World Folklore

Full of tragic heroes, intoxicating love stories, and the unstoppable force of fate, there is no conflict more iconic than the Trojan War. Troy is the story of the epic battle retold by Fry with drama, humor, and vivid emotion. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Helen, their lovers, and their mortal enemies all burn bright in Fry's compelling prose. This volume invites you to explore a captivating world with a brilliant storyteller as your guide.

In detective Mera Maurea's experience, three things motivate a murder: secrets, convenience, or passion. But none of the three can explain why the Summer King is dead. With a tight deadline hanging over her head, Mera has to figure out who's the culprit before the frail balance that holds the nation of Tagrad together crumbles into dust. To aid her - or turn her life into a living hell, hard to tell which - is her fae partner Sebastian Dhay, a snarky detective with a penchant for the illegal. He's a volatile wild card who will do anything to solve the murder, even if it means his doom.

Native Americans have a long tradition of storytelling. Now, you can easily introduce your children to these rich cultures with a compilation of powerful tales from multiple tribes like the Cheyenne and the Lenape.

Passed down through generations, the Slavic practice of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery is still alive and well in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus, as well as the Balkans and the Baltic states. There are still witches who whisper upon tied knots to curse or heal, sorceresses who shapeshift into animals or household objects, magicians who cast spells for love or good fortune, and common folk who seek their aid for daily problems big and small. Natasha Helvin explores in detail the folk history and practice of Russian sorcery and Eastern Slavic magical rites.

Rich in detail derived from the author's fieldwork and the anthropological literature, this work paints a picture of possession as one of the usually positive and most widespread of human religious experiences. It also details the ritual of exorcism, which is applied when things go wrong.

In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.

Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows, and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings.

They live in shadows - deep in the forest, late in the night, in the dark recesses of our minds. They're spoken of in stories and superstitions, relics of an unenlightened age, old wives' tales, passed down through generations. Yet no matter how wary and jaded we have become, as individuals or as a society, a part of us remains vulnerable to them: werewolves and wendigos, poltergeists and vampires, angry elves and vengeful spirits.

Join Aaron Mahnke, the host of the popular podcast Lore, as he explores some dreadful places and the history that haunts them. Mahnke takes us to Colorado and the palatial Stanley Hotel, where wealthy guests enjoyed views of the Rocky Mountains at the turn of the 20th century - and where, decades later, a restless author would awaken from a nightmare, inspired to write one of the most revered horror novels of all time. Mahnke also crosses land and sea to visit frightful sites with their own echoes of dark deeds, horrible tragedies, and shocking evil still resounding.

Many yoga practitioners explore the benefits of yoga through its poses, but did you know that the magic and mystery of yoga lie within the power of yogic mythology? Myths of the Asanas was the first book to collect and retell the ancient tales of yogic myth to a modern audience, and has since become a beloved resource for yoga practitioners and instructors the world over. This expanded edition contains nine unheard stories about some of the yoga world's most beloved poses.

The second book in a three-volume collection, The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals tells the incredible true stories of some of the mortals who achieved notoriety in history and folklore through horrible means. Monsters of this sort - serial killers, desperate criminals, and socially mobile people with a much darker double life - are, in fact, quite real.

A portal is a point of possibility, a step into a thousand journeys. Join leading researcher Freddy Silva as he takes you on a magical tour around the world to places on the land where the laws of physics behave differently and the perception of overlapping realities is both apparent and immediate. Experience Cadair Idris in Wales, Tintagel in England, the west coast of Scotland, Kura Tawhiti in New Zealand, Tse Bit'a'i in New Mexico, the plateau of Giza, and power places high in the Andes.

For many centuries the figure of the witch has haunted our imagination and our nightmares. There have been many attempts to quash our fascination with these wielders of forbidden powers, but all have failed. We invite you now on a journey through a moonlit world, where every shadow tells a tale of magic, persecution and persistence. In this fascinating volume, discover witches real and legendary, who once terrorized, devoured, helped or empowered their communities, but who are now largely forgotten.

Why have societies all across the world feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs, and origins in Europe's history. The witch came to prominence - and often a painful death - in early modern Europe, yet her origins are much more geographically diverse and historically deep. In this landmark book, Ronald Hutton traces witchcraft from the ancient world to the early modern state.

Jason and the Golden Fleece is one of the finest tales of Ancient Greece, an epic journey of adventure and trial standing beside similar stories of Perseus, Theseus and the Labours of Heracles. The finest classic account comes from Apollonius of Rhodes, the Greek poet of the 3rd century BCE and librarian at Alexandria. Though less well-known than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and much shorter, it is an epic poem which is both exciting and moving, with remarkably vivid portraits of the main characters, Jason and Medea.

“The People Could Fly,” the title story in Virginia Hamilton’s prize-winning American Black folktale collection, is a fantasy tale of the slaves who possessed the ancient magic words that enabled them to literally fly away to freedom. And it is a moving tale of those who did not have the opportunity to “fly” away, who remained slaves with only their imaginations to set them free as they told and retold this tale.

In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili - the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love - into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body - as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet.

During his journeys around Japan, Smith recorded ancient Japanese myths and legends in his personal diaries. The result is a fascinating collection of historical legends from all over Japan, with themes including ghosts, unrequited love, Shinto landscape, tree and ocean spirits, samurai culture and tales driven by Bushido and Buddhist ethics. Gordon Smith's writing combines a realist style with supernatural elements, resulting in an anthology of 'magic realist' tales which will bewitch and captivate listeners.

People have always been afraid of the dead. Since the dawn of humanity, people have both cared for those who are deceased yet also tried to keep them away. There are a myriad of legends and beliefs about the dead coming back, and one of the more persistent ones is of the vampire.