James Morrow

Jennet Stearne's father hangs witches for a living in Restoration England. But when she witnesses the unjust and horrifying execution of her beloved aunt Isobel, the precocious child decides to make it her life's mission to bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act. Armed with little save the power of reason, and determined to see justice prevail, Jennet hurls herself into a series of picaresque adventures—traveling from King William's Britain to the fledgling American Colonies to an uncharted island in the Caribbean, braving West Indies pirates, Algonquin Indian captors, the machinations of the Salem Witch Court, and the sensuous love of a young Ben Franklin. For Jennet cannot and must not rest until she has put the last witchfinder out of business.

After God falls from the sky, his two-mile long corpse is turned into a theme park in Florida. Subsequently, a judge whose wife dies in a car accident, decides to put God on trial at the international court in The Hague for allowing suffering.

"It is the summer of 1914. As the world teeters on the brink of the Great War, a callow American painter, Francis Wyndham, arrives at a renowned European insane asylum, where he begins offering art therapy under the auspices of Alessandro Caligari - sinister psychiatrist, maniacal artist, alleged sorcerer. Determined to turn the impending cataclysm to his financial advantage, Dr. Caligari will -- for a price -- allow governments to parade their troops past his masterpiece: a painting so mesmerizing it can incite entire regiments to rush headlong into battle. As the doctor's outrageous scheme becomes a reality, Francis joins with his brilliant, spider-obsessed student, Ilona Wessels, and a band of lunatic saboteaurs to thwart the mercenary magic. By radically reimagining the most famous of all German Expressionist silent films, satirist James Morrow has wrought a timely tale that is by turns funny and erotic, tender and bayonet-sharp - but ultimately, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari emerges as a love letter to that mysterious, indispensible thing called art." -- back cover.

An introduction to the geography, history, government, economy, culture, and people of the African country that is three-fourths desert.

A brilliant philosopher with a talent for self-destruction, Mason Ambrose has torpedoed a promising academic career and now faces a dead-end future. Before joining the ranks of the unemployed, however, he's approached by a representative of billionaire geneticist Dr. Edwina Sabacthani, who makes him an offer no starving ethicist could refuse. Born and bred on Isla de Sangre, a private island off the Florida coast, Edwina's beautiful and intelligent adolescent daughter, Londa, has recently survived a freak accident that destroyed both her memory and her sense of right and wrong. Londa's soul, in short, is an empty vessel—and it will be Mason's job to fill it.Exploring his new surroundings, our hero encounters a lush Eden abounding in bizarre animals and strange vegetation engineered by Edwina and her misanthropic collaborator, Dr. Vincent Charnock. And Londa, though totally lacking a conscience, proves a vivacious young woman who quickly captivates her new teacher as he attempts to recalibrate her moral compass with the help of Western civilization's greatest ethical thinkers, living and dead.But there's trouble in this tropical paradise. Mason soon learns that he isn't the only private tutor on Isla de Sangre, nor is Londa the only child in residence whose conscience is a blank slate. How many daughters does Edwina Sabacthani really have, and how did she bring them into being?Undaunted by these mysteries, Mason continues to instruct Londa, hoping that she can lead a normal life when she eventually ventures forth into human society. His apprentice, however, has a different agenda. Her head crammed with lofty ideals, her heart brimming with fearsome benevolence, and her bank account filled to bursting, Londa undertakes to remake our fallen world in her own image—by any and all means necessary.

"Galapagos Regained centers on the fictional Chloe Bathurst, an unemployed Victorian actress who finds work on Charles Darwin's estate, nurturing the strange birds, exotic lizards, and giant tortoises he brought back from his trip around the world. When Chloe gets wind of the Great God Contest, sponsored by the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society--£10,000 to the first petitioner who can prove or disprove the existence of a Supreme Being--she decides that Mr. Darwin's materialist theory of speciation might just turn the trick. (If Nature gave God nothing to do, maybe He was never around in the first place.) Before she knows it, her ambitions send her off on a wild adventure--a voyage by brigantine to Brazil, a steamboat trip up the Amazon, a hot-air balloon flight across the Andes--bound for the Galapagos archipelago, where she intends to collect the live specimens through which she might demonstrate evolutionary theory to the contest judges"--

Join the Abominable Snowman as, determined to transcend his cannibalistic past, he studies Tibetan Buddhism under the Dalai Lama. Pace the walls of Ilium with fair Helen as she tries to convince both sides to abandon their absurd Trojan War. Visit the nursery of Zenobia Garber, born to a Pennsylvania farm couple that accept her for the uncanny little biosphere she is. Scramble aboard the raft built by the passengers and crew of the sinking Titanic - and don't be surprised when the vessel transmutes into a world even more astonishing than the original Ship of Dreams. Reality by Other Means offers readers the most celebrated results from James Morrow's thirty-five-year career designing fictive thought experiments. Anchored by seven previously uncollected stories, this omnibus ranges from social satire to theological hijinks, steampunk escapades to philosophical antics.

"Once God's grinning skull - all that remains of our Creator - goes into geosynchronous orbit directly above Times Square, a plague of "death awareness" spreads across the Western world. Tbe first symptom is the appearance of the victim's fetch, a satanic doppelganger bent on dragging him to the grave."--BOOK JACKET. "As the United States begins to resemble fourteenth-century Europe during the Black Death, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. Nora Burkhart is a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to rescue her only son, Kevin, from his fetch. Gerard Korty is a renowned sculptor who struggles to create a masterwork, carved from a mysterious asteroid, that will heal the metaphysical wounds caused by God's abdication."--BOOK JACKET. "Among other apocalyptic wonders, Morrow depicts a pitched battle between Jews and anti-Semites on a New Jersey golf course, a theater troupe's stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic, an afterlife debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus, and the villainy of Dr. Adrian Lucido, founder of a new church in Coatzacoalcos and inventor of a cure more dreadful than any disease."--BOOK JACKET.