An American soldier works in post-surrender Japan in a novel “reminiscent of The English Patient . . . sad, wistful and romantic” (Los Angeles Times). When Francis Vancleave joins the army in 1944, he expects his term of service to pass uneventfully. His singular talent—typing ninety-five words a minute—keeps him off the battlefield and in General MacArthur’s busy Tokyo headquarters, where his days are filled with paperwork in triplicate and letters of dictation. But little does Van know that the first year of the occupation will prove far more volatile for him than for the US Army. When he’s bunked with a troubled combat veteran marketer and recruited to babysit MacArthur’s eight-year-old son, Van is suddenly tangled in the complex—and risky—personal lives of his compatriots. As he brushes shoulders with panpan girls and Communists on the streets of Tokyo, Van struggles to uphold his convictions in the face of unexpected conflict—especially the startling news from his war bride, a revelation that threatens Van with a kind of war wound he never anticipated. “Tells the story of generals, war, and occupation through the eyes of a typist who proves himself to be the calm at the center of the storm . . . [An] elegant, thoughtful, and resonant novel.” —Ann Patchett “A memorable read.” —Chicago Tribune
A Los Angeles Times Notable Book: Short fiction by the author of Eveningland, “a writer of the first rank” (Esquire). “These 10 distinctive and intensely affecting stories confirm Knight as a writer of significant gifts. In short narratives that invariably entice the reader with an arresting opening sentence, he establishes a solid sense of place, using the local color of his native Alabama, and transforms ordinary people into nearly mythic figures. The first story, ‘Now You See Her,’ sets the stage, constructing a conflict of nearly Oedipal proportions. A veterinarian widower and his teenage son, Xavier, who calls himself X, spy on Grace, their next-door neighbor, who ‘it would appear . . . renounced clothing altogether’; the surprising climax occurs when her dog suddenly takes ill. In many of Knight’s offerings, animals act as agents of change: in the title story, a dogfight is the catalyst for an adulterous affair and results in a parallel clash between the dogs’ owners. ‘Gerald’s Monkey’ uses a man’s desire for a pet monkey to examine the emotional aftermath of Vietnam. Knight demonstrates agility with a diversity of viewpoints: he is equally at ease with first-person narration or third, an adult perspective or an adolescent’s, as in a stunner called ‘A Bad Man, So Pretty’ (taken from a Muhammad Ali quote) that works up to a Cain and Abel-style confrontation. Knight’s characters are both recognizable and transcendent, suddenly drawn into trespassing the ordinary limits of their lives to enter the realm of allegory.” —Publishers Weekly
A New York Times Editors’ Choice short story collection hailed as “a fresh masterpiece of Southern fiction . . . touching, haunting and brilliant” (Dallas News). Long considered a master of the form and an essential voice in American fiction, Michael Knight delivers a “deft and wonderful, wholly original” collection of interlinked stories set among the members of a Mobile, Alabama family in the years preceding a devastating hurricane (The New York Times Book Review). Grappling with dramas both epic and personal, from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the “unspeakable misgivings of contentment,” Eveningland captures with perfect authenticity of place the ways in which ordinary life astounds us with its complexity. A teenaged girl with a taste for violence holds a burglar hostage in her house on New Year’s Eve; a middle-aged couple examines the intricacies of their marriage as they prepare to throw a party; and a real estate mogul in the throes of grief buys up all the property on an island only to be accused of madness by his daughters. These stories, infused with humor and pathos, excavate brilliantly the latent desires and motivations that drive life forward in “a luminous collection from a writer of the first rank” (Esquire).
The award-winning author of Eveningland “combines a coming-of-age tale, a ghost story and a meditation on history in his engrossing latest novel” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). It’s 1994 and Lenore Littlefield is a junior at Briarwood School for Girls. She plays basketball. She hates her roommate. History is her favorite subject. She has told no one that she’s pregnant. Everything, in other words, is under control. Meanwhile, Disney has announced plans to build a new theme park just up the road, a “Technicolor simulacrum of American History” right in the middle of one of the most history-rich regions of the country. If successful, the development will forever alter the character of Prince William County, VA, and have unforeseeable consequences for the school. When the threat of the theme park begins to intrude on the lives of the faculty and students at Briarwood, secrets will be revealed and unexpected alliances will form. Lenore must decide whom she can trust—will it be a middle-aged history teacher struggling to find purpose in his humdrum life? A lonely basketball coach tasked with directing the school play? A reclusive playwright still grappling with her own Briarwood legacy? Or a teenage ghost equally adept at communicating with the living via telephone or Ouija board? Following a cast of memorable characters as they reckon with questions about fate, history, and the possibility of happiness, At Briarwood School for Girls is “an inventive coming of age tale” (Southern Living). “A stunning novel with a hint of the supernatural that’s sure to delight readers.”—Publishers Weekly “Irresistible and satisfying.”—Christine Schutt, author of Florida: A Novel
From “the lineage of . . . Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty” comes a prize-winning novel about crimes of passion in Alabama (San Francisco Chronicle). After the deaths of his parents, Simon Bell returns to his sleepy hometown of Sherwood, Alabama, hoping for a simple, quiet existence. But when he meets Delia Holladay one hot, unmoving summer day, latent needs and desires are suddenly awakened. Delia is young, beautiful, impulsive, and married. As their emotions deepen, the affair soon slips beyond their control, building to a final reckoning that will leave no one untouched. Evoking a medley of distinct voices, Michael Knight, “a writer of the first rank”, and winner of the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Excellence in Fiction, tells a richly layered tale of adultery, love, and murder (Esquire). “Every word in this deeply resonant novel is pure gold” as it follows the arc of one fateful romance to its inevitable and heartbreaking conclusion (The Washington Post Book World).
“Truman Capote, Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas all used Christmas . . . The Holiday Season joins this crowded table and . . . makes itself at home” (The New York Times Book Review). Hilarious and heartbreaking, The Holiday Season and its companion piece, Love at the End of the Year, are tender ruminations on the nature of family, the power of love, and a particularly complicated time of year. In The Holiday Season, father Jeff Posey and sons Ted and Frank are still trying to figure out how to be a family three years after the death of the wife and mother who bound them together. As the holidays threaten to unearth the usual myriad of emotions and memories, fractures in their relationships begin to splinter over what should be, but never are, relatively unimportant problems . . . The second novella, Love at the End of the Year, is an intoxicating tale that weighs up love in all its many forms over the course of a single, magical Alabama New Year’s Eve as a series of humorous vignettes explore how relationships begin, how they end, and how insane they can make every one of us. Here, the acclaimed author of The Typist celebrates the holidays with a duet of stories that are “quirky, humorous, smart, and sad,” offering a unique view of our world that “gets to the heart of loneliness, family, and the hope of love without crying a river of false sentiment or cheer that fades with the season” (Style Weekly).
Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story. In the course of his adventures, Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarchist Sufi heretics, vegan kungfu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hard-core bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.
Success in 50 Steps has been 10 years in the making, with the author researching and compiling over 500 book summaries into video, audio and written format on his website Bestbookbits.com. The book takes the reader through the steps of taking their dreams out of their head and making them a reality. Walking the reader through the steps to success such as dreams, passions, desire, purpose, goals, planning, time, knowledge, ideas, thinking, beliefs, attitude, action, work, habits, happiness, growth, failure, fear, courage, motivation, persistence, discipline, results and success. With the pathway to success outlined in 50 easy steps, anyone can put into practice the wisdom to take their personal dreams and goals out of their head into reality. Featuring a treasure trove of quotations from the legends of personal development such as Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill, Les Brown, Zig Ziglar, Wayne Dyer, Brian Tracy, Earl Nightingale, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Og Mandino and Bob Proctor to name a few, let this book inspire you to become the best version of yourself.
When Michael Muhammad Knight sets out to write the definitive biography of his “Anarcho-Sufi” hero and mentor, writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), he makes a startling discovery that changes everything. At the same time that he grows disillusioned with his idol, Knight finds that his own books have led to American Muslim youths making a countercultural idol of him, placing him on the same pedestal that he had given Wilson. In an attempt to forge his own path, Knight pledges himself to an Iranian Sufi order that Wilson had almost joined, attempts to write the Great American Queer Islamo-Futurist Novel, and even creates his own mosque in the wilderness of West Virginia. He also employs the “cut-up” writing method of Bey’s friend, the late William S. Burroughs, to the Qur’an, subjecting Islam’s holiest scripture to literary experimentation. William S. Burroughs vs. the Qur’an is the struggle of a hero-worshiper without heroes and the meeting of religious and artistic paths, the quest of a writer as spiritual seeker.
Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority. Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.
A thoughtful, insider view of The Five Percenters-a deeply complex and misunderstood community whose ideas and symbols influenced the rise of hip-hop. Misrepresented in the media as a black parallel to the Hell's Angels, portrayed as everything from a vicious street gang to quasi- Islamic revolutionaries, The Five Percenters are a movement that began as a breakaway sect from the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960s Harlem and went on to impact the formation of hip-hop. References to Five Percent language and ideas are found in the lyrics of wide-ranging artists, such as Nas, Rakim, the Wu-Tang Clan, and even Jay-Z. The Five Percenters are denounced by white America as racists, and orthodox Islam as heretics, for teaching that the black man is Allah. Michael Muhammad Knight ("the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature" -The Guardian) has engaged this culture as both white and Muslim; and over the course of his relationship with The Five Percenters, his personal position changed from that of an outsider to an accepted participant with his own initiatory name (Azreal Wisdom). This has given him an intimate perch from which to understand and examine the controversial doctrines of this influential movement. In Why I Am a Five Percenter, Knight strips away years of sensationalism to offer a serious encounter with Five Percenter thought. Encoded within Five Percent culture is a profound critique of organized religion, from which the movement derives its name: Only Five Percent can act as "poor righteous teachers" against the evil Ten Percent, the power structure which uses religion to deceive the Eighty- Five Percent, the "deaf, dumb, and blind" masses. Questioning his own relationship to the Five Percent, Knight directly confronts the community's most difficult teachings. In Why I Am a Five Percenter, Knight not only illuminates a thought system that must appear bizarre to outsiders, but he also brilliantly dissects the very issues of"insiders" and "outsiders," territory and ownership, as they relate to religion and privilege, and to our conditioned ideas about race.
From Malcom X to the Wu Tang Clan, the first in-depth account of this fascinating black power movement With a cast of characters ranging from Malcolm X to 50 Cent, Knight’s compelling work is the first detailed account of the movement inextricably linked with black empowerment, Islam, New York, and hip-hop. Whether discussing the stars of Five Percenter rap or 1980s crack empires, this fast-paced investigation uncovers the community’s icons and heritage, and examines its growing influence in urban American youth culture.
If Tripping with Allah is a road book, it’s a road book in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey, rather than On the Road. Amazonian shamanism meets Christianity meets West African religion meets Islam in this work of reflection and inward adventure. Knight, the “Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature” seeks reconciliation between his Muslim identity and his drinking of ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea that has been used in the Amazon for centuries. His experience becomes an opportunity to investigate complex issues of drugs, religion, and modernity. Though essential for readers interested in Islam or the growing popularity of ayahuasca, this book is truly about neither Islam nor ayahuasca. Tripping with Allah provides an accessible look into the construction of religion, the often artificial borders dividing these constructions, and the ways in which religion might change in an increasingly globalized world. Finally, Tripping with Allah not only explores Islam and drugs, but also Knight’s own process of creativity and discovery.
The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention. It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable. Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large.
The progenitor of "Muslim punk rock" and one of today's freshest spiritual voices pushes back against the common assumption that the historic faiths have no occult or magical tradition in this richly learned historical and personal journey through the practice of magic in Islam. Magic in Islam offers a look at magical and occult technologies throughout Muslim history, starting with Islam's earliest and most canonical sources. In addition to providing a highly accessible introduction to magic as it is defined, practiced, condemned, and defended within Muslim traditions, Magic in Islam challenges common assumptions about organized religion. Michael Muhammad Knight's deeply original book fills a gap within existing literature on the place of magic in Islamic traditions and opens a new window on Islam for general readers and students of religion alike. In doing so, the book counters and complicates widespread perceptions of Islam, as well as of magic as it is practiced outside of European contexts. Magic in Islam also challenges our view of "organized religions" as clearly defined systems that can be reduced to checklists of key doctrines, texts, and rules. As a result, Magic in Islam throws a monkey wrench into the conventions of the "intro to Islam" genre, threatening to flip popular notions of a religion's "center" and "margins.
A land filled with rolling hills and countless forests, with mystery and adventure. This is the kingdom of Valeron, an age old land full of knights, dragons, wizards, witches, wolves and other creatures of fantasy. Young Edward is a knight apprentice training with the legendary knight Sir James. Edwards life changes as he encounters a dragon in the marketplace. Sir James arrives and he and Edward chase the dragon away. This is just the start of Edwards journey, filled with mysterious strangers, vicious pack of wolves and a dragon with an appetite for revenge. Along this journey Edward will discover what it truly means to be a knight for Valeron. At the end of this journey will the knights succeed or will they be dinner for wolves or a dragon. Knight Tales will keep you wondering what will happen next when the knights battle men, wolves, and a dragon with a surprise for everyone.
I have tried to tell the story of Christ and what he gave us in a language that children can both read and understand, hopefully making a change in their lives and in their families also.
Become a Jedi Master ·Jedi Force power tips and combo attack lists ·Every secret exposed ·Detailed walkthroughs for every mission, including bonus and challenge missions ·Complete maps for all story missions, revealing all secret and pickup locations ·Comprehensive enemy bios and strategies ·Multiplayer dueling and arena tactics
Taqwacores are a legendary group of California Islamic punk bands with their own superstars and customs: Sunni straight-edgers, riot grrls in burqas, and stoned, mohawked Sufis acknowledge the old rules, but live a riotous American tradition of Islam. Buffalo, NY is a collegiate microcosm of the Khalifornia scene where debate rages about whether electric guitars are halal and what the Quranic sources are for an Iggy Pop song. A trucker incarnation of Rumi who leaves love poems at rest stops is among the other Muslim iconoclasts who inhabit this surprising milieu, an intimate, new American Islamic experience.
Cat-Boy just wants a day off. But crime never takes a holiday, and a heros work is never done. Cat-Boys convention meeting with the Sparky-Rat Brethren is interrupted when he is called to duty. Much to his chagrin, his nemesis, Joshua uses the opportunity to his own advantage and steals the Game-cat, releases Queen Jonester and turns the brethren against Cat-Boy! Team-Cat is suddenly forced to battle Jonesters digital army as well as a bunch of nasally nerds to bring some type of law and order back to Glendale. All Cat-Boy wants is a little fun with Sparky-Rat. Even a superhero needs someone to look up to! (Murky Cortes says,) This just in! Bonus short story, DNA Test, included!
Only One Can Rule! - Pros and cons of each alignment path: Pagan, Imperial, and Renaissance - Keys to utilizing terrain, Acts of God, technology, and espionage - Military formations, unit combinations, and siege warfare tactics - Resource management: harvest, trade, and pillage - In-depth building tree for units and structures - Multiplayer strategies and tips from the developers - Detailed walkthroughs of all 21 levels
Mastery is now attainable ·Learn to refine your battle tactics with deft attacks and graceful defenses ·Gain insight into the workings of the Card Shop ·Become a discriminating aficionado when trading cards for that ultimate deck ·Unlock the secrets that will advance your gameplay ·Earn the bragging rights of a true Kaijudo Master!
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