1997, Boston -- Fifteen years ago an eleven-year-old girl died an unspeakable death in a small Midwestern city.... As a child, Weeble earns her nickname for her ability to stand up under difficult circumstances. Despite the squalor, neglect, and abuse of her home, Weeble adopts the role of protector, first for her younger sister, Annie, and then for her best friend, Lauren. When Lauren dies, Weeble hides her stark, painful childhood from herself in order to survive. Years later and now a civil engineer living thousands of miles away, Weeble's tenuous hold on her emotional state has started to unravel. The methods she uses to cope with her shame and grief no longer work. After winning a grant to create a Web site dedicated to the victims of serial killers, Weeble shuts out longtime friends and begins training for the Boston Sprint Triathlon. Running hard has always kept the nightmares at bay. Then during an early-morning run, she's caught off guard by a Freegan named Tom Paul, a glass artist and modern mystic. Weeble's numb detachment shatters. As her past increasingly invades her present, she will be forced to confront the truth of what happened that long ago summer. Using a structure that switches abruptly between radiant present and dark past, Saint Sebastian's Head tells the ultimately healing love story of a damaged woman and the faithful man who can see the hidden beauty of her soul.

“What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, the work that established both men as important art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.

Plague, a devastating and recurring affliction throughout the Renaissance, had a major impact on European life. Not only was pestilence a biological problem, but it was also read as a symptom of spiritual degeneracy and it caused widespread social disorder. Assembling a picture of the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to plague from medical, spiritual and civic perspectives, this book uncovers the place of music - whether regarded as an indispensable medicine or a moral poison that exacerbated outbreaks - in the management of the disease. This original musicological approach further reveals how composers responded, in their works, to the discourses and practices surrounding one of the greatest medical crises in the pre-modern age. Addressing topics such as music as therapy, public rituals and performance and music in religion, the volume also provides detailed musical analysis throughout to illustrate how pestilence affected societal attitudes toward music.