Imaginary Homelands

IMAGINE... Leaving your house in the middle of the night. Knowing your mother is doing her best, but she's just as scared as you. IMAGINE... Starting a new school, making friends. Seeing how happy it makes your mother. Hearing a voice, calling out to you. IMAGINE... Following the signs, into the woods. Going missing for six days. Remembering nothing about what happened. IMAGINE... Something that will change everything... And having to save everyone you love.

Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered. Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents. Homelands is at once a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

“The art of the biographer consists specifically in choice. He is not meant to worry about speaking truth; he must create human characteristics amidst the chaos.”—Marcel Schwob Imaginary Lives remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Apollinaire, Borges, Jarry and Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas De Quincey and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue. These 22 portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique lives, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows. These “imaginary lives” thus acquaint us with the “Hateful Poet” Cecco Angiolieri instead of his lifelong rival, Dante Alighieri; the would-be romantic pirate Major Stede Bonnet instead of the infamous Blackbeard who would lead him to the gallows; the false confessor Nicolas Loyseleur rather than Joan of Arc whom he cruelly deceived; or the actor Gabriel Spenser in place of the better-remembered Ben Jonson who ran a sword through his lung. Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. The secret influence on generations of writers, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French).

• Last book of poetry, Animal Eye,” named one of the top 5 poetry books of 2012 by Publishers Weekly• Interested in multi-media essays and poems with strongly historical influences• Book is illustrated with incredible Andrea Modica photographs of skulls unearthed at the Colorado Mental Health Institute• Seattle area local and current resident of Salt Lake City• Mental illness and constructions of American femininity are heavily present in this work• Rekdal is on the faculty of Kundiman, an organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American literature

In 1352 King Edward III had expanded the legal definition of treason to include the act of imagining the death of the king, opening up the category of «constructive» treason, in which even a subject's thoughts might become the basis for prosecution. By the sixteenth century, treason was perceived as an increasingly serious threat and policed with a new urgency. Referring to the extensive early modern literature on the subject of treason, Imaginary Betrayals reveals how and to what extent ideas of proof and grounds for conviction were subject to prosecutorial construction during the Tudor period. Karen Cunningham looks at contemporary records of three prominent cases in order to demonstrate the degree to which the imagination was used to prove treason: the 1542 attainder of Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, charged with having had sexual relations with two men before her marriage; the 1586 case of Anthony Babington and twelve confederates, accused of plotting with the Spanish to invade England and assassinate Elizabeth; and the prosecution in the same year of Mary, Queen of Scots, indicted for conspiring with Babington to engineer her own accession to the throne. Linking the inventiveness of the accusations and decisions in these cases to the production of contemporary playtexts by Udall, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, Imaginary Betrayals demonstrates how the emerging, flexible discourses of treason participate in defining both individual subjectivity and the legitimate Tudor state. Concerned with competing representations of self and nationhood, Imaginary Betrayals explores the implications of legal and literary representations in which female sexuality, male friendship, or private letters are converted into the signs of treacherous imaginations.

Christopher Reese has been through a lot by the age of seven. He will go through much more before he turns eight. All his mother Kate Reese ever wanted to do is protect him. She will have to do that more than she ever imagined. Their new home, the town of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, is sleepy, ordinary, and isolated. In other words: perfect for what is about to happen. Something that will deeply mark everyone: from Christopher and his mother, to the local sheriff, the residents of the retirement home, and every student at the school. Something which no one can explain, but everyone can feel. Something that will change everything...

IMAGINE... Leaving your house in the middle of the night. Knowing your mother is doing her best, but she's just as scared as you. IMAGINE... Starting a new school, making friends. Seeing how happy it makes your mother. Hearing a voice, calling out to you. IMAGINE... Following the signs, into the woods. Going missing for six days. Remembering nothing about what happened. IMAGINE... Something that will change everything... And having to save everyone you love.

IMAGINE... Leaving your house in the middle of the night. Knowing your mother is doing her best, but she's just as scared as you. IMAGINE... Starting a new school, making friends. Seeing how happy it makes your mother. Hearing a voice, calling out to you. IMAGINE... Following the signs, into the woods. Going missing for six days. Remembering nothing about what happened. IMAGINE... Something that will change everything... And having to save everyone you love.