Cicada Dreams

It was a midsummer night’s dream that lingers during the day Arkansas 1935. Rarely, and always in summer, a strange carnival will come to a town. The town is never too large or too small and never a city. Furthermore, it is always a place isolated in space and time. Never today but fifty or a hundred years ago when things were as different from today as they are the same. The owner of this particular carnival is a black woman and devotee of voodoo. But Lady Priscilla conceals this fact, allowing everyone to believe that Wildcat, who runs the carnival’s wrestling and boxing show, is the owner. In the South, it is not wise to antagonize the Klan by letting it be known that a black woman has money or power. When the carnival sets up in a pasture outside Redmond, Arkansas, Priscilla drinks a cup of belladonna tea and soon finds herself in the land of the dead, where she is given a vision. A dark-hearted man lives in the area and has killed six young women. They are all blondes. And when Birdie, the carnival’s beautiful blond trapeze artist, disappears and is held as a sex slave, a mystery begins to unfold. The midway lies before us, and it is into this “carnival of dreams” that we now tread.

In 1969 twelve-year-old Mimi and her family move to an all-white town in Vermont, where Mimi's mixed-race background and interest in "boyish" topics like astronomy make her feel like an outsider.

Somewhere in the willow tree a little creature called cicada sings its heart out by sending its love call to its female counterpart in a lingering, low-pitched song; it is soothing and passionate, it lulled me to sleep like a lullaby in my mother’s arms when I was little.

This collection of poetry focuses on demount love and every story the author has stumbled upon on her journey, with all her heart she shares these parts of herself to the world, it will be beautiful to open this book and ache, love, cry and laugh. This is her very first collection.

Their song was majestic. Mesmerizing. I loved to lie spread-eagled in the grass beneath the speckled maples, listening to their hypnotic hum, feeling the buzz electrify my freckled skin, igniting the fuzzy blonde hairs on my lanky arms.It was May 2038 and the pharaoh-cicadas were sprouting all across the Eastern United States for the first time in seventeen years. It was astounding to think that these tomato-eyed, jewel-winged, dopey-flying, outspoken little critters were older than me. For all but the last six weeks of their lives, they tunneled underground as tiny nymphs, feeding on root sap. Then, suddenly, in the spring of their seventeenth year, when the soil-temperature reached sixty-four degrees, they surfaced all at once, by the millions, to sing, mate and die, in rapid succession. It was wonderfully-tragic in a sort of Shakespearean way, how suddenly their lives blossomed then ceased. They spent nearly two decades waiting in the dark, not only silent and blind but virtually alone, for a mere blink of glory at the end--for a single season in the sun, spreading their orange-laced wings, singing louder than lawnmowers, mating monogamously, laying eggs in the treetops? then, dropping dead, falling to the bases of the same saplings that provided their sustenance, giving their bodies back to the soil from which they emerged, fertilizing their home-base for the next generation. How beautifully heartbreaking it was, yet poignant with purpose. Cicadas never had to wonder what their goals were--it was wired in their instincts. Cicadas didn't have to worry about dating and breaking up repeatedly, until your heart was nothing but bleeding carnage in the dirt. Their paths were simple, clear, obvious. They were guaranteed to find their soulmate in a timely fashion, without the painful rigmarole that plagued my high-school. Courting was straightforward for them: males sang their one-hundred-decibel chorus, interested females would flick their wings in consent, and that was that--they were a couple. While some cicadas mated more than once, roughly ninety percent stayed loyal to their one true love. It was a real-live Hallmark movie.It was this shy, sixteen-year-old, eleventh-grade musician's dream.

Greece's most acclaimed living novelist gives us a magical realist portrait of contemporary Europe and contemporary Europeans. Here are seven tales that explore the themes of materialism, post Cold War politics, love, religious faith, and the power of imagination. In the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez and Luigi Pirandello, Vassilikos writes of the fantasies within reality, the spirit in existence, and the art within life.

Poetry. Includes CD. Jim Harrison wrote, "In most ways CICADA is an astounding book, nearly a new species of poetry. Often the poems poach gracefully in the territory of the novel. I was poignantly taken by the astute fluidity of the language, the facility of looking at ordinary things in a radical new way. This book should be widely read because it announces the arrival of a poet who has a good shot at being major."

Seth is laid off from work. His wife Lara just found out they are expecting a baby this summer. Seth plans on documenting the entire pregnancy with his brand new digital camcorder.During an evening home watching television, the news reports that a swarm of cicada (Brood Ten) are expected to overwhelm the entire Northeast. Brood Ten is vicious and ready to invade. During a sweltering summer night, Brood Ten emerges and wreaks havoc with the electric grid, phone and cell service, wi-fi, food and water supply. Civilization as they know it is gone.Seth and Lara are thrown back to the stone age in their own home with trillions of cicada trying to deposit their eggs and breed.Fast paced and filled with tension, Brood Ten is the perfect summer read when you're sitting outside listening to the cicadas sing.

The celebrated Greek poet Phoebe Giannisi explores connections between language, life, and the natural world By one of Greece’s foremost contemporary poets, Cicada is Phoebe Giannisi’s second collection in English. The cicada signifies metamorphosis in this breathtaking, lyrical book, which evokes the spirits of Archilochus, Plato, Empedocles, and Heraclitus. As the translator Brian Sneeden remarks: “The ‘I’ in Giannisi’s poetry is never static, never a fixed point, but part of a process of rebodying the ambient.” Yet, despite the fluid, mythic nature of Giannisi’s poems, they are also exquisitely rooted in the everyday: the sea heard through a window, the murmur of a distant mechanical crane, a damp wind, a photo of John and Yoko. Giannisi is a poet internationally known for her idiosyncratic eco-poetics, as well as her poetic multimedia works and performances, and most of all for her brilliant vision glowing at the borders of language, voice, place, and memory.

Artemidorus' Oneirocritica ('The Interpretation of Dreams') is the only dream-book which has been preserved from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Composed around AD 200, it comprises a treatise and manual on dreams, their classification, and the various analytical tools which should be applied to their interpretation, making Artemidorus both one of the earliest documented and arguably the single most important predecessor and precursor of Freud. Artemidorus travelled widely through Greece, Asia, and Italy to collect people's dreams and record their outcomes, in the process casting a vivid light on social mores and religious beliefs in the Severan age: this volume, published as a companion to the new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams by Martin Hammond in the Oxford World's Classics series, aims to provide the non-specialist reader with a readable and engaging road-map to this vast and complex text. It offers a detailed analysis of Artemidorus' theory of dreams and the social function of ancient dream-interpretation, while also aiming to foster an understanding of the ways in which Artemidorus might be of interest to the cultural or social historian of the Graeco-Roman world. Alongside chapters on Artemidorus' life, career, and world-view, it also provides valuable insights into his conceptions of the human body, sexuality, the natural world, and the gods; his attitudes towards Rome, the contemporary Greek polis, and the social order; and his knowledge of Greek literature, myth, and history. In addition, its accessible exploration of the differences and similarities between ancient traditions of dream-analysis and modern psychoanalytic approaches will make this volume of interest to anybody with an interest in the history of dreams and dream interpretation.