The Shepherds Of Shadows

Thirty-one years after masterful storyteller and prolific author Harry Mark Petrakis wrote the historical novel The Hour of the Bell—set in the first year of Greece's war of independence from the Turkish Empire—he now carries the narrative forward in his newest work, The Shepherds of Shadows. With this powerful sequel, Petrakis captures the fury and ferocity of revolution in the country that formed the bedrock of western culture. Featuring many of the characters who appeared in the earlier book, The Shepherds of Shadows depicts the horrors of war in battle scenes that echo the visceral starkness of conflict found in Homer's Iliad. The novel also includes a vivid portrayal of Lord Byron, who, through his poetry, supported the cause of Greece's fight for independence inspiring the world to provide aid and volunteers for the struggle. Byron himself traveled to Greece to join the war for liberation. Woven through the tapestry of war are stories of the love of a young guerilla fighter for a Greek girl and her child, born of a brutal rape, as well as the love of the scribe, Xanthos, for a village woman widowed by the war. There are lyrical descriptions of a village wedding and of the rituals of a village funeral. And always there is the mystical, overpowering presence of the Greek landscape and its majestic past blending reality and myth, as Petrakis creates a modern epic based on one of the most savage yet least known conflicts in European history.

Celebrate a Season of Wonder and Waiting Though the holidays are often jam-packed with busyness, the weeks leading up to Yuletide are still a time to reflect on the miracle of Jesus’s birth. Shadow and Light is a concise and customizable guide for the Advent season to help you rediscover your childlike wonder and contemplate the sacred gift we celebrate in the Christmas season. From bestselling author Tsh Oxenreider, Shadow and Light is a rich yet approachable experience that invites you to explore the historical meaning of Advent. Drawing from liturgical tradition, Tsh provides fresh insights for new and longtime believers alike. Each day includes Scripture, a reflection, a question, and a simple activity to engage the senses, such as lighting candles, listening to music, and viewing artwork both old and new. Let yourself break away from the hustle and bustle of crafts, cookies, and Christmas parties, and receive your invitation to remember the quiet focus of our celebration. Shadow and Light will help you reclaim the holiday season as a time to remember Jesus’s first coming, and to long for his one-day return.

Brad Thor's Summer 2018 Fiction Pick for THE TODAY SHOW! "Eerie, dark, and compelling, [The Book of M] will not disappoint lovers of The Passage (2010) and Station Eleven (2014)." --Booklist WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO REMEMBER? Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself. One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too. Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless. As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure. Like The Passage and Station Eleven, this haunting, thought-provoking, and beautiful novel explores fundamental questions of memory, connection, and what it means to be human in a world turned upside down.

Here is a wealth of insight on a great selection of Psalms which will help preachers and all believers to appreciate their richness and depth of meaning. For example, the author comments on Psalm 23: David wrote this Psalm at the height of his maturity when he could have said as most men in this world say, “I can manage my own life. I don’t need anyone else, I’ll sort out my own problems,” but he didn’t. Even though he reached the top of his career if you like; even though he was the top man of his nation, the King of Israel, he was saying: I am a sheep and I need a shepherd. This Psalm is not for those who are dying, it is for those who are living. One reason why we apply it to death is that in the Authorized Version the word “death” was put into the Psalm and it is not there. It is, “Yea, though I walk through valley of deep darkness I will fear no evil.” You can walk through that valley tomorrow morning without dying. It is also due to the inclusion of the words at the end of the Psalm “forever”, making it a reference to the future life. But in fact, if you have a Bible with marginal references, you will notice at the bottom it is Hebrew “as long as I live”. Now Christians can read eternity into that, but David was talking about as long as he lived here. So this Psalm is to help you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, next week – however near your death or far from it you are.

What's in a shadow? Menace, seduction, or salvation? Immaterial but profound, shadows lurk everywhere in literature and the visual arts, signifying everything from the treachery of appearances to the unfathomable power of God. From Plato to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Welles and Warhol, from Lord of the Rings to the latest video game, shadows act as central players in the drama of Western culture. Yet because they work silently, artistic shadows often slip unnoticed past audiences and critics. Conceived as an accessible introduction to this elusive phenomenon, Grasping Shadows is the first book that offers a general theory of how all shadows function in texts and visual media. Arguing that shadow images take shape within a common cultural field where visual and verbal meanings overlap, William Sharpe ranges widely among classic and modern works, revealing the key motifs that link apparently disparate works such as those by Fra Angelico and James Joyce, Clementina Hawarden and Kara Walker, Charles Dickens and Kumi Yamashita. Showing how real-world shadows have shaped the meanings of shadow imagery, Grasping Shadows guides the reader through the techniques used by writers and artists to represent shadows from the Renaissance onward. The last chapter traces how shadows impact the art of the modern city, from Renoir and Zola to film noir and projection systems that capture the shadows of passers-by on streets around the globe. Extending his analysis to contemporary street art, popular songs, billboards, and shadow-theatre, Sharpe demonstrates a practical way to grasp the "dark side" that looms all around us.