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6 books match the query 'Missing children'

cover of Concluding

Concluding

Henry Green

University of Chicago Press, 1985

Concluding is probably the most lyrical novel by a writer whom Rebecca West has called "the most original" of his time. "Within the compass of a summer's day for all time yet intensely and closely centered upon a particular time and place, we are made aware of man's predicament in a world of transcendent sadness and beauty."—Horizon

"[A] novel of projections, protractions, long shots, and shadows flying ahead, a slow fall. . . . The sinister world of Concluding is . . . beautiful, side-lit and colored like an undersea kingdom."—from the Foreword by Eudora Welty
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cover of Last Seen

Last Seen

Jacqueline Jones LaMon

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Inspired by actual case histories of long-term missing African American children, this provocative and heartrending collection of poems evokes the experience of what it means to be among the missing in contemporary America. This thought-provoking collection of persona poems looks at absence from the standpoint of the witnesses surrounding the void and offers an intimate depiction of those impossible moments of aftermath lived by those who remain accounted for and present. While enabling us to question our own sense of identity, this unique collection of poems reveals the blurred edges of separation between them and us and the impact that the missing have upon our present and future.


Finalist, NAACP Image Awards

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cover of Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics

Orphan Black

Performance, Gender, Biopolitics

Edited by Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing

Intellect Books, 2018

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of the hit television series Orphan Black and the questions it raises for performance and technology, gender and reproduction, and biopolitics and community. 

Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black’s own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology, and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a "posthuman" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science, and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor, and shape life today.
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cover of The Contortionists

The Contortionists

Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner

Signature Books, 2020

When five-year-old Joshua Christopher disappears off the street as he walks to a friend’s birthday party, his family is forced to confront the unimaginable. What happened? Why? Who took him? The convicted sex offender caught lurking near the search? Why won’t police leave his family, his parents, alone?

In his second novel, his first in twenty years, Robert H. Van Wagoner explores a family in extremis tottering at the edge of faith: in God and church, in family, and in marriage, in the institutions that promise safety and meaning. Both lyrical and explosive, The Contortionists unfolds as a page-turning mystery. Van Wagoner’s wrenching narrative propels the reader forward, toward the novel’s harrowing climax, while deftly unpacking its major themes—mental illness, sexuality, and substance abuse in a culture that would rather not confront them. Does the truth ever set anyone ultimately free? The stakes for Joshua and his family could not be greater.
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cover of The Thieves of Summer

The Thieves of Summer

Linda Sillitoe

Signature Books, 2014

Set in Salt Lake City at the height of the Great Depression, Linda Sillitoe’s last novel opens with three little girls, eleven-year-old triplets, skipping in front of their house at 1300 South, across from Liberty Park. They giggle lightly as they chant: 

Prin-cess Al-ice in Liberty Park
Munch-es ba-nan-as ’til way after dark.

Princess Alice is an elephant the children of Utah purchased by donating nickels and dimes to a circus. The girls don’t know this, but her handler takes the mammoth princess out on late-night strolls around the park when the moon is out. What they do know is that the elephant sometimes escapes and goes on a rampage, crashing through front-yard fences and collecting collars of clothesline laundry around her neck, a persistent train of barking dogs following behind. The girls’ father is a police officer who is investigating a boy’s disappearance. As the case unfolds, the perception of the park, with its eighty acres of trees and grass, will change from the epitome of freedom to a place to be avoided, even as Princess Alice moves to a secure confinement at a new zoo at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. The story is loosely based on the exploits of a real live elephant that lived in Liberty Park a decade before Sillitoe’s childhood in the neighborhood.  
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cover of Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims

Threatened Children

Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims

Joel Best

University of Chicago Press, 1990

Child abuse, incest, child molestation, Halloween sadism, child pornography: although clearly not new problems, they have attracted more attention than ever before. Threatened Children asks why. Joel Best analyzes the rhetorical tools used by child advocates when making claims aimed at raising public anxiety and examines the media's role in transmitting reformers' claims and the public's response to the frightening statistics, compelling examples, and expanding definitions it confronts. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from criminal justice records to news stories, from urban legends to public opinion surveys, Best reveals how the cultural construction of social problems evolves.
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