Collection: Adult

"A project of epic proportions, pulled off with remarkable élan."
--Kirkus Reviews

A gripping exposé of deception, cult power, and the long shadow of Carlos Castaneda, the man behind the biggest literary hoax of the twentieth century.

Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, American Trickster defies conventional biography. It emerges as a chilling allegory for the Trump era, a trenchant critique of academia's complicity in distorting and erasing Indigenous culture, and a deep dive into the mechanics of New Age spiritual abuse.

Carlos Castaneda, born in Peru in 1925, fled to the U.S. in 1951, escaping responsibility for a child he fathered with a thirteen-year-old girl. He changed his name repeatedly, worked as a taxi driver, studied creative writing, and eventually enrolled in anthropology at UCLA in 1959. In 1968, the University of California Press published his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which described his supposed encounters with a Yaqui shaman who initiated him into a secret world of peyote-fueled visions and ancient knowledge never before shared with a "Westerner."

Castaneda was quickly hailed as a revolutionary figure. Admirers ranged from John Lennon and Joni Mitchell to Federico Fellini, George Lucas, and Octavio Paz. His books became international bestsellers and remain the most popular titles ever published on Native American spirituality--despite having little to no connection to actual Indigenous practices.

For a time, his truth went unchallenged. Then, in 1973, Time magazine published a searing exposé revealing that Castaneda wasn't who he claimed to be. As his academic credibility unraveled, he turned inward, building a secretive spiritual group that blurred the line between fiction and reality. Castaneda's followers, mostly women, became living extensions of the characters in his books--devoted disciples who often abandoned their former lives entirely.

By the 1990s, as book sales declined, the group emerged publicly, offering workshops and seminars to thousands across the globe. When Castaneda was diagnosed with liver cancer, he told his disciples he would not die, but burn from within and ascend to another realm--and invited them to join him. After his death in 1998, five of his closest female followers vanished. They are widely believed to have taken their own lives.

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books & Library Journal's Big Books of the Year

"A poet's immersion in Greek classicism forges a stronger bond with her bloodline. . . . A moving family memoir and a triumph of cultural archaeology."--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

A genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry.

In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho's work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women.

A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about.

Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs.

This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.

Most people don't know how to have a "good death"--but Jane Callahan does. Years after watching her mother's traumatic death in a broken health care system, Jane found herself working an unfulfilling job as a marketing writer for corporations, but on nights and weekends she'd volunteer with terminally ill people awaiting death in hospice. After training as an end-of-life doula, she has spent years witnessing how our culture's resistance to talking about death leads to preventable suffering. Jane supports her clients and their families through all stages of dying, from navigating end-of-life care to preparing emotionally for the moment of death and the grief that follows.

In A Death Doula's Guide to a Meaningful End, she peels back the curtain on one of our most taboo subjects and walks readers through what happens when someone is dying. With vignettes that weave through patients' lives--and her own--she reveals to readers all the things they didn't know (or didn't know they needed to know) about our last great adventure. Along the way, readers will uncover knowledge on the raw realities of being mortal and learn how death positivity can take some of the anxiety and fear of dying out of the equation.

Surprisingly funny and often cutting, this memoir meets end-of-life planning guide outlines practical steps for patients, families, and caregivers, while acknowledging that some questions don't always need answers. The account of Jane's up-close-and-personal experiences with the emotional, physical, logistical, and (dare we say) spiritual aspects of dying shows that when we talk about death, we're actually talking about life.

Ann Rower's forgotten turn-of-the-millennium classic that looks at the lives of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning with obsessed, louche brilliance.

Maybe it was the car, the dangerous thrill of driving around, fast. I'm from the suburbs. I love driving, especially a red car, even a rental. Nothing is really mine. Maybe that's what I love. Is that sick? I skidded a little, taking a turn too quick, looking at the water not the road. I knew the roads weren't that safe. There had been many famous accidents out here. I almost did a Jackson--Jackson Pollock's drunk car tree Saturday night death on this same road. But I was struggling to eat a muffin, not slugging from a pint like he must have been, while juggling his scared girlfriend and her terrified friend.

Separating from her long-term partner Jack and beginning a passionate affair with a much younger female student, the narrator of Lee and Elaine takes time off to write. Leaving Manhattan for an off-season Springs, East Hampton rental and haunting the Green River Cemetery where artistic giants of the mid-twentieth century are buried, she becomes obsessed with the lives and friendship of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, who were both artists and the wives of famous men. They were always so peripheral, she writes. Suddenly I wanted to find out about these women. Find them, period.

First published by Serpent's Tail's in 2002, the novel was republished as an ebook in 2013 by Emily Books. Written with Rower's trademark louche and brilliant, mouthy, and deceptively casual style, it remains a forgotten classic of the turn of the millennium. With piercing and hilarious straightforwardness, the narrator turns the process of unearthing art-world gossip and tearing down her own life's substructure into a searching and original examination of sexuality and friendship, art and ambition.

★Mini magic coloring book for adults★

Wonderful little watercolor and outline illustrations on the subject of magic to color in

• A4
• 54 pages
• Elves and fairies
• Crystals and owls
• tree of Life
• Magicians and witches
• magical creatures
• Elf cottages
• Sun moon stars graphics

A wonderful coloring book full of little magical moments.

The illustrations are also ideal for cutting and pasting (scrapbooks).

Lesbian vixens from another dead world thread through moon-drenched cornfields and opulent drawing rooms in this literary horror remix of iconic gothic sagas.

Agnes is wasting away. In a bed of velvet and silk, she dreams of death--and Mary.

Mary--a wraith with bloodstained gown and mouth--drips mystery and menace. She materializes beside a lake, beneath a pear tree, outside the window. She turns servants feral and plunges the manor into anarchy. Since her arrival, nothing is right. The maids snarl. The nights grow strange. Agnes swoons.

Her brother, Arthur, calls it a sickness. A curse. He stalks the halls with scissors in his fist. He wants purity and order. He'll strike out the unintelligible. He is not the only one. Others have begun to stir--jilted lovers, disgraced doctors, moralists with sharpened knives. The disorder is spreading. It's riotous. Contagious. They'll purify the world in flame.

Written partially through footnotes and with a mystery of interwoven red text, Agnes, We're Not Murderers! is an atmospheric gothic vampire journey for fans of Kathe Koja and Mark Z. Danielewski.

RUN WILD

High school student Tsukina was worried about being different from other people...until she found out she's a werewolf! The black wolf Hayate and the white wolf Kirito explain their separate groups' views on what being a werewolf means. Both make her feel at ease as she steadily learns more about who and what she is. However, her human life can't be ignored so easily. The stress of university exams causes her to start changing unintentionally! As her fears grow, her grades decline. Her mother blames Hayate and forbids her from seeing him. Is running away her only option?

At ten, I was the unwanted tagalong on London Hale's fishing trip-the fatherless girl next door he resented having to include. But all it took was one hot Texas summer afternoon of fishing to change everything.

At sixteen, he saved my life, and then he kissed me. The star quarterback and the quiet outsider, we defied every small-town stereotype as we fell hopelessly in love. By eighteen, we had our futures mapped out together until four desperate words shattered everything.

"Don't take the girl."

With those words, my world collapsed, and London disappeared from my life.

Six years later, I'm starting fresh at my best friend's ranch, healing among horses instead of people, until I discover that the rival rancher next door is none other than London Hale. The boy I loved. The man who should be in prison.

He wants me gone, and I understand why. His sacrifice cost him everything. But I never asked him to save me, not the first time or the second.

Sharing another small town with him isn't going to be easy, but I'm not going anywhere. I need this job, and besides-it's temporary. At the end of the summer, I'll have my certification, and I'll leave just as he asked me to.

But when I uncover the truth behind that fateful night and why London never went to jail, I realize our story wasn't finished at eighteen-it's been waiting here all along.

Some chapters aren't meant to be closed. Sometimes, the most beautiful stories are the ones brave enough to try again.

Bring your favorite artwork from Magic: The Gathering to vivid life in this official 80-page coloring book for fans of all ages.

Illuminate every color of mana through artwork that showcases classic characters, settings, creatures, and scenes from the adventure-filled worlds of Magic, from Dominaria to Ravnica to Strixhaven and beyond.

Featuring 80 pages of iconic and fan-favorite illustrations from across Magic's three-decade history, printed on high-quality, bleed-resistant paper, The Official Magic: The Gathering Coloring Book is the perfect gift for any player looking for an enjoyable way to unwind and relax after a long day of spell-slinging.

Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, an electrifying account of living with and writing about trauma from a singular new voice in Canadian literature.

Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident's aftermath.

Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences--from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch--LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative.

Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving, a book unlike any other and one destined to become an essential text.

Groundbreaking, unique, and beautiful, Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape Our World features over 250 images from over 40 countries, taking readers on a journey across cultures and continents in search of a deeper understanding of how we might live with plants on a changing planet.

Our love of flowers and desire to be close to them has, across cultures and for millennia, created both landscapes and livelihoods. In this book, Christin Geall covers hot topics such as aesthetics, appropriation, fair trade, floriculture, globalization, indigeneity, modernism, seasonality, and tokenism--to name only a few of the over eighty entries presented here in an accessible A to Z format.

In her inimitable style, Geall shares personal stories and ideas from growers and designers, weaving her narratives between art, ecology, and history to get readers truly thinking about their relationships to plants, gardens, and design.

A poignant and darkly witty portrait of aging, memory, and multigenerational caretaking from the first female Faroese writer to ever appear in English.

I'm a woman in my early sixties. Somewhere between late and never. No longer the career woman, mother, housewife, and lover doing it all... Now I'm wife, mother, grandmother and my mother's mother. But I still have to satisfy all the demands placed on me.

So begins Sólrún Michelsen's tender and darkly witty exploration of what she considers to be the strange, remaining leg of life's journey. Her kids are grown and out of the house and she's faced with a time that, for years, she always seemed to be looking toward--a time when she wasn't needed by somebody or something. But now, with her mother's declining health, she finds herself revisiting childhood scenes, family hymns, and folk songs--revealing a lifetime of love, duty, awe, and regret. She tends to her mother amid the stark rhythms of Faroese life, waiting for a new nursing home that never arrives, and confronts the reality of being part of the "army of women" who inherit care. In her grief and private goodbye to her mother, however, is also a gorgeous meditation about life, as translator Marita Thomsen says in her afterword, "in its ragged mundane glory."

A lyrical portrait of caretaking and the invisible labor of motherhood, On the Other Side Is March is a tribute to caretakers across generational lines, as well as the rich oral traditions of singing and storytelling that kept the Faroese language alive centuries before its standard written form.

This is the first work of Michelsen's--a best-selling author of novels, short stories, poetry, and children's literature--to be published in English.

Tuscany, 1950. A chance encounter between two young people on the street marks the beginning of a whirlwind romance. Yolanda and Clemente Gallorini are about to embark on the journey of a lifetime as they begin to build a life together. No one ever suspects it will end in suspense, intrigue, and tragedy.

Join multiple generations of Gallorinis in this family saga, beginning with the story of a young couple's move from Tuscany to Toronto in 1950. Through the second generation-Marie, Ana, and Michael-the saga continues all across Canada, from Yellowknife to Vancouver, from Collingwood to Penticton. No one can predict the twists and turns of this family's story as they navigate relationships, disappointment, and jealousy. Through the lows of discrimination and rejection and the highs of success and love, the story of the Gallorini family depicts the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience. Family dynamics are constantly shifting, and ambition threatens to cloud judgement as Marie, Ana, and Ana's husband, David, a retired member of the RCMP, undertake a legal battle over an inheritance and the investigation of tragic family mystery.

A multi-generational saga, Externalities showcases a full cast of characters to portray the experience of one family's immigration and life in Canada.

A how-to guide for theatermakers who want freedom from white supremacy in their creative practices

The Antiracist Theatre offers readers the tools and foundational philosophy to create their own antiracist theatre ethos and delve into its three core principles: harm reduction, harm prevention, and relationship repair.

Nicole Brewer, faculty at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and the originator of the Antiracist Theatre model, guides readers through self-reflection exercises designed to strengthen awareness of their own position, power, and privilege and uproot their racist practices. Brewer provides definitions of oft-used, but rarely defined terms like "accountability," "racism," and "abuse." She welcomes BIPOC readers and lovingly and playfully calls in white theatermakers as she outlines methods to interrupt patterns of abuse.

All who believe the way forward for theatre is antiracist and anti-oppressive are welcome. We each have a role to play. Join us in liberating the stage, the classroom, and the performing arts.

JUST ONE STRANGE THING AFTER ANOTHER

After parting ways with Marya, Ivy and her friends continue their journey with high hopes. But before long, the travellers find themselves lost in an incomprehensible that's not even on the map, no matter how hard they look! Feeling that something isn't right, Ivy and her friends find thier way back on the road, only to discover the next village is in the middle of a murder mystery! Wanting to keep out of the mess, Ivy heads to the dump to collect trash to prepare to move on only to be lured by serpents deep into the forest. When Ivy gets there, she hears a voice...and encounters yet another bizarre phenomenon?! Can Ivy ever get a break?

From the author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family, an original diagnosis of femmephobia in our culture, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.

To be femme is to embody a dispossessed femininity, to be freighted with freedom, to refuse to be made proper or institutionalized. To love it is to embrace love for women (be they butch or not) in the broadest sense. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital importance of politicized femme-ness: a feminism that is self-consciously artificial, extravagant in its erotic and political appetites, and staunchly anti-work, abolitionist, and utopian. Femme labors deserve our care, respect, and support, but instead face dismissal from masculinist antagonists and feminist allies alike.

Where neoliberal women's empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on octopuses and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people.