The Rose Garden Society’s annual festival starts tomorrow. With competition so fierce the judges remain secret to avoid threats and bribes, a few broken stems could win or lose the coveted Gardener of the Year award. Dog walker Penelope Standing enjoys a nice shade tree, but that’s the extent of her gardening interest. She worries more about all the dogs missing after last night’s storm. Crumbling fences and high winds make a bad combination. But there may be a link between the missing dogs and the festival. If you love outrageously fun action in your cozy mysteries, grab Death Smells a Rose — the latest in the Penelope Standing Mysteries.

The short tale A Rose for Emily was first published on April 30, 1930, by American author William Faulkner. This narrative is set in Faulkner's fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi, in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha County. It was the first time Faulkner's short tale had been published in a national magazine. Emily Grierson, an eccentric spinster, is the subject of A Rose for Emily. The peculiar circumstances of Emily's existence are described by a nameless narrator, as are her strange interactions with her father and her lover, Yankee road worker Homer Barron.

The Rose Garden Society's annual festival starts tomorrow. With competition so fierce the judges remain secret to avoid threats and bribes, a few broken stems could win or lose the coveted Gardener of the Year award. Dog walker Penelope Standing enjoys a nice shade tree, but that's the extent of her gardening interest. She worries more about all the dogs missing after last night's storm. Crumbling fences and high winds make a bad combination. But there may be a link between the missing dogs and the festival. If you love outrageously fun action, grab Death Smells a Rose - the latest in the Penelope Standing Mysteries.

This book explores the role of bodily, sensory experience in early Christianity (first – seventh centuries AD) by focusing on the importance of smell in ancient Mediterranean culture. Following its legalization in the fourth century Roman Empire, Christianity cultivated a dramatically flourishing devotional piety, in which the bodily senses were utilized as crucial instruments of human-divine interaction. Rich olfactory practices developed as part of this shift, with lavish uses of incense, holy oils, and other sacred scents. At the same time, Christians showed profound interest in what smells could mean. How could the experience of smell be construed in revelatory terms? What specifically could it convey? How and what could be known through smell? Scenting Salvation argues that ancient Christians used olfactory experience for purposes of a distinctive religious epistemology: formulating knowledge of the divine in order to yield, in turn, a particular human identity. Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources, Susan Ashbrook Harvey examines the ancient understanding of smell through religious rituals, liturgical practices, mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, homiletic conventions; scientific, medical, and cosmological models; ascetic disciplines, theological discourse, and eschatological expectations. In the process, she argues for a richer appreciation of ancient notions of embodiment, and of the roles the body might serve in religion.

New York Times best-selling author and renowned science journalist Ed Yong compiles the best science and nature writing published in 2020. "The stories I have chosen reflect where I feel the field of science and nature writing has landed, and where it could go," Ed Yong writes in his introduction. "They are often full of tragedy, sometimes laced with wonder, but always deeply aware that science does not exist in a social vacuum. They are beautiful, whether in their clarity of ideas, the elegance of their prose, or often both." The essays in this year's Best American Science and Nature Writing brought clarity to the complexity and bewilderment of 2020 and delivered us necessary information during a global pandemic. From an in-depth look at the moment of the virus's outbreak, to a harrowing personal account of lingering Covid symptoms, to a thoughtful analysis on how the pandemic will impact the environment, these essays, as Yong says, "synthesize, evaluate, dig, unveil, and challenge," imbuing a pivotal moment in history with lucidity and elegance. THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2021 INCLUDES - SUSAN ORLEAN - EMILY RABOTEAU - ZEYNEP TUFEKCI - HELEN OUYANG - HEATHER HOGAN BROOKE JARVIS - SARAH ZHANG and others

This book is a gentle reminder for anyone who is lost in life, experiencing difficulty in relationships, or looking for hope and trying to rediscover their self-worth. You can't understand the beauty and value of love unless your heart falls apart. No matter how hard life has been for you, no matter how tired you are, there's always a reason to live. Even a dead rose still smells great. And amid the shattered pieces of a broken heart, there's always some hope. It will help those who are trying to heal from things that they can't talk about.

"The columns in this book were previously published in The Times-picayune"--Title page verso.