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Wit, compassion and insight combine in this entertaining novel that explores the politics and human comedy behind writers’ festivals and the publishing industry. Writers’ festivals can be hotbeds of literary and romantic intrigue, and the Oceania is up there with the best of them. Rookie director Rae McKay, recently returned from New York, fears she has bitten off more than she can chew. Pressure comes not only from local and international writers but also from the prestigious Opus Book Award, which this year is being hosted by the festival. Add to that high-level diplomatic fallout surrounding a dissident Chinese writer, Rae’s slowly disintegrating private life and ongoing dramas invo...
One hundred mental patients are brutally massacred in the frigid cold of a Russian forest as they wait for a mysterious light coming down from the night sky. Their deaths are never spoken of again. More than three decades later, directors at mental hospitals in California are stunned when 100 patients—comatose for years—suddenly "wake up" and speak of a person called "The Commander" who will lead them to a place where they will be taken from Earth. One person may hold the answers—a severely mentally-ill homeless man whose knowledge of astronomy, physics and mathematics is not only more advanced than Einstein and Tesla, but can summon superhuman abilities in the blink of an eye. Taken i...
The Cuzco Valley of Peru was both the sacred and the political center of the largest state in the prehistoric Americas—the Inca Empire. From the city of Cuzco, the Incas ruled at least eight million people in a realm that stretched from modern-day Colombia to Chile. Yet, despite its great importance in the cultural development of the Americas, the Cuzco Valley has only recently received the same kind of systematic archaeological survey long since conducted at other New World centers of civilization. Drawing on the results of the Cuzco Valley Archaeological Project that Brian Bauer directed from 1994 to 2000, this landmark book undertakes the first general overview of the prehistory of the Cuzco region from the arrival of the first hunter-gatherers (ca. 7000 B.C.) to the fall of the Inca Empire in A.D. 1532. Combining archaeological survey and excavation data with historical records, the book addresses both the specific patterns of settlement in the Cuzco Valley and the larger processes of cultural development. With its wealth of new information, this book will become the baseline for research on the Inca and the Cuzco Valley for years to come.
Spanish America has produced numerous "folk saints" -- venerated figures regarded as miraculous but not officially recognized by the Catholic Church. Some of these have huge national cults with hundreds -- perhaps millions -- of devotees. In this book Frank Graziano provides the first overview in any language of these saints, offering in-depth studies of the beliefs, rituals, and devotions surrounding seven representative figures. These case studies are illuminated by comparisons to some hundred additional saints from contemporary Spanish America. Among the six primary cases are Difunta Correa, at whose shrines devotees offer bottles of water and used auto parts in commemoration of her tragi...
Charles Walker examines the largest rebellion in the history of Spain's American empire, led by Latin America's most iconic revolutionary, Tupac Amaru, and his wife. It began in 1780 as a multiclass alliance against European-born usurpers but degenerated into a vicious caste war, leaving a legacy that still influences South American politics today.
"As the Nation approached the 5-year mark of the start of the GWOT, the USAWC focused the attention of its Seventeenth Annual Strategy Conference on whether or not the evidence supports the continuing assumption that the Nation is really at war. Some would insist that the answer is obviously yes. The conference studied this question in depth with panels on the homeland security aspects, the international context, the legal foundation for the war, and the associated economic and domestic policy issues. The conclusion was that the answer to the question is not as clear as first thought. Much of the evidence suggests that the Nation or at least some parts of it is not at war."--Page v.
In December 1788, in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo, fifty-one-year-old Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón stood surrounded by twenty-four large wooden crates, each numbered and marked with its final destination of Madrid. The crates contained carefully preserved zoological, botanical, and mineral specimens collected from Trujillo's steamy rainforests, agricultural valleys, rocky sierra, and coastal desert. To accompany this collection, the Bishop had also commissioned from Indian artisans nine volumes of hand-painted images portraying the people, plants, and animals of Trujillo. He imagined that the collection and the watercolors not only would contribute to his ques...