Everything works out - except in the end. In the meantime, concentrate on temptations of the flesh; on naked desire. Being properly damned brings its own joy: that's what Richard Meadows is thinking on his way to the city dump to retrieve his wife's favourite chair, which he had thrown away earlier. And that’s where he meets old flame Virginia Coates. So begins a dance of circumstance that feeds on Richard’s newfound fearlessness, and his desire to be daring. Time to lean in to the danger. How can a nice man like him get things so wrong? For some reason, the sudden closeness between Richard and Virginia doesn't yield the desired intimacy, doesn’t satisfy the passion. It is Richard’s wife, Gloria, who truly fastens on her chance for fulfilment. Quiet City is a literate, satisfying work of fiction which crosses Richard Ford with Kinky Friedman, with a noir undercurrent. Spellbinding storytelling from a novelist at the height of his powers.

This selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham, and shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Cage's joie de vivre resounds in these letters - fully annotated throughout - in every phase of his career, and includes correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among others. Above all, they reveal his passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from his writings: singular, profound, irreverent, and funny. Not only will readers take pleasure in Cage's correspondence with and commentary about the people and events of a momentous and transformative time in the arts, they will also share in his meditations on the very nature of art. A deep pleasure to read, this volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

Calling from the Scaffold is a collection of poems about connecting and not connecting – or approaching the brink of connecting. It’s about paying tribute and salvaging and gratitude. The voices vary in their longings: we hear from men and women, the young and no longer young. Nature often is there to help them out.

In war, every action has a beginning and an end. Echo Among Warriors is a story of close combat between two opposing, equally committed adversaries. The powerful narrative immerses the reader in both sides of the battle, playing and replaying the same battle sequence from alternating viewpoints – through the eyes of the Marines and through the eyes of the North Vietnamese. The bullet fired from a Marine's M-16 at a silhouetted enemy solider crouched on the jungle path will in the next chapter tear into the flesh of that crouched NVA trooper. The story – unfolding from the initial contact to the final horrific ending – represents just one of perhaps thousands of deadly encounters that reflect the reality of battle: a mind-numbing, intensely personal experience, that forever changes the participant.

Hello I Must Be Going, David Hernandez's fifth collection of poems, offers a unique take on poetry informed by works of art. With narrative and lyrical brushstrokes, Hernandez crafts vibrant landscapes that depict the chaos of the modern world and the beauty entwined within it.

Pickett's charge has just ended, the battle of Gettysburg is over. The Confederate army is defeated and must retreat to the Potomac River forty miles away with thousands of wagons full of wounded soldiers, provisions and tens of thousands of animals. Asa Helms, a private in the Twenty-Sixth North Carolina Infantry, joined the army to oppose the Yankee's invasion of his "country. " He is torn between serving his country with honor and going home to take care of his wife who is in great need. He faces a long, seemingly impossible march with little food, little hope and the Yankees on his heels. Captain Louis Young, aide-to-camp to Confederate General James Pettigrew, is fighting to preserve a culture and a lifestyle and possible domination by the despicable Yankees. The defeat at Gettysburg, the horrendous condition of the army and the endless resources of the enemy are causing him to doubt the ability of the Confederacy to gain another major victory and thus independence. His objective is to get the rebel army across the Potomac River to preserve it to fight another day. Colonel George Gray, an Irishman, is colonel of the Sixth Michigan Cavalry. He is hell-bent on putting down the rebellion before it divides the country that has been so good to him. He is neither a soldier, nor an accomplished equestrian, and has gotten on the wrong side of his superior, General George Custer, with whom he is in constant conflict. He sees a chance to cut off the Confederate army and end the war before it reaches the Potomac River.The journey ends at the Potomac River where each soldier must face the bitter realities of this unnatural war. Asa must choose between escaping across the river or remaining with his wounded friend and facing certain captivity.

Prelude explores the gay female experience through a poetic reconstruction of the girlhood and adolescence of Saint Catherine of Siena. Speaking through a poetic persona of Catherine of Siena, Prelude addresses the historical erasure of gay women’s lives, juxtaposing details from her girlhood with the terrain of the lesbian body as it relates to desire and violence.

1970 - the height of the Vietnam War. A group of young Forward Air Controllers based in Thailand are assigned with supporting the Truck War and the People's War in southern Laos, where the fate of the Vietnam War, and Laos' very future, is being decided. Tasked with shutting down the Ho Chi Minh Trail - the North Vietnamese supply lines running into South Vietnam - literally stopping the constant stream of trucks in their tracks, these American airmen, call sign "Nail," fly missions 24 hours a day. Daily they run the gauntlet of intense anti-aircraft fire to bring in accurate attacks by American fighter bombers. At night, streams of red tracers scream up from the ground, seeking the metallic flesh of their fragile craft. During the day, they search the skies for the telltale black puffs of smoke that reveal the self-destructive warheads of the North Vietnamese gunners. Even when tragedy befalls the group, they perserve with their mission. But will courage and dedication be enough?

Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American developmental biologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs successfully performed the technique of nuclear transplantation by cloning frog nuclei in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, The Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, and Marie DiBerardino, before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness, and when many thought the very idea of cloning was experimentally impossible. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, Nathan Crowe demonstrates how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems. His book illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as the changing relationship between science and society after the Second World War.

It is the height of the Troubles and Northern Ireland lies under a shadow… When Neil Fitzpatrick, a rogue Green Beret soldier, is recruited by the Irish Republican Army to help prepare a terrorist attack, Paul Stavros, his former teammate, is sent to stop him and bring him home alive. Fitzpatrick, the American son of an Irish rebel who was forced to flee his birthplace, is a Special Forces demolitions expert. Fitzpatrick knows his trade and has a personal agenda with the IRA. Alarm bells erupt when the US government learns that Fitzpatrick has gone over to the IRA. The American public can't find out that one of its elite soldiers is involved in terrorism and the US government won't rely on the British to find him. They need someone who knows Fitzpatrick and how he operates. Who better than one of his former teammates? Paul Stavros is also a Special Forces veteran. He knows little of the Irish Troubles but is about to learn. What he does know is how to fix problems and Neil has just become his biggest headache. But before Stavros can go operational, he must endure an arduous and hazardous selection process to be accepted by the joint SAS-intelligence cell that will back him up. The British aren't happy with Stavros on their turf; they'd rather do the job themselves – quickly, cleanly, and terminally. Once, Fitzpatrick and Stavros were comrades and friends. Now they are pawns on opposite sides of an ugly war where all is fair and no one is innocent. The British want to kill one, the IRA wants to kill the other. It's a race to see who will be first.

This volume introduces an international readership to the role books have played in the lives and upbringing of young people in the Nordic countries from the 1750s until today. Charlotte Appel and Nina Christensen look beyond an overview of noteworthy texts and characters to address the region’s distinctive reading cultures and the interactions between literature and changing views of childhood, with a special focus on Denmark.The emergence of a dedicated market for children’s books in the Global North coincided with national school reforms, when Luther’s Small Catechism started to be supplemented—or replaced—by new books published for and about young readers, learners, and citizens. Children’s use of books and media is closely related to adults’ wishes to influence the present and future of a child through instruction, entertainment, or play. Chapters point to strong continuities as well as remarkable changes in the relationships between child readers and adult authors, artists, publishers, teachers, librarians, and parents through the centuries.Focusing on children as the central users and producers of texts, this interdisciplinary and transnational history shows how children’s exposure to and use of media impacted the Nordic welfare state, and vice versa. The ways adults facilitated—and in some cases prevented—access to picture books, schoolbooks, textbooks, comics, magazines, and other media to youth between infancy and adolescence reveals the complicated interplay between children’s internal wishes and grown-ups’ external expectations over time. As narratives for young audiences are continuously rewritten, republished, and adapted into new forms, this pithy synthesis brings forward new knowledge about the material and social history of books, literature, and childhood.

John D. Bengston offers a detailed analysis of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis in this new volume, exploring the idea that the Basque language is most closely related to the North Caucasian language family. He builds on ideas proposed by prominent scholars in the 20th century, notably the work of C. C. Uhlenbeck, Georges Dumézil, and René Lafon. Whilst important, their ideas were rather sporadic and consisted of scattered articles, and they never developed a comprehensive phonological and morphological model of Euskaro-Caucasian.Now thanks to advances in our understanding of Basque phonology and etymology, and in North Caucasian phonology and etymology, and improved linguistic methods, it has become possible to develop a comprehensive Euskaro-Caucasian phonological structure, including regular sound correspondences of vowels and consonants supported by significant numbers of etymologies. These correspondences, in turn, have allowed the author to evaluate objectively the etymological proposals of earlier investigators (which led to the modification or outright rejection of many of them), and have also provided clues to discovering some original etymologies. The nucleus of the Euskaro-Caucasian hypothesis is 'old', beginning in the 19th century, but the 'new paradigm' alluded to in this volume's subtitle refers to a focus on the North Caucasian language family as the closest surviving relative of Basque (as opposed to the 'South Caucasian' = Kartvelian family); a new and comprehensive scheme of comparative phonology; new discoveries in comparative morphology; and finally several hundred lexical and grammatical etymologies that supersede the more haphazard comparisons offered in earlier research.

Beyond the Lab and the Field analyzes infrastructures as intense sites of knowledge production in the Americas, Europe, and Asia since the late nineteenth century. Moving beyond classical places known for yielding scientific knowledge, chapters in this volume explore how the construction and maintenance of canals, highways, dams, irrigation schemes, the oil industry, and logistic networks intersected with the creation of know-how and expertise. Referred to by the authors as "scientific bonanzas," such intersections reveal opportunities for great wealth, but also distress and misfortune. This volume explores how innovative technologies provided research opportunities for scientists and engineers, as they relied on expertise to operate, which resulted in enormous profits for some. But, like the history of any gold rush, the history of infrastructure also reveals how technologies of modernity transformed nature, disrupting communities and destroying the local environment. Focusing not on the victory march of science and technology but on ambivalent change, contributors consider the role of infrastructures for ecology, geology, archaeology, soil science, engineering, ethnography, heritage, and polar exploration. Together, they also examine largely overlooked perspectives on modernity: the reliance of infrastructure on knowledge, and infrastructures as places and occasions that inspired a greater understanding of the natural world and the technologically made environment.

In-Between: Exploring Small Cracks of Everyday Life is an anthology comprising contributions from a group of social scientists all preoccupied with the possibilities and potentials of working ethnographically. The chapters of the book investigates a range of small everyday life ‘cracks’ – a notion covering unnoticed, withdrawn and overlooked phenomena alike, and which designate the metaphorical interstices and in-betweens that influence and affect most aspects of everyday experience, the comprehensive field also subject to ethnographic inquiry. The chapters in the anthology are all based on original fieldwork and explore different cracks occurring in-between humans as well as in-between humans and non-human entities. A distinct element of the book as a whole is that it comprises experiments in terms of both ethnographic writing approaches as well as with the construction of analytical objects. The argument consistently going through the separate chapters, as well as through the volume in entirety, is that the many wondrous, mysterious, odd and puzzling phenomena encountered in everyday life are not necessarily grasped best by the application of strictly rational and rigorous academic approaches. To the contrary, and as the authors all demonstrate in their own manner, social science can also seek to fathom these sides of human existence with analytical explorations that are both sensitive, bold and infused with responsive and creative intensity.

When former Kentucky Poet Laureate Richard Taylor took a job at Kentucky State University in 1975, he purchased a fixer-upper - in need of a roof, a paint job, city water, and central heating - that became known to his friends as "Taylor's Folly." The historic Giltner-Holt House, which was built in 1859 and sits close by the Elkhorn Creek a few miles outside of Frankfort, became the poet's entrance into the area's history and culture, and the Elkhorn became a source of inspiration for his writing. Driven by topophilia (love of place), Taylor focuses on the eight-mile stretch of the creek from the Forks of the Elkhorn to Knight's Bridge to provide a glimpse into the economic, social, and cultural transformation of Kentucky from wilderness to its current landscape. He explores both the natural history of the region and the formation of the Forks community. Taylor recounts the Elkhorn Valley's inhabitants from the earliest surveyors and settlers to artist Paul Sawyier, who memorably documented the creek in watercolors, oils, and pastels. Interspersed with photographs and illustrations - contemporary and historic - and intermixed with short vignettes about historical figures of the region, Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape delivers a history that is by turns a vibrant and meditative personal response to the creek and its many wonders. Flowing across four counties in central Kentucky, Elkhorn Creek is the second largest tributary of the Kentucky River. Known for its beauty and recreational opportunities, Elkhorn Creek has become an increasingly popular location for canoeing, kayaking, and camping and is one of the state's best-known streams for smallmouth bass, bluegills, and crawfish. Like Walden Pond for Henry David Thoreau, the Elkhorn has been a touchstone for Taylor. A beautiful blend of creative storytelling and historical exploration of one of the state's beloved waterways, Elkhorn celebrates a gem in the heart of central Kentucky.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.