Thoroughly Kissed

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Christopher Palmer

"Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging."--BOOK JACKET.

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Frank P. Slaughter

Echoes of Distant Thunder shows us the war in stunning detail through the eyes of a twenty year old farm boy turned artillery soldier. On the bloody fields of Chickamauga Will Castor’s artillery battery is over-run by the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand combat, every member of his gun crew, including his best friend are killed and his final violent act of compassion will haunt him for the rest of his life. Caught behind enemy lines with a broken leg and unable to walk, he makes a pact with a war weary Confederate deserter and ends up falling in love with his former enemy’s beautiful sister. Historical events firmly anchor the story in place as Will, wounded in body and in mind moves from the battlefield to one crisis after another. Along the way he struggles with guilt, alcoholism and failed relationships.

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Lindsey Davis

From Wikipedia: " Set in Rome during AD 72, the novel stars Marcus Didius Falco, an informer and imperial agent. The title refers to the law which stated that no Roman citizen who had been sentenced to death might be arrested, even after the verdict, until he has been given time to depart, the idea being that for a Roman citizen to choose exile outside the boundaries of the Empire would have been a fate worse than death itself. Falco's closest friend, Petronius Longus, has finally caught one of the leading criminals in Rome, Balbinus Pius. But a quirk in Roman law allows a convicted felon, even a murderer, time to depart before the sentence is carried out. Balbinus' departure has left a vacuum in the underworld of Rome, and there is a crowd of criminals trying desperately to fill the void. Their first step is to engineer a robbery that reverberates throughout the city. Falco is again called upon by the Emperor Vespasian to supply answers, as quietly and quickly as possible. A couple of murders, a kidnapping or two, and more suspects than Falco cares to count takes him, and his patrician girlfriend Helena Justina, to places a family shouldn't have to go."

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Lilian R. Furst

"While Countless Memoirs have been written about depression and therapy, no one has examined how the "talking cure" of psychotherapy is presented in novels and other works of literature. Beginning with an overview of the principles of psychotherapy and its growing use as a treatment for mental and emotional disorders, Lilian R. Furst addresses the patient's view of the value of talk."--BOOK JACKET. "Furst examines such well-known works as Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Plath's The Bell Jar, and Lodge's Therapy, as well as lesser-known novels, to discuss how patients react to psychotherapy as a cure for mental and emotional disorders."--BOOK JACKET.