John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson are just a few of the prominent American mediums who have been accused of being frauds. But what if a respected scientist challenged them to make contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions? What if the results not only stunned a skeptical scientist but also offered astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death? THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS Risking his academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz asked well-known mediums to become part of a series of experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. This riveting narrative, with electrifying transcripts, documents stringently monitored experiments in which mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. Here are the results that awed sitters and researchers alike: a revelation about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Forced by data to abandon skepticism, Schwartz presents this amazing account of his groundbreaking work, compelling from first page to last.

Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of easy consolations or redemptions. Driven by "the need to extend beyond the personal and out toward the intolerable present," Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, "darkness has its own resolutions."

Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of easy consolations or redemptions. Driven by "the need to extend beyond the personal and out toward the intolerable present," Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, "darkness has its own resolutions."

Controversies abound in studies of Edgar Allan Poe. From the time of his death well into the twentieth century, partisans debated the issue of his character: was he an alcoholic? drug addict? pathological liar? necrophile? In the 1920s and 30s, psychoanalytic critics sought to divorce the study of Poe from Victorian moral concerns but in the process made scandalous claims by linking Poe's dream-like stories to his personality. The status of Poe's literary productions was similarly disputed; dismissed by the New Critics but championed by poets such as William Carlos Williams and Allen Tate. Recent scholars have debated the meaning and significance of Poe's representations of race, class, and gender, often returning to the character issue: how racist and misogynist was he, and how important are those questions to understanding his work? Finally, how have the seemingly countless plays, films, novels, comic books, and pop music experiments based on his image and works intertwined with academic study of Poe? This book examines these and other controversies, shedding light on broader issues of canon formation, the role of biography in literary study, and the importance of integrating various, even conflicting interpretations into one's own reading of a literary work. This book will be of great interest to Poe scholars, both those who have been a part of the literary battles described above and newcomers to the field who can use the book as a guide to the field of Poe studies, and to all those interested in Poe and his work. Scott Peeples is associate professor of English at the College of Charleston.

n 1973 a young man finds unusual objects at a yard sale in the historic district of Fayetteville, Arkansas, which lead him through a series of eerie coincidences and twists and turns to the story of Leslie Stringfellow, who was born in Texas just after the conclusion of the Civil War. Leslie’s untimely death at age nineteen resulted in what his well-educated parents regarded as successful attempts to make contact with their dead son through private séances held nightly in their own home.Once established, contact continued nightly for over fifteen years. With the help of their dead son, Henry Martyn and Alice Stringfellow recovered a lost inheritance, learned immediately the last words of one of their own parents when he died over a thousand miles away, and adopted and raised a two-year-old orphan girl who grew up to become an active suffragist, newspaper editor, and publicity director for the largest women’s organization of the early twentieth century.During the years of contact with what the Stringfellows believed to be their departed son, they received thousands of séance messages through “automatic writing” in which the young man described his personal afterlife and provided detailed descriptions of the geography of paradise.When Alice Stringfellow was eighty years old and widowed, she decided to write about her experiences with Leslie with the help of her adopted daughter. In 1919 the two women contacted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who read their manuscript and sent them two letters, one handwritten, encouraging them to publish it. The creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories even proposed an experiment that involved his own deceased son, Kingsley Doyle, who was killed in World War I. These letters are published here for the first time.This book is the result of years of extensive research by Stephen Chism, associate librarian at the University of Arkansas, who was the young man at the yard sale in 1973. Chism documents the objective facts of the story and provides historical background on the widespread practice of spiritualism in the American South during the close of the nineteenth century.