Weaving early accounts of witchcraft-trial records, ecclesiastical tracts, folklore, and popular iconography-into new and startling patterns, Carlo Ginzburg presents in Ecstasies compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across Europe and in England for thousands of years.

H.D’s writing continues to inspire generations of readers. Bringing together a number of never-before-published essays, this new collection of H.D.’s writings introduces her compelling perspectives on art, myth, and the creative process. While H.D. is best known for her elemental poetry, which draws heavily on the imagery of natural and ancient worlds, her critical writings remain a largely underexplored and unpublished part of her oeuvre. Crucial to understanding both the formative contexts surrounding her departure from Imagism following the First World War and her own remarkable creative vision, Notes on Thought and Vision, written in 1918, is one of the central works in this collection. H.D. guides her reader to the untamed shores of the Scilly Isles, where we hear of powerful, transformative experiences and of her intense relationship with the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The accompanying essays, many published here for the first time, help color H.D.’s astute critical engagement with the past, from the city of Athens and the poetry of ancient Greece. Like Letters to a Young Painter (2017), also published in the ekphrasis series, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process.

A bestsellig romance author suffers a paralyzing stroke and her philandering husband wonders how this will affect his gambling and whoring budget; two young lovers must come to terms with their chemically induced deformity; Lloyd from Leith transfigures his passion for an unhappily married woman. These three tales confirm Irvine Welsh's position as a master of the "chemical" romance genre.

Honorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theater Research Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment. Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism’s relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices—including literature, photography, audio recording, and early film—Lindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent forms of being beside. Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized gestures—especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy—to racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow America.

The powerful and influential last poems of an unsung master, now again available, with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Mark Doty James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death—has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available—clear, passionate, and hard-earned. The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

"Education and Ecstasy" was originally written as a call for reform in America's school systems. Published in the 60s, and then revised in the 80s, this book reveals the deep-rooted structural problems in American schools--problems which still plague the system. (Education/Teaching)

From the author of Illuminations, a novel of the imminent composer Alma Mahler, what she sacrificed for love, and how she brought men to their knees. Coming of age in the midst of a creative and cultural whirlwind in Vienna, young, beautiful Alma Schindler yearns to make her mark as a composer. A new era of possibility for women is dawning, and she is determined to make the most of it. But Alma loses her heart to the great composer Gustav Mahler, nearly twenty years her senior. He demands that she give up her music as a condition of their marriage. Torn by her love and in awe of his genius, how will she remain true to herself and her artistic passion? Part cautionary tale, part triumph of the feminist spirit, Ecstasy reveals the true Alma Mahler: composer, author, daughter, sister, mother, wife, lover, and muse. Mary Sharratt has finally given center stage to one of the most controversial and complex women of her time. A New York Post Must-Read Boook “Sharratt has made an impressive career fleshing out the lives of women rendered one-dimensional in the pages of history...With this fine work, [Sharratt] has us wanting more.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “Alma Mahler is certainly worthy of joining the remarkable women about whom Sharratt has previously written.”—St. Paul Pioneer Press “This winning historical novel offers an enjoyable portrait of an ambitious woman whose struggles are as relevant today as they were a century ago.”—Publishers Weekly “[Sharratt] has in-depth knowledge of classical music and turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna…Recommended for readers who like the peaks and valleys of nonstop drama.”—Library Journal