Sharon Marcus: 9 books

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other...

A bold new account of how celebrity works Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched...

Not revelation, but the accent, the flavor of revelation, this commentary offers a description or analysis of the mysteries at the heart of Sufi experience. The true study of Sufism does not begin in a book or in scholarly investigations because this is an inner pursuit, a path which lies within that...

This is the voyage of the soul which moves in its own direction, away from the world to planes of inner light where truth is its own resonance and grace a flood of bliss. We have our own mystery locked in the secrets of the soul, secrets which can be told, although the mystery will unfold only in revelation,...

From the early sixties to the mid-eighties this highly reflective novel, set frequently in downtown Toronto, traces events in the lives of Jennie Weber and Bill Corelli, the protagonists whose story imprints itself against this unambiguous skyline. Jennie devotes herself to supporting Bill’s career...

A tradition on the nature of consciousness offers a platform to build an ascent to the revelations of divine wisdom, mysteries as irrelevant to the molecules and atoms of science as they are to the assumptions of psychology. It is a systematic analysis based on presumptions of faith in God and the determination...

When the boatman ferrying souls of the dead across the river is on holiday, we linger on the far shore of hell, sweat and study the terrain. For that reason we move slow motion through the novel, a frieze of images projected by memory and desire, ghosts haunting the past activated by the imminence of...

Examinations of wargaming for entertainment, education, and military planning, in terms of design, critical analysis, and historical contexts. Games with military themes date back to antiquity, and yet they are curiously neglected in much of the academic and trade literature on games and game...

Thirty years of interviews that offer “a window into the minds and the writing processes of some of the world’s best practitioners of poetry and prose” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).   Since 1981, the quarterly magazine Bomb has been the gold standard for artist-on-artist interviews,...