Master Of Ecstasy

With her trademark humor and sizzling love scenes, Nina Bangs brings us to the Scottish Highlands to meet her sexiest hero yet, a mysterious and seductive vampire.

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways. Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer. This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.

A bestsellig romance author suffers a paralyzing stroke and her philandering husband wonders how this will affect his gambling and whoring budget; two young lovers must come to terms with their chemically induced deformity; Lloyd from Leith transfigures his passion for an unhappily married woman. These three tales confirm Irvine Welsh's position as a master of the "chemical" romance genre.

“Paxson provides songs, rituals, magical exercises, and practical advice to help you develop your own personal relationship with the Lord of Runes.” —Judika Illes, author of Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells Odin is arguably one of the most enigmatic and complex characters in Norse mythology. Revered since the Viking Age, Odin has been called the greatest of the gods—the god of words and wisdom, runes and magic, a transformer of consciousness, and a trickster who teaches truth. He is both war god and poetry god, and he is the Lord of Ravens, the All- Father, and the rune master. Odin: Ecstasy, Runes, and Norse Magic is the first book on Odin that is both historically sourced and accessible to a general audience. It explores Odin’s origins, his appearances in sagas, old magic spells, and the Poetic Edda, and his influence on modern media, such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Each chapter features suggestions for rituals, exercises, and music, so readers can comprehend and become closer to this complicated god. Author Diana Paxson, an expert on Viking-era mythology, provides a complete portrait of Odin and draws on both scholarship and experience to provide context, resources, and guidance for those who are drawn to work with the Master of Ecstasy today. “This remarkable book is at times ribald and reverent, worldwise and innocent, pragmatic and idealistic, as needed to masterfully show the ways of a very complex God.” —Ivo Domiguez, Jr, author of Keys to Perception

A Fixation becomes deadly:Temptress loved Rapture from the moment she saw him. Nothing or no one will stand in her way to possess him. Not even Rapture himself When sex becomes power:Ecstasy, Master's angel, has discovered his sexual power. All women desire him and all men are driven to have him. Ecstasy becomes very good at playing sexual mind games. Wanting to wield the power Master has, Ecstasy must learn the difference between holding someone in a delicious spell versus destroying his or her very being. Curiosity leads down a road that you may not be able to come back from:Master Dante was invited to the island, mostly out of Master's curiosity to meet the man who made Wrath. However, it is Jessica who gets entangled in Dante's wicked web. Master must pull her back to the safety of his arms before Jessica becomes Dante's slave. Three plots woven together, all telling stories of different degrees of obsession

To design this journal, we've gathered data from the psychedelic community. This information shaped the way we designed each tracking area. Firstly, we will help you track and find the right dose of psychedelics that works for you. Secondly, we have provided a space for you to track your daily experiences, paying attention to the areas of your life that might be impacted while microdosing.

• Emphasizes how shadow work, integrating past wounds, and healing our ancestry allows us to facilitate the ecstatic transition into the next life • Offers exercises and visualizations to help us integrate emotions like anger and grief, which impact the soul’s readiness to leave the body when the time comes • Discusses what happens to our cells when we die with regard to the human energy field and explores the soul’s journey through the aítes or bardos In the Celtic tradition dying is considered an act of birthing, of our consciousness passing from this life to the next. Informed by an early near-death experience, spiritual midwife and former nun Phyllida Anam-Áire offers an intimate overview of the sacred stages of the dying process seen through the lens of her Celtic heritage. Compassionately describing the final dissolution of the elements, she emphasizes how important it is to resolve and integrate our psycho-spiritual shadows and wounds in this lifetime. What truly heals is our capacity for authentic compassionate love--in life, in death, and after. Healing our ancestry before leaving the body eases not only our transition but sets future generations free from old stories held in our family systems. Sharing her insights into God consciousness, our earth/ego mind, and the soul’s journey through the Aíte or bardos, Phyllida’s poetic words guide us toward the final ecstasy as the soul leaves its material form and enters the vast Universal Heart of cosmic energy. Providing a deep spiritual understanding of the mysteries of death and the afterlife, this courageous book combines Celtic and Christian wisdom to dispel the fear of dying and invites us to live consciously and with love to our very last breath.

This book is a study of religious ecstasy, and the ways that it has been suppressed in both the academic study of religion, and in much of the modern practice of religion. It examines the meanings of the term, how ecstatic experience is understood in a range of religions, and why the importance of religious and mystical ecstasy has declined in the modern West. June McDaniel examines how the search for ecstatic experience has migrated into such areas as war, terrorism, transgression, sexuality, drug use, and anti-institutional forms of spirituality. She argues that the loss of religious and mystical ecstasy, as both a religious goal and as a topic of academic study, has had wide-ranging negative effects. She also proposes that the field of religious studies must go beyond criminalizing, trivializing and pathologizing ecstatic and mystical experiences. Both religious studies and theology need to take these states seriously as important aspects of lived human experience.

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers. A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and oth­ers. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.