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In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived.

María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home—her Holy Children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of God. But her life changes forever when an amateur mycologist from New York, with a cameraman in tow, visits her to experience for himself the mushroom ceremony, or velada, he knows only from whispers in anthropological records. When he publishes an unauthorized article about his experience in LIFE Magazine 1957, the stage is set for an explosive encounter between the burgeoning international counterculture and the woman who became an unwilling icon of the psychedelic revolution.

Homero Aridjis’s novel, vividly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts, tells the story of the motley crew of bohemians, researchers, and holy fools, both real and imagined, who descend on the town of Huautla de Jiménez searching for inspiration, distraction, and salvation in the sacred mushrooms. These seekers melt in and out of a narrative infiltrated by the slipstream logic of dreams. As John Lennon plays jazz on the patio of the Hotel Grande, Juan Rulfo contemplates horror movies, and Allen Ginsberg recites mantras at Philip Lamantia’s wedding, María Sabina’s life is increasingly thrown into turmoil.

Carne de Dios is a masterful and often humorous blend of history, myth, and poetic imagination, captured in a translation that mirrors the hallucinatory beauty of Aridjis’s original Spanish. Aridjis’s intimate portrayal of María Sabina, informed by his personal connection to her, serves as both a tribute to her enduring legacy and a critical reflection on the wave of global interest in mushroom culture still gaining momentum today.

This English translation includes an introduction by the translator and an afterword by the author.
 

Fidel Castro's most original contribution to revolutionary and radical thought has been his development of an explicit ethical position on one of the most controversial issues of our time: violence. This book explores the evolution of Castro's political thinking - and in particular how he philosophically reconciles violence, political power and morality.

This book makes a timely intervention into the question of Castro's historical role and contribution. The author argues that Castro's doctrine of armed struggle is the logical development of his idea of the ethical liberation fighter. At its core is an unremitting emphasis on the ethical use of violence.

What does it mean to be instantly transformed into the most hated person in your community? After meeting Fidel Castro at a Havana reception in 1994, Cuban-born Magda Montiel Davis, founder of one of the largest immigration law firms in South Florida, soon found out. The reception—attended by hundreds of other Cuban émigrés—was videotaped for historical archives. In a seconds-long clip, Fidel pecks the traditional protocol kiss on Montiel Davis’s cheek as she thanks him for the social benefits conferred upon the Cuban people. The video, however, was mysteriously sold to U.S. reporters and aired incessantly throughout South Florida. Soon the encounter was an international cause célèbre.

Life as she knew it was over for Montiel Davis and her family, including a father who worked with the CIA to topple Fidel, a nohablo-inglés mother who lived with the family, her five children, and her Jewish Brooklyn-born attorney husband. Kissing Fidel shares the sometimes dismal, sometimes comical realities of an ordinary citizen being thrown into a world of death threats, mob attacks, and terrorism.

A study of religion through the lens of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus.
 
In Unbridled, William Robert uses Equus, Peter Shaffer’s enigmatic play about a boy passionately devoted to horses, to think differently about religion. For several years, Robert has used Equus to introduce students to the study of religion, provoking them to conceive of religion in unfamiliar, even uncomfortable ways. In Unbridled, he is inviting readers to do the same.
 
A play like Equus tangles together text, performance, practice, embodiment, and reception. Studying a play involves us in playing different roles, as ourselves and others, and those roles, as well as the imaginative work they require, are critical to the study of religion. By approaching Equus with the reader, turning the play around and upside-down, Unbridled transforms standard approaches to the study of religion, engaging with themes including ritual, sacrifice, worship, power, desire, violence, and sexuality, as well as thinkers including Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jonathan Z. Smith. As Unbridled shows, the way themes and theories play out in Equus challenges us to reimagine the study of religion through open questions, contrasting perspectives, and alternative modes of interpretation and appreciation.