Sean McCann

Souma resumes control of Van in the wake of Prince Julius’s renewed tyranny, and the shifting political landscape initiates an eye-opening talk between Souma and Empress Maria of the Gran Chaos Empire. Afterward, he returns his attention to the domestic front. Countless refugees have been displaced by the Demon Lord’s Domain and taken up in his lands. With no easy solution in sight, Souma arranges a meeting with their leader and proposes an ultimatum.

Scorch marks blacken the wireframe dungeon, and the smell of burnt meat hangs in the air. Iarumas’s party stumbles upon a corpse, more charcoal than flesh, and Raraja insists on dragging it out. Murmur—Chant—Pray—Invoke. A large-framed girl named Berkanan gulps the fresh air of her second chance at life. Her confidence is low and her skills as a fledgling mage are inadequate, but despite all that, she has a serious goal—kill the red dragon that burned her party alive. This dragon, an interloper from the lower levels of the dungeon, has become so notorious that even the most seasoned parties refuse to engage. Even so, Garbage and Raraja agree to aid Berkanan, and Iarumas lends his support. The chances of failure are high, but in the dungeon, immolation is not a permanent end...as long as someone is willing to pay. Can Iarumas’s party douse the flames of the dragon, or will they all succumb to a menacing red death?

Deep in the unexplored reaches of the dungeon, a corpse is discovered—one that shouldn’t exist. After Iarumas is resurrected, his memories of life before death are gone, and he spends his days delving into the dungeon to retrieve the bodies of dead adventurers. Can they be revived as well? Or will God reduce them to piles of ash on the altar? Either way, Iarumas collects his finder’s fee. And though his skills earn him some grudging respect, he’s also scorned for this cold, utilitarian attitude. The living keep their distance—Iarumas consorts primarily with the dead. That is, until he meets Garbage, a feral young swordswoman who’s the sole survivor of a massacred party. With Garbage by his side, Iarumas ventures deeper, scouring the dungeon for clues to his past, avoiding monsters, traps, and the inevitability of a permanent ashen demise.

Paperback edition of bestselling, powerful memoir co-written by the founder of Great Big Sea and his wife, exploring alcoholism, childhood abuse, and the fight to save their marriage, family, and themselves. Globe & Mail Bestseller Quill & Quire Industry Pick, Best Books of 2020 This deeply personal memoir, co-written by singer-songwriter, renowned mental health advocate, and recent Order of Canada recipient S an McCann and wife Andrea Aragon leaves no stone unturned. Detailing in powerful and lyrical prose a Newfoundland childhood indoctrinated in strict Catholic faith, the creation of the wildly successful Great Big Sea, and the battle with alcoholism that nearly cost them everything, McCann and Aragon offer readers a story of reaching international fame and finding rock bottom. Most of all, this book is an honest, raw, and inspiring tribute to embracing the belief that we are all worth saving. At the heart of this insightful coming-of-recovery is McCann's exploration of the root cause of his alcoholism; a secret he kept until 2014 when he came out as a survivor of sexual abuse. Aragon's parallel narrative offers a rare and intimate spousal perspective, making the memoir a nuanced and complex portrait of the effects of addiction on family. Featuring lyrics from McCann's celebrated solo career, personal colour photographs, and original drawings from visual artist Bee Stanton, One Good Reason is a rallying cry for holding on to the ones you love, helping yourself, and turning music into medicine.

The Tense Aftermath Unfolds! Souma has now proven his military might in the successful siege of Van, but the Amidonian foothold he’s secured continues to be a hotbed of contention. Disgruntled Prince Julius calls upon the Gran Chaos Empire in an attempt to tip the scales during the ensuing peace talks. Souma thus finds himself meeting directly with Jeanne, sister to the empress, and the negotiations take an unexpected turn. Elfrieden isn’t out of the woods yet, however. With the fates of Georg Carmine and Castor Vargas in his hands, Souma has more tough decisions to make...

Contains the complete volumes 5-6! Sorawo and Toriko have been spending their days surrounded by the supernatural. They managed to successfully spend a night together in the Otherside and can now venture even deeper! As they go back and forth between the normal and abnormal, they continue to encounter even more strange events... The two discover a mysterious lady living in a mansion in the Otherside, go searching for a missing man named Abarato, run into Hasshaku-sama yet again, and...some of Sorawo’s memories begin to mysteriously vanish?! Don’t miss the third collection of the girls’ bizarre tale of exploration and survival!

The Battle Continues! Souma presses Elfrieden’s siege on the Amidonian principality, whose soldiers fight tooth and nail to keep him at bay. The violence on the front lines is bad enough, but a surprise attack at the rear will confound the bloody battle further. Souma and Carla must fend off Gaius themselves in a life-or-death test of nerves, loyalty, and steel. When hard-fought victory finally dawns over the capital, it’s time for the realist hero to get to work. Souma now needs to win over the citizens of the former enemy nation, and he has a most unusual plan that just might do the trick.

Otherside Picnic: Omnibus 2 (Light Novel)

Contains the full Volume 3 and 4! The Subjugation War Begins! With supplies in place, plans made, and alliances forged, Souma's mission to subdue the rebelling nobility has begun. With a pocket full of tricks, loyal subjects, and modern knowledge, this should be easy! Well... not if you want your civilians to escape unharmed. Or if adventurers keep treading across the battlefield. Or if your nosy neighbors think this might be the best time to launch an invasion of their own. As the conflict expands, it's up to the crew to find a way to win without falling prey to tricks, manipulations, and schemes behind the scenes. Can Souma survive? And with his reputation intact?

Contains the full Volume 1 and 2! "O, Hero!" With that cliched line, Kazuya Souma finds himself summoned to another world and his adventure in administration begins! Upon presenting a plan to strengthen his new land economically and militarily, the king cedes the throne to him and Souma finds himself stuck with the top job! What's more, he's betrothed to the outgoing king's daughter?! In order to get the country back on its feet, Souma must summon the wise, the talented, and the gifted to his side. And even when he does manage to catch a break, a day off with his staff provides anything but: rebelling retainers, natural disasters, and the threat of war all await. Can Souma keep up without succumbing to the stress?

Contains the complete volumes 1-2! Sorawo Kamikoshi's first encounter with Toriko Nishina was on the Otherside, after seeing something otherwordly and nearly dying. Ever since that day, Sorawo's life as an exhausted university student changed forever. In the Otherside, a place where internet urban legends become real, dangerous beings like the Kunekune and Hasshaku-sama appear--despite only being spoken of in ghost stories on the internet. Toriko and Sorawo set foot into this abnormal world for research, for profit--and to find a missing person that is near and dear to someone's heart. A tale of two girls' bizarre exploration and survival, brought to you by an up-and-coming Sci-fi author!

There is no more powerful symbol in American political life than the presidency, and the image of presidential power has had no less profound an impact on American fiction. A Pinnacle of Feeling is the first book to examine twentieth-century literature's deep fascination with the modern presidency and with the ideas about the relationship between state power and democracy that underwrote the rise of presidential authority. Sean McCann challenges prevailing critical interpretations through revelatory new readings of major writers, including Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Don Delillo, and Philip Roth. He argues that these writers not only represented or satirized presidents, but echoed political thinkers who cast the chief executive as the agent of the sovereign will of the American people. They viewed the president as ideally a national redeemer, and they took that ideal as a model and rival for their own work. A Pinnacle of Feeling illuminates the fundamental concern with democratic sovereignty that informs the most innovative literary works of the twentieth century, and shows how these works helped redefine and elevate the role of executive power in American culture.

In Gumshoe America Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society. Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crimefiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre’s conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler’s fiction, unlike Hammett’s, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback-Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford-are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy. Before concluding, McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the changing political significance of race that accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural legacies of the New Deal, Gumshoe America will interest students and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture, and government.

In Gumshoe America Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus a homogenized society. Gumshoe America traces the way those problems surfaced in hard-boiled crimefiction from the1920s through the 1960s. Beginning by using a forum on the KKK in the pulp magazine Black Mask to describe both the economic and political culture of pulp fiction in the early twenties, McCann locates the origins of the hard-boiled crime story in the genre’s conflict with the racist antiliberalism prominent at the time. Turning his focus to Dashiell Hammett’s career, McCann shows how Hammett’s writings in the late 1920s and early 1930s moved detective fiction away from its founding fables of social compact to the cultural alienation triggered by a burgeoning administrative state. He then examines how Raymond Chandler’s fiction, unlike Hammett’s, idealized sentimental fraternity, echoing the communitarian appeals of the late New Deal. Two of the first crime writers to publish original fiction in paperback-Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford-are examined next in juxtaposition to the popularity enjoyed by their contemporaries Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald. The stories of the former two, claims McCann, portray the decline of the New Deal and the emergence of the rights-based liberalism of the postwar years and reveal new attitudes toward government: individual alienation, frustration with bureaucratic institutions, and dissatisfaction with the growing vision of America as a meritocracy. Before concluding, McCann turns to the work of Chester Himes, who, in producing revolutionary hard-boiled novels, used the genre to explore the changing political significance of race that accompanied the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Combining a striking reinterpretation of the hard-boiled crime story with a fresh view of the political complications and cultural legacies of the New Deal, Gumshoe America will interest students and fans of the genre, and scholars of American history, culture, and government.