Bøker av Alexis Brooks de Vita

The 1855 Murder Case of Missouri versus Celia, an Enslaved Woman: An Exercise in Historical Imagination reconstructs and sets in motion known and suspected details, rebuilding the elided background story behind the conviction of an enslaved teen found guilty of bludgeoning and burning to death her owner. A middle-aged widower bought Celia for sexual usage that began in the first hour of her purchase; he fathered her three children in quick succession. After five years of sexual entrapment on his isolated farm, as the child Celia entered legal womanhood, someone brutally murdered her enslaver and told the posse to force a confession from Celia. The judge who decided the handling of the case suppressed testimony and struck exonerating evidence. The political climate and social tensions of pre-Civil War Missouri did not favor justice for an enslaved young woman who confessed, even under torture, to murdering her owner and mutilating his remains, though those acquainted with the case believed she could not have committed the deed. But why would Celia confess and then stick to her coerced confession, claiming that Satan made her do it? Who else might have harbored motives to brutalize and burn to death Celia's enslaver and then leave her to be condemned to hang? U.S. history favors belief in Celia's forced confession, but The 1855 Murder Case of Missouri versus Celia, an Enslaved Woman, interrogates the circumstances that produced it.

Love and Darker Passions is a collection of provocative short stories by today's up-and-coming authors of dark, urban and Gothic fantasy. Award-winning author Karen Duvall sends a Millennial Alice through a very different looking glass, and acclaimed author Lee Barwood sends the Sight-gifted bard of her upcoming series into the passionate world of faerie to hunt for a child - and find her own destiny. Bestseller C.E. Murphy reworks a favorite fairytale into a stunning perspective on what draws us into the arms of those we think we love. And new fantasy voices offer their disturbing visions.One man becomes enchanted by a fabled monster, another by a voice that drives him to a frenzy of self-punishing acts, and a third by the increasingly bizarre demands of his changeling girlfriend. A household appliance adores its new family and only wants to be needed - just a little more than is good for its owners, and a hexed man trusts his butler more than he does his wife. An Edenic society of loving innocents is confronted by jealous rage, and a woman too long taken for granted develops a fatal persona for whom she can at last demand her family's affection. And these lovers! They fight curses - new, historical and ancient - to be united. They undertake epic quests to find each other. And they discover, again and again, that the shadowy third figure distorting their relationships into a triangle isn't quite what they thought it would be. For in this collection love proves to be that bloody splatter across the eons that moves at the edges of our lives, in our silences and secrets, drawing yearning hearts to hear what they were always listening for, in its indecipherable whispers in the dark. In Love and Darker Passions, a host of edgy and cult fantasy authors combine their talents to make us question what inspires love, why we crave revenge against those who've stolen love from us, and what is it that makes us despair in the event of love's loss.

For an urban English-speaker in the twenty-first century, the original language of Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the first act of his trilogy, the Comedy, would read like a shockingly accurate critique of today's globalized society, if we could understand it. Dante's Inferno: A Wanderer in Hell gives second-millennial English-language readers a chance to share the pathos, the humor, and the raw political aggression of Dante's vision of Hell.Dante's Inferno: A Wanderer in Hell preserves the meaning of Dante's verses, line by line. Where a literal translation of his highly philosophical but often slang-rich text will not make sense for the twenty-first century English-speaking reader, the most reasonable compromise of the literal and figurative is used.Written in exile from Florence, Dante's Inferno speaks to those of us today who question our own and our societies' values. Dante, lost in the middle of his lifetime, wanders behind Virgil down the narrow safe passage through Hell's increasingly nightmarish suffering. On this horrendous journey, Dante will come to understand the consequences of the social evils running rampant in Europe's cancerously spreading empire that values profits more than people and teaches its citizens to prize their own personal pleasure above principle, spreading sexual license, gang turf war, and international political and religious violence.

The Third Book of Joy: Chain Dance is the second notebook of family lore, the collection of Joy's magical stories about her enslaved ancestors, researched by Professor Bo Wolfson in Burning Streams; the first notebook was published in Blood of Angels. When Heaven's heartbroken death in childbirth and Whip Man's torture at her father's hands lead her to resurrect herself as a death dancer, magic and terror drive the plantation's owner off of his land. Most of the men and women who labor on the haunted plantation flee, following Heaven's brother to his Louisiana swampland.But not everyone runs. A winged angel, a dancing coven of witches, a shapeshifting wildcat, and a ferocious pack of werewolves defend Solace's plantation from attack. Marauding patrollers and opportunists clash with the cunning, the blood thirst, and the supernatural powers unleashed by women determined to free themselves and the men and children they love.

Left Hand of the Moon is an American Romeo and Juliet story about doomed love between the very young. In the early 1800s, as the fledgling United States completes the Louisiana Purchase and marches troops through the newly acquired state, executing by firing squad the freed adult children of enslaved women and their owners, an enslaved teen and her owner's youngest son run away to live together. They have grown up together and have always trusted and loved each other. Now that adulthood threatens to force them into roles they would rather die than play, the passionate young couple determines to create their own future.Defying French and Spanish colonial custom and the new American laws, Aurélie and Jules masquerade as revelers and escape into the festive chaos of All Hallows' Eve in old New Orleans. On this night when spirits walk abroad, the lovers discover they have begun an adventure that may ultimately shatter every illusion they have about themselves, their families, their countrymen, and each other. Perhaps some dreams are best left undisturbed.

When Eva Dennison learns that she has inherited the fallow sharecropping plantation in Mississippi that her parents fled to make a new life in L.A., she is eager to escape the big city and explore her historical roots. Eva abandons her dissertation about ancestral memory in African American literature and myths.

This title seeks to analyze African / Diaspora women's literary voices and images. Dr Brooks De Vita aims to develop culturally relevant modes of literary analysis of African / Diaspora literatures by identifying traditional figures of myth, religion, legend and history.