Rachel Owen

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine Comedy' and its artistic legacy with her unique talent for collage and printmaking. These illustrations, casting the viewer as a first-person pilgrim through the underworld, prompt us to rethink Dante's poem through their novel perspective and visual language. Owen's work, held in the Bodleian Library and published here for the first time, illustrates the complete cycle of thirty-four cantos of the Inferno with one image per canto. The illustrations are accompanied by essays contextualising Owen's work and supplemented by six illustrations intended for the unfinished Purgatorio series. Fiona Whitehouse provides details of the techniques employed by the artist, Peter Hainsworth situates Owen's work in the field of modern Dante illustration and David Bowe offers a commentary on the illustrations as gateways to Dante's poem. Jamie McKendrick and Bernard O'Donoghue's translations of episodes from the 'Inferno' provide complementary artistic interpretations of Dante's poem, while reflections from colleagues and friends commemorate Owen's life and work as an artist, scholar and teacher. This stunning collection is an important contribution to both Dante scholarship and illustration.

Dante on View opens an important new dimension in Dante studies: for the first time a collection of essays analyses the presence of the Italian Medieval poet Dante Alighieri in the visual and performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. The essays in this volume explore the image of Dante emerging in medieval illuminated manuscripts and later ideological and nostalgic uses of the poet. The volume also demonstrates the rich diversity of projects inspired by the Commedia both as an overall polysemic structure and as a repository of scenes, which generate a repertoire for painters, actors and film-makers. In its original multimediality, Dante's Commedia stimulates the performance of readers and artists working in different media from manuscript to stage, from ballet to hyperinstruments, from film to television. Through such a variety of media, the reception of Dante in the visual and performing arts enriches our understanding of the poet and of the arts represented at key moments of formal and structural change in the European cultural world.

Rachel is worried that she has done something to upset her human boyfriend, Owen, because lately he has not come to visit her in Neptunia--but it turns out that the truth could put an end to their relationship completely.

In this action packed sequel, Owen and Melissa go through a series of problems. Mr. Black and the seven mirror demons are back. This time, the demons are possessing Owen's family, along with others. Oh, and the lord of the underworld, Hades, is involved. Will Owen save the day once again? Find out when you read this sequel, with more action, more excitement, more drama, more romance, and more adventure!

What would you ask if you could write ten letters to your future self? How might they reply? In 2017, three people got the chance to find out. Yet with access to the future come even greater surprises in the present... Letters to 2039 examines hope, despair and human development. It explores our tendency for solipsism, even when faced with the chance to receive unprecedented insight into the future, and about how we might help others. At a time when planning for and predicting the future seems to have found its cultural counterpart in mindfulness, and when quantifiable outcomes have become the favoured yardstick of progress, this book looks at the tensions between the present and the future, as well as the unpredictability of the human experience.

This inclusive guide to how every family begins is an honest, cheerful tool for conversations between parents and their young ones. To make a baby you need one egg, one sperm, and one womb. But every family starts in its own special way. This book answers the "Where did I come from?" question no matter who the reader is and how their life began. From all different kinds of conception through pregnancy to the birth itself, this candid and cozy guide is just right for the first conversations that parents will have with their children about how babies are made.

In a domed granite chamber deep beneath the Giza Plateau, a proto-pyramidical beacon pulses a warning into the cosmos for millennia while dark spectral forces conspire to terminate the signal by removing its infinite power, the golden ellipse. * * * In 1944, a German spy unwittingly looted the golden ellipse, but in the fog of world war, it ended up in the hands of a brash American fighter pilot who buried the prized contraband in the desert before his paranormal demise on a daring air raid in the south of France. * * * In 2044, a young couple fresh off a space tourism touchdown in Toulouse is hijacked from their honeymoon onto a heart-pounding odyssey to locate the legendary gold relic and restart the beacon’s signal before time runs out. It’s just the fate of the world. No pressure. Book One in THE POWERS THAT BE trilogy, THE GOLDEN ELLIPSE, is an epic sci-fi action adventure introducing Rachel and Owen Haig—intrepid newlyweds in a tech-driven near-future world of 2044 replete with AI and humanoid replicants. Their perilous quest culminates in a harrowing pitch-black descent beneath the Giza Plateau, where fates collide as alien invaders tear open Earth’s skies. Drawing parallels between the Great Pyramid's mysterious origin and Fermi's paradox, The Golden Ellipse is an epoch-spanning story rich in history and paranormal intrigue with an eclectic cast of 3-dimensional characters, gritty dialogue, dark humor, and a clandestine organization known simply as The Powers That Be, chartered to foster humankind's destiny in a crowded universe. Includes an excerpt from THE LOST SHIP The Powers That Be Book Two