moon was covered by dust.Eclipses have stunned, frightened, emboldened and mesmerized people for thousands of years. They were recorded on ancient turtle shells discovered in the Wastes of Yin in China, on clay tablets from Mesopotamia and on the Mayan “Dresden Codex." They are mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and at least eight times in the Bible. Columbus used them to trick people, while Renaissance painter Taddeo Gaddi was blinded by one. Sorcery was banished within the Catholic Church after astrologers used an eclipse to predict a pope’s death.In Mask of the Sun, acclaimed writer John Dvorak the importance of the number 177 and why the ancient Romans thought it was bad to have sexual intercourse during an eclipse (whereas other cultures thought it would be good luck). Even today, pregnant women in Mexico wear safety pins on their underwear during an eclipse. Eclipses are an amazing phenomena—unique to Earth—that have provided the key to much of what we now know and understand about the sun, our moon, gravity, and the workings of the universe.Both entertaining and authoritative, Mask of the Sun reveals the humanism behind the science of both lunar and solar eclipses. With insightful detail and vividly accessible prose, Dvorak provides explanations as to how and why eclipses occur—as well as insight into the forthcoming eclipse of 2017 that will be visible across North America.

    Based on fascinating archaeological discoveries, it includes everything from how to write your name in hieroglyphs to the proper way to bury a king, as well as:Tools and training of magiciansInterpreting dreamsAncient remedies for headaches, cataracts, and indigestionWrapping a mummyRecipes for magic potions and beauty creamsExplanations of amulets and pyramid powerA spell to entice a loverA fortune-telling calendarThese subjects and many more will appeal to everyone interested in Egyptology, magic, parapsychology, and the occult; or ancient religions and mythology.