Die Schwarze Spinne is a religious allegory about morals and religious living in the mid-nineteenth century, written by Jeremias Gotthelf. This work is an interlinear translation of Gotthelf's Die Schwarze Spinne with introductions to both the author and the work itself. In a small Swiss community, a baptism is the backdrop for a village elder to tell the story of his family and their life and death struggle with the devil himself. The elder relates the story of a knight and his ill treatment of the farmers of the area. The knight's inhuman demands upon the peasants bring about unforeseen consequences, which lead to the decimation of the village and, ultimately, the knight's own death. The plague released through a pact with the devil, the black spider, haunts the village for hundreds of years and must be fought with religious piety, courage, and devotion to traditional values. It is when one forgets God and his commandments that the black spider is at its most deadly. A true tale of morality written by a pastor in 1842, The Black Spider serves as a warning to those who, according to Gotthelf, go against the will of God.

'Since she was valorous, she said she was a man, and since Mahishan was speaking of love, he was feminine... If she was a combination of feminine and masculine qualities, why could he too not be a combination of the masculine and feminine?' Setting the stage with the Asura Mahishan's doomed love for the beautiful Devi, Ambai deftly combines myth and tradition with contemporary situations. In the title story, the woman who is mother, daughter, solver of all problems for her family, finds that it is only a black spider on a wall in a deserted guesthouse with whom she can share her own pain and suffering; in Burdensome Days, Bhramara enters a world of politics that turns her music into a commodity; while in A Moon to Devour, it is through her lover's mother that Sagu learns that marriage is not a necessity for motherhood. Like the strains of the veena that play again and again in this masterful concert of stories, journeys too weave in and out. By train or bus or autorickshaws, each journey takes one into a different facet of human nature: the power of caste over the most basic of bodily needs like thirst; the simple generosity of a mentally afflicted child who loves the colour blue; the loneliness of dying amongst strangers, and the final journey of a veena whose owner herself had gone before it into another world. As in most of her writing, women are central to Ambai's stories, but so too is her deep understanding of, as she puts it, 'the pulls and tensions' between the many different things that make up life and ultimately, create a story.

The emergence of cinema as a predominant form of mass entertainment in the 1910s inspired intellectuals to rethink their definitions of art. The Great Black Spider on Its Knock-Kneed Tripod traces the encounter of Italy's writers with cinema, and in doing so offers vibrant new perspectives on the country's early twentieth-century culture. This comparative study focuses on the immediate responses to this cultural phenomenon of three highly influential intellectuals, each with a competing aesthetic vision – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism; Gabriele D'Annunzio, leader of Italian Decadentism; and Luigi Pirandello, a father of modern European theatre and theorist of humour. Along with demonstrating how the popularization of the feature-length narrative influenced each author's outlook and theories, Michael Syrimis unravels the extent to which cinema enforced or neutralized the ideological and aesthetic differences between them.

Black Spider thinks Yellow Bird should be more traditional. "Why don't you make a lovely, cozy nest?" asks Black Spider. "I like hotels, actually," says Yellow Bird. But is Yellow Bird willing to change his unconventional ways? He is a unique bird who does his own thing in his own way. Black Spider soon learns that this bird likes sailing, vanilla ice cream, and even red guitars-but his most shocking discovery comes at the end, when Black Spider innocently asks, "Why don't you eat some yummy, squelchy worms?" This quirky, stylish tale is full of wit and whimsy. Its ever-so-slightly macabre ending serves as the perfect punch line to this clever book.

An NYRB Classics Original It is a sunny summer Sunday in a remote Swiss village, and a christening is being celebrated at a lovely old farmhouse. One of the guests notes an anomaly in the fabric of the venerable edifice: a blackened post that has been carefully built into a trim new window frame. Thereby hangs a tale, one that, as the wise old grandfather who has lived all his life in the house proceeds to tell it, takes one chilling turn after another, while his audience listens in appalled silence. Featuring a cruelly overbearing lord of the manor and the oppressed villagers who must render him service, an irreverent young woman who will stop at nothing, a mysterious stranger with a red beard and a green hat, and, last but not least, the black spider, the tale is as riveting and appalling today as when Jeremias Gotthelf set it down more than a hundred years ago. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism), or as a vision, anticipating H. P. Lovecraft, of cosmic horror. There’s no question, in any case, that it is unforgettably creepy.

Don't say you weren't warned. Black widows have red markings that let you know they are dangerous. Bother a black widow and experience the effects of its potent poison. Get caught up in reading about the deadly black widow spider.

A powerful ring. A dangerous web. When Maria inherits a strange, spider-shaped ring from her grandmother, she doesn't realize she's also inheriting a strange power -- the power to control spiders and have them do whatever she wants. This is a pretty cool thing when it comes to fetching objects from another room . . . or if Maria wants to use the spiders to get back at some mean kids in her class. But the power comes with a price. Maria has attracted the attention of the Black Widow -- who is trying to collect all the spider magic for herself. The Black Widow is not going to let anything stand in her way -- especially not Maria.The story of the ring is being woven like a web -- and Maria is going to have to do everything she can to not get trapped within it.