Kirjahaku

David Riggs evokes the atmosphere and texture of Marlowe's life, from the stench and poverty of a childhood spent near Canterbury's abattoirs to the fanatical pursuit of classical learning at school. Marlowe won a place at Cambridge University, where he entered its world of 18-hour working days, religious intrigue and twilight homosexuality, tolerated but unspoken. The gifted student was not immune to the passions and fears of the wider society, and Riggs describes the mood of England in those years when Elizabeth's crown was anything but secure, and Spain and the Papacy were determined to overthrow her regime. Looming above everything is the Elizabethan state and its spy rings, with which Marlowe was already involved by the time he left Cambridge. His undercover missions brought him into contact with Catholic conspirators who were plotting to kill the Queen; yet as a playwright and thinker he was attracted to the most unorthodox and threatening idea of all - atheism. Marlowe's brief life was enigmatic, contradictory and glorious - and this magisterial work of reconstruction and scholarship illuminates it with immense richness.

Ben Jonson's contemporaries admired him above all other playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance. He was the “great refiner” who alchemized the bleakest aspects of everyday life into brilliant images of folly and deceit. He was also a celebrated reprobate and an ambitious entrepreneur. David Riggs illuminates every facet of this extraordinary career, giving us the first major biography of Jonson in over sixty years.The story of Jonson's life provides a broad view of the literary procession in early modern England and the milieu in which Elizabethan drama was produced. Beginning as a journeyman actor, Jonson was soon a novice playwright; his first important play was staged in 1598, with Shakespeare in the cast. He was by turns the self-styled leader of a literary elite, a writer of court masques, the first dramatist to publish his own Works, a royal pensioner, and a genteel poet. As Jonson transformed himself from an artisan into a gentleman, his need to transcend his class origins led him to murder, to his notorious quarrels with Thomas Dekker, John Marston, and Inigo Jones, and to his lifelong rivalry with Shakespeare. Riggs traces the roots of Jonson's aggressiveness back to the turmoil of his childhood and adolescence. He offers new and convincing accounts of Jonson's latent hostility toward his bricklayer stepfather, his reckless marriage to Anne Lewis, and his conflicted relationships with his children.This vivid portrait synthesizes six decades of scholarship and new historical evidence. Sixty halftones beautifully illustrate the story and capture the spirit of the age. With Riggs' original interpretations of Jonson's masterpieces and lesser known works, Ben Jonson: A Life will prove the standard account of this complex man's life and works for many years to come.

Bomarcus, a mysterious voice heard only in dreams, speaks to a young mental patient to foretell a tragedy about to befall a sinister, polygamous family in northern Arizona. A war-wounded veteran of the Gulf War, now a psychological researcher from Seattle, is abruptly coerced away from a much-anticipated motorcycle vacation in South Dakota. He becomes tangled in a desperate race to rescue several young women, the wives of a dangerous and demented patriarch. Shocking discoveries at the polygamous compound reveal a pattern of corruption, sex abuse, incest and murder, with origins decades earlier in the jungles of Vietnam. This second novel in a series beginning with "Lord of Obstacles", features Glenn Porter and Charlotte Waller, as they explore the deep and hidden connections shared by human beings. Mysterious voices demanding retribution and redemption, can sometimes reach out across time and space dimensions to communicate, when we allow ourselves to hear.

Embattled Shrine is a narrative of the Civil War at one of America's earliest national symbols, recounting how both sides conducted that war behind the Richmond-Petersburg front. Here is the most recent scholarship on one of the Civil War's forgotten places.