The Believer, a ten-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a bimonthly literature, arts, and culture magazine based at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, a department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. Our poetry section is curated by Jericho Brown, Kristen Radtke selects our comics, and Joshua Wolf Shenk is our editor-in-chief. Issues feature a column by Nick Hornby, in which he discusses the things he's been reading, as well as a comedy advice column.

"Stories that delight, surprise, that hang about the dusky edges of 'mainstream' fiction with characters, settings, plots that abandon the normal and mundane and explore new ideas, themes and ways of being." -Deb Hoag. Featuring: Nancy A. Collins, Eugie Foster, Janice Lee, Rachel Kendall, Candy Caradoc, Mysty Unger, Roberta Lawson, Sara Genge, Gina Ranalli, Deb Hoag, C. M. Vernon, Aliette de Bodard, Caroline M. Yoachim, Flavia Testa, Aimee C. Amodio, Ann Hagman Cardinal, Rachel Turner, Wendy Jane Muzlanova, Katie Coyle, Helen Burke, Janis Butler Holm, J.S. Breukelaar, Carol Novack, Tantra Bensko, Nancy DiMauro, Moira McPartlin.

A complex and entangled text that explores inherited trauma, the presence of ghosts, interspecies communication, the dream world, grief, and human/animal separation. Weaving wisdom from her shamanic practice and the interstices of language, and in the difficult moments anticipating the deaths of her beloved dog companions, Separation Anxiety marks the first collection of poetry from acclaimed prose writer Janice Lee, and is a meditation on inhabitation and existence beyond the human.

The three-volume set LNCS 13245, 13246 and 13247 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2022, held online, in April 2021. The total of 72 full papers, along with 76 short papers, are presented in this three-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 543 submissions. Additionally, 13 industrial papers, 9 demo papers and 2 PhD consortium papers are included. The conference was planned to take place in Hyderabad, India, but it was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The three-volume set LNCS 13245, 13246 and 13247 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2022, held online, in April 2021. The total of 72 full papers, along with 76 short papers, are presented in this three-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 543 submissions. Additionally, 13 industrial papers, 9 demo papers and 2 PhD consortium papers are included. The conference was planned to take place in Hyderabad, India, but it was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The three-volume set LNCS 13245, 13246 and 13247 constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications, DASFAA 2022, held online, in April 2021. The total of 72 full papers, along with 76 short papers, are presented in this three-volume set was carefully reviewed and selected from 543 submissions. Additionally, 13 industrial papers, 9 demo papers and 2 PhD consortium papers are included. The conference was planned to take place in Hyderabad, India, but it was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

'The "corpus hermeticum," in Janice Lee's stunning collection, is the color of the blood it contains. As the body that "paints" and "listens", it "glitters" with "pigment": it bursts into flower and it crouches down on all fours to put its mouth to the ground. On a continuum from primitive to synthetic, the figures in KEROTAKIS "is[are] something which it is like to be a human being." Questions of nest, shelter, and milk arise; questions about a mineral composition arise. Like "waves." There's an extreme wetness in this book, brought into relief by the "desert" -- its feral architecture and peripheries. Reading Lee's beautiful first book, I was incredibly moved by the vulnerability of the bodies that appear in her work, and the way these bodies make intensive marks upon landscapes that almost immediately disappear. With enormous tenderness and craft - - (this writer is a design genius in a way that extends to the wiring of the lines themselves) -- Lee asks her readers: What erodes an originating point? Why do people disappear? What brings a body back to the optic and sensate domains, where it thrives, where it has a love, where it had a mother? I am not sure that this book answers these question, but it repeats them until the reader's blood rises in response. Until the reader, alchemically, becomes - also - "red."' -Bhanu Kapil, Author of Incubation: A Space For Monsters and A Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

BLACK AND WHITE EDITION] "Janice Lee is a genius." - Eileen Myles, author of Inferno (a poet's novel) ART: Original Holga photographs by Rochelle Ritchie Spencer SOUND: original music by Resident Anti-Hero "Daughter is quantum. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language -- in minimal bursts of physical intensities, their magnitude measured in intimate discretes. Janice Lee's prose is energy transfer of the elementary particles of the matter of language. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language, understood at the infinitesimal level. No other book ever written has entered my body and being so physically pure. There is not distance between the state of narrative and the matter of being. I turn the page of her body." - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Reel to Reel "Daughter, the new volume by Janice Lee, seems to rise as intuitive quantum ascent. It is praxis of the marred, of the seemingly uneven. Janice Lee understands that writing cannot exist as narrative outcome. In Daughter there is reckoning with the cosmos as phantom, as something that does and does not exist. Energies appear by means of paradox and evaporation." - poet Will Alexander, author of The Sri Lankan Loxodrome "In Daughter, Janice Lee floods the body of a book with the body of a body, all its hybrid, constantly damaging and mending cells. From field to field among the pages we are subject to a brain-damaged, collide-o-scopic file of some internet-age Acker'd Frankenstein having lived to see god die; and yet still must go on walking in the deity's corpse... The result is a meticulous and terrifying resurrection, a glitchy screamtext passed in dire silence to the reader the way blood passes from mother into child. - Blake Butler, author of There is No Year "Lee's surgical cadences and sharp fragments work here as writing will work-to force attention to detail. Which is the unnatural order of things. - Vanessa Place, author of La Medusa and Dies: A Sentence

For Gavin McKinley, the lead pastor of a growing congregation in southern Mississippi, life could not get any better. His hard work and long years of sacrifice have finally paid off. That is, until his wife, Gillian, becomes pregnant with their third child against Gavin's wishes. Things take an unexpected turn when Gillian decides to keep the baby, knowing that she is defying her husband's express command.

In the meantime, Gavin is exposed for having an illicit affair and is asked to step down from the pulpit after twenty years in ministry. Gavin sees his world crumbling, and the loss of control terrifies him. In a frantic attempt to take matters into his own hands, Gavin unwittingly involves a young man from his congregation. In a twist of fate that turns deadly, their lives are changed in the blink of an eye.

Can Gavin McKinley find forgiveness for his sins? Will Gillian hold true to her faith, even when all seems lost? Could God possibly take a terrible situation and make it right?

Throughout And the Widow Wore Red, it is clear that the choices we make are often life altering, and not always for the better. We are reminded that God's grace is sufficient and His mercy is everlasting. God is exalted in this tale of love gone awry, of faith tested beyond endurance, and of forgiveness extended when least expected.

In the fall of 1930, Sheldon Henry's life is in turmoil once again. After barely escaping with his life from an illegal rum running operation in Canada, he marries his second wife, Eliza. As she struggles with a life threatening illness, Sheldon fears that he may be left to raise his four young daughters alone. A poor business decision also forces him to mortgage the family farm, putting his family in jeopardy just as the Great Depression gains momentum. Thomasina, a beautiful young Irish woman, is also facing an uncertain future. Her husband of one month abandons her, and while waiting on the divorce to be finalized she is forced to take on the role of a housekeeper for which she is ill prepared. In addition to the disgrace and pain of abandonment, she also struggles with feelings toward her new employer. Desperate times lead to desperate measures, and Sheldon Henry and Thomasina are unprepared for what lies ahead. While each of them is determined to see that the family is taken care of, it becomes difficult to find common ground. For Sheldon Henry Stottz, it seems that pain and turmoil are determined to haunt his life. With his faith stretched to its limit, he finds himself desperately reaching out to God for wisdom and direction. How much tragedy can one man endure without completely losing hope? Can a woman whose life has been shattered learn to trust God? Can a man and woman from completely different backgrounds find love and forgiveness in a broken world?

In one earth shattering moment, Sheldon Henry Stottz's near perfect life is changed forever. The influenza epidemic of 1918 had already taken many lives, but now it had resulted in the untimely death of his wife, Lila and their newborn, Rose. In what seemed like a single breath, the people Sheldon Henry loved the most where gone, and his rock-solid faith shaken to the core. Why was God letting this happen? What had he done to deserve such agony, such utter pain? "I've always been faithful." he thought, "I have always believed."Just when he thought things could not get worse, they did. At the graveside service of his beloved family, Sheldon Henry is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a German spy. "This can't be happening." he thought, "Not here. Not now."Still in shock over the deaths of his beloved family, he is ripped away and immediately transported to a military prison for questioning."Why God?" "What have I done to deserve this?" "Is this a test?" "Is there something you are trying to teach me?" "Have I done something wrong?" "Tell me, Father, please tell me."In the days that follow, Sheldon Henry is tested to the limits of his personal and spiritual endurance. His confusion over what has happened, and the isolation of prison, only amplify his unbearable sense of loss. He dreams of Lila. Her voice. Her tender touch. She is always on his mind even though he knows she is gone forever.Shortly after his release from prison, Sheldon stumbles upon a young woman in tears. She's deeply broken, and while trying to offer some comfort, Sheldon suddenly realizes that God has spared him for a purpose; a purpose he would perhaps soon understand.AuthorsLynette Chambers & Janice Lee

The Illusion of Ignorance examines the cultural politics of the American encounter with Porfirian Mexico as a precursor and model for the twentieth-century American encounter with the world. Detailed discussions of the logistics of conducting diplomacy, doing business, or traveling abroad in the era give readers a vivid picture of how Americans experienced this age of international expansion, while contrasting Mexican and American visions of the changing relationship. In the end, Mexico's efforts to promote Mexico as a partner in progress with the U.S. was lost to an American illusion schizophrenically divided between fantasies of American leadership toward, and refuge from, modernity. The Illusion of Ignorance argues that American ignorance of the experience of other nations is not so much a barrier to better understanding of the world, but a strategy Americans have chosen to maintain their vision of the U.S. relationship with the world.

In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn't the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she was a child, lives alone with her dog and struggles to finish her book. The photographer, stunted by the death of his grandmother and caretaker, struggles to take a single picture and enters into a complicated relationship with the writer. The old man, facing his past in small doses, spends his time watching television and reorganizing the objects in his apartment to stay distracted from the deterioration around him. A depiction of the cycles of abuse and trauma in a prolonged end-time, Imagine a Death examines the ways in which our pasts envelop us, the ways in which we justify horrible things in the name of survival, all of the horrible and beautiful things we are capable of when we are hurt and broken, and the animal (and plant) companions that ground us.