Books about Netherworld from Amazon.com

When Fred and Anthony are faced with their unfinished history project, they come up with a great idea: pay someone else to do it.  There's just one problem: they have no money.  Luckily, they have plenty of schemes for making quick dough.  So, after a paralyzing case of writer's block forces them to abandon careers as best-selling authors, they ride around town on their skateboards, trying to get "old people" to hire them.

 

But Fred and Anthony never imagined that in their quest to avoid work, they would stumble into a portal to the Netherworld, where terrifying (or just plain wacky) encounters with ghosts, monsters, and other paranormal creatures eerily echo the plots of their favorite horror movies . . .

 

 We're launching with two titles and following with one a season thereafter.

 .
Price: $5.17 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Travels in the Netherworld, Bryan J. Cuevas examines a fascinating but little-known genre of Tibetan narrative literature about the delok, ordinary men and women who claim to have died, traveled through hell, and then returned from the afterlife. These narratives enjoy audiences ranging from the most sophisticated monastic scholars to pious townsfolk, villagers, and nomads. Their accounts emphasize the universal Buddhist principles of impermanence and worldly suffering, the fluctuations of karma, and the feasibility of obtaining a favorable rebirth through virtue and merit. Providing a clear, detailed analysis of four vivid return-from-death tales, including the stories of a Tibetan housewife, a lama, a young noble woman, and a Buddhist monk, Cuevas argues that these narratives express ideas about death and the afterlife that held wide currency among all classes of faithful Buddhists in Tibet.

Relying on a diversity of traditional Tibetan sources, Buddhist canonical scriptures, scholastic textbooks, ritual and meditation manuals, and medical treatises, in addition to the delok works themselves, Cuevas surveys a broad range of popular Tibetan Buddhist ideas about death and dying. He explores beliefs about the vulnerability of the soul and its journey beyond death, karmic retribution and the terrors of hell, the nature of demons and demonic possession, ghosts, and reanimated corpses. Cuevas argues that these extraordinary accounts exhibit flexibility between social and religious categories that are conventionally polarized and concludes that, contrary to the accepted wisdom, such rigid divisions as elite and folk, monastic and lay religion are not sufficiently representative of traditional Tibetan Buddhism on the ground. This study offers innovative perspectives on popular religion in Tibet and fills a gap in an important field of Tibetan literature..
Price: $49.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This book revises the picture of the glittering Chicago of impressive mansions and museums; it exposes the city's corrupt underbelly and the realities of life in an age which is often assumed to have been simpler and more moral than ours. Includes chapters on the Haymarket riot, the gamblers' wars, the notorious levee red-light district and institutionalized graft..
Price: $8.39 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An anecdotal history of a twisted filmmaker.
Price: $6.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

LEVEL FOUR: HARDWARE, PET SUPPLIES, SPORTING GOODS
Time moves in a line, but not a straight line. In the Inner Kingdom, time is as hopelessly snarled as a child's scribble Nomads and refugees from two millenia cross paths, purposes and swords over access to the past, present and future. They reside in the trash of a thousand collapsed timelines, far from the prying eyes of ordinary folks.

LEVEL THREE: SALE ITEMS, FOOD COURT
If the Netherworld is the dustbin of history, it's crawling with roaches. Psychopaths from the future roam with guns the size of totem poles. Shaolin monks mix it up with giant firebreathing infants. Four deposed sovreign sorcerers scheme with and against one another, while speed freak hitmen and homeless robots just try to get by from day to day.

LEVEL TWO: REAL ESTATE, ORGAN DONATION
Need to stage a live-ammo war exercise on a recreation of Catherine the Great's beside table, scaled up to a thousand times its actual size? Talk to Thurston White -- or, at least, talk to his head. And don't miss the Inner Kingdom's suspiciously useful jungle, the hotel where the decor is fabulous but the gravity's unreliable, and the forest haunted by the ghosts of every war ever fought -- and every war that could have been fought.

LEVEL ONE: THE GATEWAY TO HELL
Watch out -- the Inner Kingdom can turn into a free-fire zone without warning. After all, it's the key to time travel, and time travel is the key to the Secret War.

GOING DOWN?.
Price: $10.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]