One day, Mama Ngonsu told her son: "Normally, a child grew up and stayed around to help his parents. The world has changed, and things are no longer as they used to be. Things must not be normal all the time, otherwise life would not be life." When Emmanuel Kwanga gets a University scholarship, he travels from the lake and hills of Abehema to the Great City. Everyone in the village has invested in him their hopes for the good life. When the life they've imagined is cut short by the University guillotine, Emmanuel Kwanga must struggle to make sense of what the good life means - for himself and for Abehema - in a world where things are no longer as they used to be. This novel is about coming of age and coming to terms in Mimboland. It is also about the fragility of life and the strength of the human spirit. The filth and screaming splendor of the city and the perplexed tranquility of the village are juxtaposed, as the tension and conviviality between tradition and modernity are lived and explored. Roads and drivers, dreams and public transport link different geographies. Faltering along or speeding away, these spaces of risk, frustration and solidarity are filled with popular songs as vehicles for understanding events and relationships. With every crossing of the Pont de Maturit the story flows, and its mysteries surge. In this novel, the worlds of the living and the dead intermingle, as do the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible.

Burial processions are depressing, tearful events. Sadder still, when people make their last visits to a cemetery on the same day they bury acquaintances, friends, and even loved ones. With a simple toss of dirt, a final goodbye muttered into the wind, and moral obligations complete, most will never return. The dead are left to their solitude, their misery … neglected and forgotten. Beneath sacred grounds, cemeteries fight to keep these forgotten souls within their crumbling gates, to protect them against the sinister forces that consistently pull from the molten pits of another world. But their hold is weakening.

Andrea has long conversed with the dead, and has waited for the one who would help her on a most important quest to release these forgotten souls. She finds her partner in Darren, a recently graduated young man who is desperately searching for his calling. Together, the two set out on a journey to accomplish a seemingly insurmountable task, unaware of the horrible danger they are both in. If they should fail, humanity will pay the ultimate price on account of its negligence.

Winner of the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for Minnesota Nonfiction The stirring story of the reform movement that laid the groundwork for a modern mental health system in Minnesota In 1940 Engla Schey, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, took a job as a low-paid attendant at Anoka State Hospital, one of Minnesota’s seven asylums. She would work among people who were locked away under the shameful label “insane,” called inmates—and numbered more than 12,000 throughout the state. She acquired the knowledge and passion that would lead to “The Crusade for Forgotten Souls,” a campaign to reform the deplorable condition of mental institutions in Minnesota. This book chronicles that remarkable undertaking inspired and carried forward by ordinary people under the political leadership of Luther Youngdahl, a Swedish Republican who was the state’s governor from 1946 to 1951. Susan Bartlett Foote tells the story of those who made the crusade a success: Engla Schey, the catalyst; Reverend Arthur Foote, a modest visionary who guided Unitarians to constructive advocacy; Genevieve Steefel, an inveterate patient activist; and Geri Hoffner, an intrepid reporter whose twelve-part series for the Minneapolis Tribune galvanized the public. These reformers overcame barriers of class, ethnicity, and gender to stand behind the governor, who, at a turbulent moment in Minnesota politics, challenged his own party’s resistance to reform. The Crusade for Forgotten Souls recounts how these efforts broke the stigma of shame and silence surrounding mental illness, publicized the painful truth about the state’s asylums, built support among citizens, and resulted in the first legislative steps toward a modern mental health system that catapulted Minnesota to national leadership and empowered families of the mentally ill and disabled. Though their vision met resistance, the accomplishments of these early advocates for compassionate care of the mentally ill hold many lessons that resonate to this day, as this book makes compellingly clear.

Vampires . . . they ache, they love, they thirst for the forbidden. They are your friends and lovers, and your worst fears. “A major new voice in horror fiction . . . an electric style and no shortage of nerve.”—Booklist At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, look for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not; Ann, longing for love; and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself. Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds—Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah, whose eyes are as green as limes—are on their own lost journey, slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh. They find it in Nothing and Ann, leading them on a mad, illicit road trip south to New Orleans. Over miles of dark highway, Ghost pursues, his powers guiding him on a journey to reach his destiny, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Nothing from himself. . . . “An important and original work . . . a gritty, highly literate blend of brutality and sentiment, hope and despair.”—Science Fiction Chronicle

Kaylie Hart has finally accepted that she can’t run from her past any longer. The monsters in her life aren’t the kind that vanish when you turn on the light. But she’s had a harder time accepting that the brother she thought had been killed two years ago might still be alive. She needs to dust off her old Hunter skills if she's going to find him and learn the truth about what killed her family. In addition to hunting again, Kaylie has also decided to open her heart to a fellow Hunter, Rafe. But when Rafe becomes a Siren’s latest victim, Kaylie’s two worlds collide and she is forced to face both of her deepest fears- love and loss. Just when she starts to accept their situation, her friend, Hope, is pulled into the deadly Hunter world and Kaylie helplessly faces the possibility that she may have to kill her best friend.

The first new translation of Balzac’s 1847 novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in half a century, fully annotated and with an extensive introduction In Lost Souls, Honoré de Balzac’s brilliant evocation of nineteenth-century Paris, we enter a world of glittering wealth and grinding poverty, teeming with strivers, poseurs, and pleasure seekers along with those who struggle merely to survive. Between the heights of Parisian society and the criminal world lurking underneath, fate is about to catch up with Lucien de Rubempré, last seen in Lost Illusions, as his literary aspirations, his love for the courtesan Esther van Gobseck, and his scheme to marry the wealthy Clotilde become entangled in the cunning and ultimately disastrous ambitions of the Abbé Herrera, a villain for the ages. An extraordinary volume in Balzac’s vast Human Comedy (in which he endeavored to capture all of society), Lost Souls appears here in its first new English translation in half a century. Keenly attuned to the acerbic charm and subtleties of Balzac’s prose, this edition also includes an introduction presenting thorough biographical, literary, and historical context, as well as extensive notes throughout the text—an invaluable resource for today’s readers as they navigate Balzac’s copious allusions to classical and contemporaneous politics and literature.

“I start my story. Which, if I do say so myself, is a fine story for a Sunday drive. It’s a love story, at least up to the point that it gets tangled up in death and lies.” And so begins Father Hoven’s journey back to St. Jude and back to the memory of a time when he was “right out of the seminary and ready to set the world straight.” The young priest, however, could hardly be prepared for residents of the Minnesota community who harbored in the midst of their devout natures a host of dark secrets and earthy desires. Father Hoven tells of his early days in their company, speaking alternately with the sweetness of youthful ambitions and the ironic wisdom of old age. His is one of the most delightful voices in American fiction today.