They were out. He thought they were out. All cards on the table except one, Spade now staring daggers at them. But they were a unified front, formidable in decision and determination. They all got what they wanted. Freedom. Love. Disney World. They were riding high from the rising tide below, basement level. Nothing was going to bring them down. But Suicide Kings are wild, and the Vegas high crashed and burned.
Sonnet Mondal is a fresh and multitalented versatile Indian English poet whose poetry deals with various aspects of life. Literature is the manifestation of socio-historical pressures; Sonnet Mondal believes that poetry should function as the incitement for rebellion. Poetry must be useful, must serve the lumpy points of common sense. The poetry should reach to common man with simple and lucid way of representation.
In the words of Billy Idol, “It’s a nice day to start again. It’s a nice day for a white wedding.” Beautiful snow. Crisp hope. New beginnings. Innocent love. All to be obliterated by rocks falling from heaven, and all that white now crimson.
Three lives are shattered. Sanctuary obliterated. Questions unanswered. The enemy remains unseen, a shadow of doubt, and the dead disappear under a veil of mystery. Dark magic is at hand.
Melissa Mendelson’s Porcelain, a horror novella in her upcoming Notebook Stories series, features Paige and Shelli, sisters spending a seemingly monotonous summer together with family in a middle-of-nowhere town. Troubled Paige and troublesome Shelli, exploring the few entertainment options this little Hicktown has to offer, happen upon an eerie antique store, and here begins the story’s classically frightening arc – a large ominous window hides the store’s angry shopkeeper and his angry, potentially possessed porcelain doll.
Carolyn Henderson has published in book form a series of almost 50 short think pieces, laced with humor, irreverent insight, exasperation, spirituality and hope, often uniquely from a woman’s perspective. She seeks to explore how one can be a 21st century Christian, avoid hypocrisy and instead be an independent thinker, all while operating outside of the structure and culture of institutional churches. She writes “for the misnamed misfits of the Christian world, the independent thinkers who question what they hear, and don’t want to do everything that they are told.” To this end she divides her book into seven loosely associated sections which contain provocative independent essays found within the general topic.
The downward spiral of one man’s story pulled me into a world of uncertainty and intrigue. The descent kept me turning page after page in hopes of discovering his escape from certain death. As we hit the bottom, the story concluded, and the downward spiral reversed its course. If you mixed together the stories of The Sopranos, Law & Order, and Prison Break, the blend would be called Slip and Fall.
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Close your eyes.
Imagine you are George Winston.
It is 1984.
You are concerned about Big Brother watching you.
The technology of control scares you.
The clock is striking thirteen.
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Frohwerk was convicted and sentenced to ten years of hard labor for his news articles and opinions. He was one of about 2,000 seditionists rounded up and eventually imprisoned by zealous federal prosecutors in the years of the Great War. His was one of four separate appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1918, including that of Eugene V. Debs, famous labor leader, socialist and four time presidential candidate. All their various prison terms were affirmed by the Court, despite serious arguments that the freedom of speech protected their opinions on the War, the draft and other topics, as long as they had not directly incited imminent lawless action to disrupt the War effort.
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Each generation has to come to its own understanding about war and the tragic loss of life which accompanies it. David Swanson’s book—’War No More: The Case for Abolition’—ardently addresses wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and elsewhere in the headlines. Previously, the Great War (World War I) left 21 million men wounded and more than 8.5 million soldiers dead on all fronts, together with at least 12 million civilian deaths. Conscientious objectors to this madness were brutalized and imprisoned in Britain and the United States. Fast forwarding to the Vietnam War, now a generation ago, it was the last war in America with a forced draft. Then the road to a conscientious objection to Vietnam was somewhat less hazardous with many being able to flee to the safe haven of Canada. But Muhammad Ali did not flee and he was ordered imprisoned for his objection to Vietnam until the Supreme Court freed him. READ MORE.
Imitating Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous work on the gulag prison system in Soviet Russia, The First Circle, Jens Soering portrays himself in this book as prisoner 179212, serving a life term with no possibility of parole through anything but death. In this short and easy to read narrative he supplies an hour-by-hour survey of daily life in a medium-security prison in Virginia, while also identifying and commenting upon numerous public policy issues relating to the state of the typical prison system in the United States. His chronology of a typical day is enlightening and instructive for any interested citizen but it is only the structure for the greater policy issues which this book raises about the operation of America’s prison-industrial complex. READ MORE.