It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.

All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.

Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt have gathered together a wide-ranging and provocative set of original essays that successfully demonstrate how contingent the process of making knowledge was during a period of fundamental epistemological change. This is a finely crafted and conceptualized collection.

Within days they'd formed an unholy alliance with a foppish young French vampire in the Garden District who had implausibly golden hair and a streak of ruthlessness as wide as the Mississippi

Are you smelling me?” After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn't want him to have. “Don't tempt me,” he murmured.

Wordlessly I looked back at him, astonished that a kiss on the palm could be so intimate.

I wanted to know how humans came up with a view of the world that had so little magic in it. I needed to understand how they convinced themselves that magic wasn’t important.