In 1929, in a remote county of the Arkansas Ozarks, the gruesome murder of harmonica-playing drifter Connie Franklin and the brutal rape of his... teenaged fiancée captured the attention of a nation on the cusp of the Great Depression. National press from coast to coast ran stories of the sensational exploits of night-riding moonshiners, powerful "Barons of the Hills," and a world of feudal oppression in the isolation of the rugged Ozarks. The ensuing arrest of five local men for both crimes and the confusion and superstition surrounding the trial and conviction gave Stone County a dubious and short-lived notoriety. Closely examining how the story and its regional setting were interpreted by the media, Brooks Blevins recounts the gripping events of the murder investigation and trial, where a man claiming to be the murder victim--the "Ghost" of the Ozarks--appeared to testify. Local conditions in Stone County, which had no electricity and only one long-distance telephone line, frustrated the dozen or more reporters who found their way to the rural Ozarks, and the developments following the arrests often prompted reporters' caricatures of the region: accusations of imposture and insanity, revelations of hidden pasts and assumed names, and threats of widespread violence. Locating the past squarely within the major currents of American history, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South paints a convincing backdrop to a story that, more than 80 years later, remains riddled with mystery.

Poetry. Jim Reese's newest collection, GHOST ON 3RD, is riddled with love, latent violence, humor, and prison life. Critics who said that his last... collection kicked "like an old pump-12 gauge" will be happy to find the barrels sawed off in this book. Reese shows no sign of putting the hammer down--he takes his reader on the daily routine and long nights that are an inescapable part of raising two small daughters--shows us how family is not a burden but a complex source of joy. Ride shotgun with him down the lonesome byways of the Great Plains westward into San Quentin prison, where he has full access and isn't afraid to ask the hard questions. Author John Price writes: "Reese's beautiful and powerful poems are born of 'wish and skin and bone,' of dirt and dignity, of faith and fry grease, of laughter and lament. To read them is to be carried to a place where risk is a promise fulfilled--whether it be the homing memory of a grandfather or eating suspicious pastries or raising children or teaching poetry to inmates. It is a place where the familiar opens into the extraordinary, and even, at times, the miraculous."

“Singer of stories, lyric raconteur, Sydney Lea has evolved—through a long, rich career—into one of America’s most harrowing and honest poets.... Ghost Pain is his most eloquent and wrenching book.”—T.R. Hummer“Ghost Pain is a remarkable book, which takes his work to a new level.”—Stephen DunnThe eighth poetry collection by the founder of New England Review explores addiction, alcoholism, violence and the uses and inadequacies of art.

Coming from the "independent" or "free" theater movement developed at the end of the nineteenth century, both Miss Julia and Ghosts have come to be... looked upon as watershed events in the critical response to what we now accept as the Modern Drama. This edition for performance and study, translated and edited by Thaddeus L. Torp, includes an introduction, a chronology of principal works and important events in the authors' lives, and a bibliography.

The plays in this volume focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling lies - and exposing them. In "Ghosts", Osvald Alving... returns home only to discover the truth about the father he always looked up to, and learns the horrific effect his father's debauchery has had on him. It was Ibsen's most provocative drama, stripping away the surface of a middle-class family to expose layers of hypocrisy and immorality. "A Public Enemy" sets two brothers against each other when one wishes to make public the facts about the polluted water in the public baths of their home town. And "When We Dead Wake" tells of an artist meeting an old lover by chance and rejecting his wife, in a symbolic exploration of Ibsen's own literary life and the sacrifices he made in his work.

The Japanese have ambivalent attitudes toward death, deeply rooted in pre-Buddhist traditions. In this scholarly but accessible work, authors Iwasaka... and Toelken show that everyday beliefs and customs--particularly death traditions--offer special insight into the living culture of Japan.

Powerful psychological drama (1881) exposes hypocrisy of social conventions and society's moral codes. Mrs. Helen Alving is haunted by her husband's... infidelities and the disease he has passed to their son. Ultimately, she is forced to acknowledge the "ghosts" that have kept her from living "just for the joy of life."

As groundbreaking as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring, Ghosts from the Nursery" presents startling evidence on how abuse and neglect during the first two... years of life is creating a tide of violent youth National media tour.

As groundbreaking as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring, Ghosts from the Nursery" presents startling evidence on how abuse and neglect during the first two... years of life is creating a tide of violent youth.

Henrik Ibsen Translated by Christopher HamptonFull Length, DramaCharacters: 3 male, 2 femaleInterior Set This riveting family drama is a classic of the... modern theatre. Oswald Alving returns for the dedication of the orphanage to his father's memory and has a flirtation with the family maid who, it turns out, is his father's illegitimate daughter. As the long-supressed truths collide, the orphanage is destroyed by fire, the maid deserts the family in disgust when she learns her true parentage, and Mrs. Alving is left alone to care for her hopelessly insane son who has fallen prey to the social disease that killed his father. The role of Mrs. Alving, considered one of the greatest in the modern repertoire, has been played by Liv Ullman, Geraldine Page, Eva Le Galliene, Mrs. Fiske, Alla Nazimova and Eleonora Duse.

Blossom Culp is the outspoken outcast of Bluff City, always getting into trouble. No one wants to cross her, especially now that she's revealed that she... can see the Unseen. Then Blossom herself is stunned, because her lie turns out to be truth. She actually does have second sight...and she is "on board" the sinking Titanic.

Human ears, strung like beads on a cord; scalps with hair and ears still intact; infant bones in a medicine bundle; corpses, whole, in a cardboard box.... These artifacts in an obscure corner of the Smithsonian cause Indian ghosts to haunt, torment, and murder researchers--even as they themselves are tormented by the items in the museum's collection. Only the sacred rituals of Indian medicine men can make it safe to be around these dangerous artifacts.

The most unsettling and stunning of Aira's short novels published so far by New Directions.“On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building,... visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course.”—from Ghosts Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and handsome ghosts around their quarters, but the teenage daughter is the most curious. Her questions about them become more and more heartfelt until the story reaches a critical, chilling moment when the mother realizes that her daughter's life hangs in the balance.