検索キーワード： 制作 "Blackstone Publishing" 文学・フィクション

Why are so many of the superhero myths tied up with loss, often violent, of parents or parental figures? What is the significance of the dual identity? What makes some superhuman figures “good” and others “evil”? Why are so many of the prime superheroes white and male? How has the superhero evolved over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? All these topics, and more, are covered in this lively and original exploration of the reasons why the superhero—in comic books, films, and TV—is such a potent myth for our times and culture.

In a frigate stolen from his own navy, Captain Favian Markham races to New Orleans with the dispatches he’s captured from a British warship—dispatches making it clear that the city will soon be the target of a British fleet and an invading army. But Favian finds New Orleans a city of intrigue, where Creoles conspire against the Americans, streetfighters cloak their murders under the Code Duello, the pirate Jean Laffite defies the Navy, and a cabal of elite soldiers conspire to hand the city to the enemy—and where two sensuous Creole women, Eugenie and Campaspe, vie for his favor.

Aspasia and Saniye are friends from childhood. They share their secrets and joy, helping each other in times of trouble. When WWI breaks, the news travels to the village, but the locals have no idea how it will affect their lives. When the war ends, the Greeks come to the village, causing havoc, burning houses, and shooting Turks. The residents regard each other with suspicion. Their world has turned upside down, but some of the old friendships survive, despite the odds.

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse. Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors charts the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.

Coming to terms with advancing dementia, Mary has no choice other than to move into her daughter’s home. Her daughter, Kayla, caught between her cognitively impaired mother and her belligerent teenage son, soon finds caregiving is more challenging than she imagined. Sage, the family’s golden retriever, offers comfort and unconditional love, but she has her own problems, especially when it comes to dealing with Mary’s cat.

Across forty years, three continents, and a past incident in 1560 France, Serafina Olegario tests the boundaries of love, power, and corruption as she fights to escape her life of poverty and abuse. Serafina’s quest begins in Brazil when she’s possessed by the warrior goddess Yansã, who emboldens her to fight yet threatens to consume her spirit. Fueled by power and enticed by Exú, an immortal trickster and intermediary to the gods, Serafina turns to the seductive magic of Quimbanda. It’s dangerous to dance in the fire. But when you come from nothing, you have nothing to lose.

When Timur remarries, the girls’ new stepmother has none of their mother’s warmth, so Gül feels compelled to take on the role of mother to her younger siblings. Their village upbringing is full of simple pleasures: summer evenings sat outside listening to the radio, games played in the street. But the world is evolving, and with an emerging focus on economic growth and prosperity as modernity creeps in, Gül’s future is unknown.

Out of my mountain, out of my reach. I’ll do anything to get her back, even break a truce that’s kept my kingdom safe. I can only breathe again when she’s back in my arms. When I can make her pay for every second I spent in fear. I want more than her body. I want her heart. And I will punish her until it’s mine.

The Tale of the Tenpenny Tontine is another mystifying manor-house stumper for Wodehousian bon-vivant and problem-solver Anty Boisjoly, when his clubmate asks him to determine who died first after a duel is fought in a locked room. The untold riches of the Tenpenny Tontine are in the balance, but the stakes only get higher when Anty determines that, duel or not, this was a case of murder.

Amelia Cole—Lia for short—is one of the first women studying abroad at Oxford University in the 1920s. Finally free from her overbearing Brooklyn parents, she finds a welcome sense of independence in British college life. Lia quickly falls for Scarlett Daniels, an aspiring actress and hardheaded protester. Scarlett introduces her to an exciting gender-equality movement with high stakes. But when their secret love clashes with political uprising, their relationship is one of the casualties.

When business magnate Robert Jeffreys announces his investment in airships, he hosts a promotional flight for a group of reporters. Working undercover in the crew is retired spy Augusta Peel. She’d rather be working on her book repair business, but Inspector Fisher of Scotland Yard has persuaded her to help with a surveillance operation. The press trip on the airship takes a turn when a body is found in a cabin. Can Augusta identify the murderer? It’s tricky to find a motive among the sophisticated passengers—some of them are sophisticated liars, too.

The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he’s a loser. Well into his forties, he’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall. He gets by just by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job....

Fed up with an outlaw existence, Calico Jack Rackam swears off the pirate life, but he hasn’t reckoned with Anne Bonny, a woman who would as soon stab a man as give him a good tumble—that is, unless he’s a pirate. Soon Jack finds himself out on the high seas again, with Anne by his side and his men spoiling for action. And when they capture a Dutch merchant ship, they pick up an unlikely crewmate as well, an expert sword fighter and topmast seaman who has a secret: he just happens to be a woman named Mary. Together they cut a bold swath through the West Indies.

Over twenty years ago, after an ultimatum from his pregnant ex-wife, Will was forced to assume a new identity and to fake his own death to get out from under his dealer and user-friends once and for all. Now Will is counseling Thea, a young woman who has been diagnosed with a pathological addiction to creating fake social-media identities and who founded a start-up company, Alibis, that created false internet identities for clients, many with suspect pasts.

Favian Markham is a rising young American officer during the War of 1812. As commander of the small, slow brig Experiment, he must break the British blockade and take his outgunned vessel on a daring raid into the Narrow Seas of England. On his desperate journey he faces duels, rivalries, ambitious politicians, yardarm-to-yardarm combat, and the deadly beauty of a foreign courtesan. Yet his greatest battle is not with the enemy, but with his own divided nature….

When Eleanor Brice loses a glass slipper, she unexpectedly gains a royal fiancé and a way out of her abusive stepmother’s house. Unfortunately, eight years of mistreatment, isolation, and clandestine book learning hardly prepared Eleanor for life at Eclatant Palace, where women are seen, not heard. According to Eleanor’s eavesdropping parrot, no one at court appreciates her unladylike tendency to voice her opinion. To make matters worse, Gregory Desmarais, Crown Prince of Cartheigh, spends his last night of bachelorhood on a drunken whoring spree.

Angus is a reformed ne’er-do-well looking forward to the birth of his first child when he’s murdered by a man who is in love with his pregnant wife, Gracie. Having never believed in God, heaven or hell, Angus finds himself in the afterlife—a place that provides more questions than answers. As a worldwide pandemic finally reaches the shores of Australia, the afterlife starts to get very crowded and Angus finds a way to reconnect with his wife, Gracie, and maybe even seek revenge on his murderer.

London’s bright young things are partying, Soho’s nightlife is buzzing, and Augusta Peel is hiding in her basement. She has a reason to hide there: it’s home to her Bloomsbury workshop where she repairs old, neglected books. After a busy time during the war, all Augusta wants is peace and quiet. But events take a turn when Augusta agrees to chaperone nineteen-year-old Harriet Jones on a date. Failing to get her home on time, she ends up in a riotous nightclub. She can’t imagine the evening getting much worse when the police raid it. But then the murder happens.

Laura, a student from a modest background, escapes her small town to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield fellowship to study at Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her coursework, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation. Years later, back in the United States with a PhD and dissertation on Henry James, she loses her job as an adjunct and reconnects with the Weatherfield Foundation. Commissioned to write a history for its centennial, she becomes obsessed by the Gilded Age origins of the Weatherfield fortune.

It’s the summer of 1883. A severe drought threatens to bankrupt the Ridgeway’s Rocking R Ranch and every rancher in northwest Texas. The cattle are thirsty and hungry. The ranchers are getting desperate. And a simple new invention called barbed wire—the devil’s rope—is their only defense against illegal herders grazing on their land. Percy Ridgeway and his brother Eli are working overtime to stake a fence around their sixty thousand acres. But someone keeps cutting the wires.