Many of the West’s best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh’s literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world.

The monarchs of seventeenth-century Europe put a surprisingly high priority on the abolition of dueling, seeing its eradication as an important step from barbarism toward a rational state monopoly on justice. But it was one thing to ban dueling and another to stop it. Duelists continued to kill each other with swords or pistols in significant numbers deep into the nineteenth century. In 1883 Maupassant called dueling “the last of our unreasonable customs.” As a dramatic and forbidden ritual from another age, the duel retained a powerful hold on the public mind and, in particular, the literary imagination. Many of the greatest names in Western literature wrote about or even fought in duels, among them Corneille, Molière, Richardson, Rousseau, Pushkin, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Twain, Conrad, Chekhov, and Mann. As John Leigh explains, the duel was a gift as a plot device. But writers also sought to discover in duels something more fundamental about human conflict and how we face our fears of humiliation, pain, and death. The duel was, for some, a social cause, a scourge to be mocked or lamented; yet even its critics could be seduced by its risk and glamour. Some conservatives defended dueling by arguing that the man of noble bearing who cared less about living than living with honor was everything that the contemporary bourgeois was not. The literary history of the duel, as Touché makes clear, illuminates the tensions that attended the birth of the modern world.

Shae Caldwell left Connecticut financially and emotionally devastated. Aunt Amanda's ranch in Dawson, Wy. was her last hope. Shae and her son set out on an adventure in the West that they could never experience in the East. What Eric Sinclair teaches Shae, is the true meaning of love. And it is that true love that keeps Shae going through what is about to be the hardest thing she will ever have to endure. Death is no stranger to Shae, and trying to deal with it by running away only makes it worse. An Indian myth, shakes Shae's reality. Is her young son really being lead by a ghost?

Gaston La Touche (1854-1913) was a leading colourist of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, who associated with all the important artists of the period. This book features many of his paintings from private collections. Selina Baring Maclennan has been researching Gaston La Touche for seventeen years and is a recognised expert on the artist. She has worked in the art world for over twenty years with comprehensive experience in leading commercial galleries and auction houses.

The parasitic children of the JumpSpace Entities, are the cause of half Travis's problems and she'd love to be rid of them; except that there's a fine line between them and what makes her what she is. They brought her father's memories into her mind and without those memories she has nothing and she might return to a mindless coma. The three agencies that claim responsibility for her creation are expecting her to tow the line with them and several other organizations would use her or kill her if she won't work with them. Some of those have raised the bar by threatening anyone near her. Now someone expects her to do their dirty work and won't take no for an answer. Everyone thinks they own her. She must question what constitutes property and what defines sentient and sapient and then whether a being who is both should be owned by anyone; and then she must decide if she intends on freeing herself alone or all the other cloned life-forms created and enslaved by man. In the Science Fiction Thriller Cripple-Mode:Hot Electric Give me liberty or give me death wasn't Travis Lucia Hamilton-McQueen's foremost declaration. She'd returned from near death and wasn't keen on revisiting; she just wanted her life back. Granddaughter of a mass murderer; daughter of a convict; suspected terrorist with confused memories. No not that life, nor the alternate. A soulless clone with limited freedom and an amnesiac ward of Greater Terran Galactic Properties, with a possible Dissociative fugue identity; consigned to convalesce aboard Medical Space Station Perl. Mix in a rogue General with a handful of assassins and her life slips from surreal to something straight out of science fiction and fantasy.

The American debut of a bestselling Israeli novel about a man who crosses into another world for the sake of love.