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Captive of the Labyrinth is reissued here to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester in 1922. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Winchester purchased a simple farmhouse in San José, California. She built additions to the house and continued construction for the next twenty years. When neighbors and the local press could not imagine her motivations, they invented fanciful ones of their own. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San José house was done to thwart death and appease the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle.

Author and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo’s definitive biography unearths the truth about this reclusive eccentric, revealing that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence and the social mores of the time. The author takes readers through Winchester’s several homes, explores her private life, and, by excerpting from personal correspondence, one learns the widow’s true priority was not dissipating her fortune on the mansion in San José but endowing a hospital to eradicate a dread disease.

Sarah Winchester has been exploited for profit for over a century, but Captive of the Labyrinth finally puts to rest the myths about this American heiress, and, in the process, uncovers her true legacies.
 

The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.

In this folk-horror pastoral, poet Brian Sneeden threads paths of myth and ritual, fatherhood and climate collapse, ghost stories and grief.

Described by Kiki Petrosino as “a beautiful invasion,” Year of the Labyrinth draws upon Sneeden’s experiences as a translator and multilingual writer working in language preservation to explore boundaries between speech and ritual, myth and ecology. “In these fiercely imagined poems,” Petrosino writes, “our speaker passes between seemingly fixed physical and conceptual worlds—human/animal, past/present, forest/field. This voice finds lyric power in liminal spaces—in ‘the pollen line’ and ‘a change of wind.’ With the speaker, we travel through mirrors to places where you might grasp an animal if only ‘by the curve of its name,’ and where ‘a bird that ha[s]n’t yet been invented’ may sing. This poet’s imagination makes porous the landscapes we thought were familiar.” Kelly Link, in her judge’s citation for the Barthelme Prize, writes: “How wonderful it is, the marriage of economy and the arcane, as if a story could be a kind of lozenge that, slipped under the tongue, estranges us from our idea of how both life and language work. Every sentence has the effect of an acupuncturist’s needle, small pricks that let in strange energy.”