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"No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Whartonâs most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Whartonâs final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937.
In The Ladyâs Maidâs Bell, the earliest tale included here, a servantâs dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in All Soulsâ the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter.
In all her writing, Whartonâs great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and...>>
"Leo Braudy, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has won accolades for revealing the complex and constantly shifting history behind seemingly unchanging ideas of fame, war, and masculinity.
Continuing his interest in the history of emotion, this book explores how fear has been shaped into images of monsters and monstrosity. From the Protestant Reformation to contemporary horror films and fiction, he explores four major types: the monster from nature (King Kong), the created monster (Frankenstein), the monster from within (Mr. Hyde), and the monster from the past (Dracula). Drawing upon deep historical and literary research, Braudy discusses the lasting presence of fearful imaginings in an...>>
"Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yogaâs origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize.
To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yogaâs practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asiaâs vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilitiesâwhich can include raising the dead, possession, and levitationâto acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who arenât...>>
