Twelve authors, twelve tales of love and travel - some sweet and touching, some bleak and disturbing. This collection includes stories by writers from Australia, Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, New Zealand, the UK, the USA and Zimbabwe. The authors have won or been nominated for prizes and awards including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Pushcart Prize and Kenya's National Book Week Literary Award. They offer the reader a meet-cute on the streets of Zimbabwe, a classic American road trip replayed with an elderly Jewish patient and his black orderly and an encounter between a withdrawn war veteran and his beautiful neighbor in Iran. They follow a couple from Malawi who endure an odyssey in search of a better future in Europe, a woman in New Zealand who has to make a choice when her husband decides to become a woman and others. These stories are about the power of love to heal us, give us courage and make us want to be better people. They are also about its power to harm us, deluding us into submitting to control, deception and abuse. The authors of the twelve stories in this anthology are Alice Bingner, Tendayi Bloom, Shirley Fergenson, Nod Ghosh, Tendai Huchu, Stanley Kenani, Lily Mabura, Jackie Davis Martin, Catherine McNamara, Marlene Olin, Barry Reddin and Gregory Wolos.

SaltWater is a collection of more than a dozen short stories, set in a sweep of coastal areas around the world, from Sherkin Island in County Cork to the faraway shores of New Zealand. Taking place against a backdrop of foam and brine, of shipwrecks and storms, the stories are often inspired by real events, both contemporary and historical. Veering between family tragedy, the excitement of teen love and short, sharp observations of daily life, SaltWater brings to life the rich tapestry of the human experience. Included in this collection are several stories that have been shortlisted for or have won fiction prizes. 'Catching the Tap-Tap to Cayes de Jacmel' won the Global Short Story Prize, UK. 'Dancing on Canvey' won the Fish Short Histories Prize, Ireland. 'SaltWater' was shortlisted for the HG Wells Prize, UK. This collection, SaltWater, was longlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor Short Story prize.

Sinker thrusts us into the story of Baker Forley. He begins the novel as a sweet, unassuming Irish man who is revealed to be a promising newcomer to the world's most controversial sport - professional drinking. Ambition fuels his talent as he strives to make something of his life, but he is plagued by worries that he could die from his job, through alcohol poisoning. Frequent fatalities occur, as players often drop dead during games. When his popularity lands him a spot at the infamous Bullfight competition in sun-baked Mallorca, Baker believes that his luck has turned. But when his drunken eye is drawn to a Saudi beauty, her bodyguard steps over and floors him. The bodyguard's boss - a Saudi oil baron - invites Baker to his magnificent, surreal, Gaudi-designed palace to hear an apology. Baker - joined by his over-ebullient coach Ratface - gets an offer he can't refuse: "Teach the crazy billionaire Sheikh to drink like a pro and in turn he'll make you rich." Later, as illicit lust flares between Baker and the oil baron's sober wife; he learns the real reason why he has been asked along. It's a set up, and he's about to be framed for killing a Sheikh. After three days of industrial-level drinking and dealing with Ratface’s random groping, can Baker break free?

"There are no days more full than those we go back to. All those Christmases collide into each other and my memory is decorated by a series of mirrors, flashing light into chambers of sound and color…the briquettes sparking red-layered on the fire, the crinkling of the ridiculous paper hats at dinnertime…and the laughter moving to deep silence at three in the afternoon when we leaned up against one another like old tires, full of turkey and gravy and trifle and God knows how many slices of plum pudding." From 'Every Christmas Morning now, Every Christmas Morning' then by Colum McCann. Packed with contributions from some of Ireland’s best-loved writers, including Roddy Doyle, Alice Taylor, Colum McCann, Sinéad Moriarty and John Boyne, among others, each of the author royalties from this collection will be donated to Aware, a charity that supports individuals and families affected by depression. Festive stories vary from vivid recollections of a childhood Christmas spent in Ireland to travels as far as modern-day New York. Each unique story captures the range of emotions that come bundled up with Christmas memories. Without a doubt, The Little Book of Christmas Memories is the perfect fireside companion for this season as well as an ideal Christmas present! Contributors: Sebastian Barry, Dermot Bolger, John Boyne, Giles Brody, Declan Burke, Mary Lys Carbery, Patricia Carr, Tony Clayton-Lea, June Considine, Carl Corcoran, Tony Corcoran, Mary Costello, Kevin Curran, Bethany Dawson, Roddy Doyle, Anne Droney, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Barbara Gibson, Virginia Gilbert, Kevin Gildea, Maura Gilligan, Liam Greene, Aidan Grennan, Linda Guerin, Antonia Hart, John Haskins, Sharyn Hayden, William Jenkins, Eileen Keane, Claire Keegan, John Kelly, Anna Laerke Byrne, Shirley Lanigan, Catherine Leon (née Dunne), Sandra Mara, Brian McCabe, Paul McDermott, John Montague, Seamus Moran, Colum McCann, John Montague, Sinead Moriarty, Joe Murphy, Kate Murphy, Breda Nathan, Tom Nestor, Senator David Norris, Lisa O'Callaghan, Deridre O'Mahony, Seán Ó Riain, Stephen O'Sullivan, Marie Smyth, Alice Taylor, Yseult Thornley, Michael Thurlow, Carol Tobin, Karina Tynan, Susan Virsano, Elizabeth Wassell, Elizabeth Waterhouse, Tara West, and Phil Young.

Thatchbury is a village much like any other, yet beneath the surface flows a stream of angst and superstition. The shadow of Thickets Wood creeps amongst its people like a primeval mist, bringing torment and desperation. Do Charlie Whitehall and young Tommy Tinkit come under its destructive power, driving their minds to despair, or is the darkness a consequence of their own guilt and fear? Thickets Wood is a compelling work of psychological suspense, and Rebecca Reid is an emerging writer to watch. Her self-published first novel, The Coop, was published in 2012 to much critical praise: 'Brilliant.' - Colin Bateman 'Original and disturbing. This is a beautifully written debut.' - Sue Leonard, Irish Examiner 'Great page turner!' - Marie-Louise Muir, Arts Extra, BBC Radio Ulster

This book offers the reader a tool to address the largely still uncharted territory of contemporary migration literature. In addition to presenting and commenting on the production of the prolific writer Helen Barolini, author Margherita Ganeri nurtures her ambition to investigate one of the questions running through the debate on the relationship between literary writing and socio-cultural groups: namely, the possibility to define literature, in particular Italian American literature, on the basis of ethnicity. The book includes a preface by Melania G. Mazzucco and an exclusive excerpt of Helen Barolini's forthcoming book “Visits”.

Favor of Crows is a collection of new and previously published original haiku poems over the past forty years. Gerald Vizenor has earned a wide and devoted audience for his poetry. In the introductory essay the author compares the imagistic poise of haiku with the early dream songs of the Anishinaabe, or Chippewa. Vizenor concentrates on these two artistic traditions, and by intuition he creates a union of vision, perception, and natural motion in concise poems; he creates a sense of presence and at the same time a naturalistic trace of impermanence.The haiku scenes in Favor of Crows are presented in chapters of the four seasons, the natural metaphors of human experience in the tradition of haiku in Japan. Vizenor honors the traditional practice and clever tease of haiku, and conveys his appreciation of Matsuo Basho and Yosa Buson in these two haiku scenes, "calm in the storm / master basho soaks his feet /water striders," and "cold rain / field mice rattle the dishes / buson's koto."Vizenor is inspired by the sway of concise poetic images, natural motion, and by the transient nature of the seasons in native dream songs and haiku. "The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and an original moment of perception," he declares in the introduction to Favor of Crows. "Haiku is visionary, a timely meditation and an ironic manner of creation. That sense of natural motion in a haiku scene is a wonder, the catch of impermanence in the seasons." Check for the online reader's companion at favorofcrows.site.wesleyan.edu.

William Black's debut short story collection looks closely at lives lived in the heart of coal country-now fracking country-in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Two miners battered by a cave-in try to wrestle down the river that altered the course of their lives. A suicide pact leaves a family and its town bewildered and struggling for words. A fracking crew confronts the vast mysteriousness of things hidden in the depths of the earth and the lives that take place on its surface.In these starkly beautiful, incandescent stories, characters struggle with the grip that their locale and its past have on them, and they are consumed by searching-for love, for escape, for brief moments of clarity that give them the courage to continue.William Black's stories have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, the Florida Review, and many other journals and magazines. He lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania and teaches at Johns Hopkins University. "Black is at his best as a social realist in a blue-collar milieu." - Kirkus Reviews Feb. 15, 2014

The acclaimed annual, The Best American Poetry, is the most prestigious showcase of new poetry in the United States and Canada. Each year since the series began in 1988, David Lehman has contributed a foreword, and this has evolved into a sort of state-of-the-art address that surveys new developments and explores various matters facing poets and their readers today. This book collects all twenty-nine forewords (including the two written for the retrospective "Best of the Best" volumes for the tenth and twenty-fifth anniversaries. ) Beginning with a new introduction by Lehman and a foreword by poet Denise Duhamel (guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013), the collection conveys a sense of American poetry in the making, year by year, over the course of a quarter of a century.

This collection of essays on transnational Chinese cinema explores the corporal, psychological, and affective aspects of experiencing bodies on screen; engages with the material and discursive elements of embodiment; and highlights the dynamics between the mind and body involved in bio-cultural practices of cinematic production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.

The present book is a collection of 9 essays, emerging from a long and intense research collaboration among scholars coming from different backgrounds and traditions. As the book subtitle suggests, these essays focus on the ethical, religious, and political aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought, which are illustrated and investigated with reference to their complex interaction with Wittgenstein’s philosophical method and his conception of philosophy, on the one hand, and with his conception of language and human agency on the other.

Powered by a fierce, compassionate intelligence, Brain Camp explores with clarity and vividness a wide spectrum of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality—all from a perspective both universal yet distinctly Webb's. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as a mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Brain Camp "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

"The Republics is a massively brilliant new work, a leap in literature we have not seen. It's gripping, harrowing, and at times horrific while its form paradoxically is fresh, luscious, and original. Bypassing pity and transforming pain into language Handal stars. She has recorded like Alice Walker, Paul Celan, John Hershey, and Carolyn Forché some of the worst civilization has offered humankind and somehow made it art."—Sapphire

This atlas is the definitive account in maps and words of the historic royal towns of Windsor and Eton. There has never been an account of the history of Eton town, and although Windsor Castle has been much studied, the last historical account of the town of Windsor was published as long ago as 1858.The atlas contains high-quality and original maps of the two towns at key periods between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the atlas lies a detailed and minutely researched map showing all the major medieval and post-medieval features in the context of a large-scale map of the towns around 1870, using Ordnance Survey maps as a source. The substantial introduction to the history of these distinctive towns charts their development over eight centuries. The atlas is presented as a large-format, high-quality A3 folder, with maps and illustrations printed at A2, allowing clear detail to be seen.All the buildings, historic sites and streets named on the maps are comprehensively documented in a detailed gazetteer, covering the history of the sites and the many sources used in compiling the maps. The value of the atlas is enhanced by the inclusion of numerous colour illustrations, including early maps and views of the towns, many of them previously unknown.For the first time, new research by historians, archaeologists and cartographers has been brought together to compile this unique and original portfolio.

An alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

Heather Christle's stunning fourth collection blends disarming honesty with keen leaps of the imagination. Like the boundary between our sun's sphere of influence and interstellar space, from which the book takes its name, the poems in Heliopause locate themselves along the border of the known and unknown, moving with breathtaking assurance from the page to the beyond. Christle finds striking parallels between subjects as varied as the fate of Voyager 1, the uncertain conception of new life, the nature of elegy, and the decaying transmission of information across time. Nimbly engaging with current events and lyric past, Heliopause marks a bold shift and growing vision in Christle's work. An online reader's companion will be available.