An empty screen, eerie serenade – who can resist woven tales sung by chiseled tongues? Woven Tales encapasulates selected poems from the Unspeakable Truths Series (Damnation Begins, 2007, and Baptism By Blood, 2009) and the Versified Series (Versified Darkness, 2008 and Versified Delusions, 2012).

Tales I Have Woven is a collection of short stories that spin around the colorful fabric of life. The common threads of love, search for meaning, human choices, family values, tradition, change, environment, destiny and life's purpose are intricately contrived into a tapestry that blends into one. In The Stone House, Mr. So lived his life following the family values of honor and responsibility. He took care of his father's textile company and of his aging mother. Polistico was the respected tenor in a little village until the day of a big wedding in the story of Polistico. In Chrysalis the quiet town of Anao woke up hearing a bellowing voice of a strange creature. It was a historical town that whispered and was heard. And in Amapola, the fields of poppies in the valley made people leave and move. It was the restless need to chase and venture towards something that followed them. As the lives of these characters unfold, Elenita unveils her keen observation in the dynamic power of human sentiments, of love, compassion, purpose, and communal spirit. Tales I Have Woven is a propitious literary debut.

The Quechua people of southern Peru are both agriculturalists and herders who maintain large herds of alpacas and llamas. But they are also weavers, and it is through weaving that their cultural traditions are passed down over the generations. Owing to the region's isolation, the textile symbols, forms of clothing, and technical processes remain strongly linked to the people's environment and their ancestors. Heckman's photographs convey the warmth and vitality of the Quechua people and illustrate how the land is intricately woven into their lives and their beliefs. Quechua weavers in the mountainous regions near Cuzco, Peru, produce certain textile forms and designs not found elsewhere in the Andes. Their textiles are a legacy of their Andean ancestors. Andrea Heckman has devoted more than twenty years to documenting and analyzing the ways Andean beliefs persist over time in visual symbols embedded in textiles and portrayed in rituals. Her primary focus is the area around the sacred peak of Ausangate, in southern Peru, some eighty-five miles southeast of the former Inca capital of Cuzco. The core of this book is an ethnographic account of the textiles and their place in daily life that considers how the form and content of Quechua patterns and designs pass stories down and preserve traditions as well as how the ritual use of textiles sustain a sense of community and a connection to the past. Heckman concludes by assessing the influences of the global economy on indigenous Quechua, who maintain their own worldview within the larger fabric of twentieth-century cultural values and hence have survived everything from Latin American militarism to a tidal wave of post-modern change.

SIX STORIES. ONE EPIC JOURNEY When the world as you know it is rent into shreds, you either survive or you die. When your friends, your neighbors, members of your own family starve to death in front of your young eyes, only a steel drive to live will rescue you. If your government turns on you, killing everyone in your community, only foresight and the guts to listen to it will help you. When widespread poverty and lack of hope destroy the fabric of reality, only fortune can save you. When you survive any or all of these traumatic events, you live to create the next generation. Cam and Tessa are the next generation. Raised by Holocaust survivors and refugees in New York City in the 1970's, Tessa battles not only her own demons but those her family faced. She takes nothing for granted and relies only on herself as she navigates a dangerous and dark period of time in the city. Cam needs to escape the midwestern upbringing that began with his mother's journey from somewhere in Eastern Europe to an orphanage in Iowa and with his great grandfather's early life in Ireland; and ends with his father's spiraling and destructive behavior. Directionless and lost, Cam takes a risk to find his way. At a chance meeting, they discover that they are kindred spirits; and against the push from both sides, they clasp hands and decide to face whatever may come together. Woven dives deeply into events you learned about in history class and makes them personal. Written as a series of novellas, this book weaves the lives of four very different families into one story, showing that out of overwhelming adversity can come strength, hope, and a future no one predicted.

The grassroots publishing sensation that began with "Leaning Into the Wind" continues in this second volume of women's writing from the heart of the American West.

"Through an analysis of specific weaving stories, the difference between a text and a textile becomes blurred. Such stories portray women weavers transforming their domestic activity of making textiles into one of making texts by inscribing their cloth with both personal and political messages."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume is based on papers from the second in a series of three conferences that deal with the multi-scalar processes of heritage-making, ranging from the local to the national and international levels, involving different players with different degrees of agency and interests. These players include citizens and civil society, the state, and international organizations and actors. The current volume focuses on the role of citizens and civil society in the politics of heritage-making, looking at how these players at the grass-roots level make sense of the past in the present. Who are these local players that seek to define the meaning of heritage in their everyday lives? How do they negotiate with the state, or contest the influence of the state, in determining what their heritage is? These and other questions will be taken up in various Asian contexts in this volume to foreground the local dynamics of heritage politics.