Books about Beheading from Amazon.com

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude." an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers. an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws. who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed. he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit..
Price: $7.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Now available in an elegant paperback, Robert Olen Butler's acclaimed collection, Severance, depicts the final thoughts of people as they are losing their heads. Celebrated as "glorious" (Los Angeles Times), these fascinating stories reveal "the limitless will of the author's imagination" (New York Times). Here are the imagined ultimate words of famous and invented figures—Medusa, Sir Walter Raleigh, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield, and a chicken, beheaded for Sunday dinner..
Price: $5.58 [Notify me when price goes down.]

What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished--but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared--and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more "barbaric" or "primitive" past?

Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity’s cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salomé and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa’s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In an unnamed dream country, Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition After spending his last days in jail, he simply wills his executioners out of existence..
Price: $21.76 [Notify me when price goes down.]

1898 BUCKSPORT, MAINE, AN INNOCENT WOMAN NEVER MADE IT HOME ONE NIGHT. SHE WAS FOUND 2 WEEKS LATER ABANDONED IN A PASTURE WHEN THEY TRIED TO PLACE HER IN A CASKET, HER HEAD FELL OFF. THE ENTIRE STATE, IF NOT ALL OF NEW ENGLAND, WAS IN AN UPROAR. EVERYONE WANTED TO KNOW WHO KILLED SARAH WARE. TO THIS DAY THE QUESTION IS STILL ASKED. WITH THIS BOOK I HAVE ATTEMPTED TO PROVIDE THE TRUE FACTS BEHIND THE ANSWERS. I LEAVE IT TO THE READER TO DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES, WHO KILLED SARAH WARE..
Price: $20.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]