Cutting-edge user-friendly & comprehensive the revolutionary guide to the brain now fully revised & updated At birth each of us is given the most powerful & complex tool of all time the human brain & yet as we well know it doesn't come with an owner's manual-until now In this unsurpassed resource Dr Pierce J Howard & his team distill the very latest research & clearly explain the practical real-world applications to our daily lives Drawing from the frontiers of psychology neurobiology & cognitive science yet organized & written for maximum usability The Owner's Manual for the Brain (4th Edition) is your comprehensive guide to optimum mental performance & wellbeing It should be on every thinking person's bookshelf ...

The Caribbean is the source of one of the richest most accessible & yet technically adventurous traditions of contemporary world literature This collection of Caribbean short stories is pan-Caribbean including stories from the four main languages of the region English Spanish French & Dutch Stories by major figures in the English language tradition such as V S Naipaul Sam Sevlon & Jean Rhys are set alongside their Spanish- & French-speaking contemporaries like Alejo Carpentier Jan Bosh & Gabriel Garcia Marquez Their work in all its diversity of style theme & linguistic energy provides a context for the work of an exciting new generation of Caribbean writers like Edwidge Danticat Robert Antoni Astrid Roemer & Jamaica Kincaid A celebration of regional creativity the collection contains sufficient surprises to keep even the most avid student of West Indian writing turning the pages while reminding readers that the Caribbean is a multilingual multicultural space ...

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories edited by A S Byatt herself the author of several collections of short stories is the first anthology to specifically take the English short story as its theme The 37 stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth & twentieth centuries ranging from Dickens Trollope & Hardy to J G Ballard Angela Carter & Ian Mc Ewan though many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing There are all sorts of threads of connection & contrast running through these stories Their subjects vary from the sublime to the ridiculous from the momentous to the trivial from the grim to the farcical There is English empiricism English pragmatism English starkness English humour English satire English dandyism English horror & English whimsy There are examples of social realism from rural poverty to blitzed London; ghost stories & tales of the supernatural; surreal fantasy & science fiction There are stories of sensibility precisely delineated from Hardy's reluctant bride to the shocked heroine of Elizabeth Taylor's The Blush from H E Bates's brilliant fusion of class sex death & landscape to D H Lawrence's exploration of a consciousness slowly detaching itself from its world There are exuberant stories by Saki & Waugh Wodehouse & Firbank with a particularly English range from high irony to pure orchestrated farce The very range & scope of the collection celebrates the eccentric differences & excellences of English short stories Some of A S Byatt's choices clearly take their place in the grand tradition of story-telling while others are more unusual Many break all the rules of unity of tone & narrative appearing to be one kind of story before unexpectedly turning into another They pack together comedy & tragedy farce & delicacy elegance & the grotesque with language as various as the subject matter As A S Byatt explains ' My only criterion was that those stories I selected should be startling & satisfying & if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement aesthetic or narrative' ...

Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry chosen & introduced by Christopher Ricks whom Auden described as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding' The Oxford Book of English Verse created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch & selected anew in 1972 by Helen Gardner has established itself as the foremost anthology of English poetry ample in span liberal in the kinds of poetry presented This completely fresh selection brings in new poems & poets from all ages & extends the range by another half-century to include many twentieth-century figures not featured before
- among them Philip Larkin & Samuel Beckett Thom Gunn & Elaine Feinstein
- right up to Ted Hughes & Seamus Heaney Here as before are lyric (beginning with medieval song) satire hymn ode sonnet elegy ballad but also kinds of poetry not previously admitted the riches of dramatic verse by Marlowe Shakespeare Jonson Webster; great works of translation that are themselves true English poetry such as Chapman's Homer (bringing in its happy wake Keats's ' On First Looking into Chapman's Homer') Dryden's Juvenal & many others; well-loved nursery rhymes limericks even clerihews English poetry from all parts of the British Isles is firmly represented
- Henryson & Mac Diarmid for example now join Dunbar & Burns from Scotland; James Henry Austin Clarke & J M Synge now join Allingham & Yeats from Ireland; R S Thomas joins Dylan Thomas from Wales
- & Edward Taylor & Anne Bradstreet writing in America before its independence in the 1770s are given a rightful & rewarding place Some of the greatest long poems are here in their entirety
- Wordsworth's ' Tintern Abbey' Coleridge's ' Rime of the Ancient Mariner' & Christina Rossetti's ' Goblin Market'
- alongside some of the shortest haikus squibs & epigrams Generous & wide-ranging mixing familiar with fresh delights this is an anthology to move & delight all who find themselves loving English verse





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The essay is one of the richest of literary forms Its most obvious characteristics are freedom informality & the personal touch
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The Gothic tale has been with us for over two hundred years but this collection is the first to illustrate the continuing strength of this special fictional tradition from its origins in the late eighteenth century Gothic fiction is generally identified from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto & the works of Ann Radcliffe & with heroes & heroines menaced by feudal villains amid crumbling ruins While the repertoire of claustrophobic settings gloomy themes & threatening atmosphere established the Gothic genre later writers from Poe onwards achieved an ever greater sophistication & a shift in emphasis from cruelty to decadence Modern Gothic is distinguished by its imaginative variety of voice from the chilling depiction of a disordered mind to the sinister suggestion of vampirism This anthology brings together the work of writers such as Le Fanu Hawthorne Hardy Faulkner & Borges with their earliest literary forebears & emphasizes the central role of women writers from Anna Laetitia Aikin to Isabel Allende & Angela Carter While the Gothic tale shares some characteristics with the ghost story & tales of horror & fantasy the present volume triumphantly celebrates the distinctive features that define this powerful & unsettling literary form ...

Ireland has long been a nation of story-tellers What began as a lively form of entertainment has grown into an unrivalled literary genre Although Ireland may mourn the loss of the seanchai the old hearthside story-teller the Irish art of story-telling is by no means lost This varied anthology traces the development of the Irish short story from the early folk-tales of the oral tradition through Oliver Goldsmith Maria Edgeworth James Joyce & Liam O' Flaherty & on to the rising stars of the modern generation such as Bernard Mac Laverty & Desmond Hogan ...

This collection of short stories including many new translations is the first to span the whole of Japan's modern era from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day Beginning with the first writings to assimilate & rework Western literary traditions through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship & the current writings reflecting the pitfalls & paradoxes of modern life this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the development of the Japanese short story Various indigenous traditions in addition to those drawn from the West recur throughout the stories stories of the self of the Water Trade (Tokyo's nightlife of geishas & prostitutes) of social comment love & obsession legends & fairytales This collection

Includes:: the work of two Nobel prize-winners Kawabata & Oe the talented women writers Hirabayashi Euchi Okamoto & Hayashi together with the acclaimed Tanizaki Mishima & Murakami The introduction by Theodore Goossen gives insight into these exotic & enigmatic sometimes disturbing stories derived from the lyrical roots of Japanese literature with its distinctive stress on atmosphere & beauty

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An attractive reissue of the late Bishop George Appleton's celebrated selection of over 1100 prayers from many centuries & many traditions including Christian Jewish Hindu Buddhist Muslim Iranian Shinto Classical Greek & Latin native American & Baha'i The wide-ranging contents of The Oxford Book of Prayer reflect the cooperation of the many advisers who have ensured that the choice of prayers is ecumenical in the widest sense of the word The prayers are arranged under headings such as ' Prayers from the Scriptures' ' Prayers of Christians personal & occasional' ' Prayers of the Church' & ' Prayers from other traditions of faith' but there is also a subject index to guide the user to prayers for particular occasions & an index of authors & sources The book may thus be used for browsing or for more structured prayer for private meditation or for public worship ...

' As good an introduction to SF as you can buy' Iain Banks The definitive collection of the twentieth-century's most characteristic genre-from HG Wells's prophetic vision of technological warfare to contemporary cyberspace & up-to-the-minute myths of genetic engineering ...