Border Crosser

Border Crossing is Pat Barker's unflinching novel of darkness, evil and society. When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back? 'Brilliantly crafted. Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story expertly told' Daily Mail 'A tremendous piece of writing, sad and terrifying. It keeps you reading, exhausted and blurry-eyed, until 2am' Independent on Sunday 'Resolutely unsensational but disquieting . . . Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it' Guardian 'Rich, challenging, surprising, breathtaking' The Times

From one of the prominent Chicano poets writing today comes a collection of poems to take your breath away. With dazzling speed and energy, Juan Felipe Herrera sends readers rocketing through verbal space in a celebration of the rhythms and textures of words that will make you want to shout, dance, and read out loud. Lika a wild ride in a fast car, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream moves at breakneck speed, a post-Lorca journey across the new millennium terrain. Words careen through space and time, through blighted urban landscapes, past banjos and bees, past AIDS faces and mad friars, past severed heads and steel-toed border-crosser boots. To the rhythm of "The Blue Eyed Mambo that Unveils My Lover's Belly" and the sounds of the Last Mayan Acid rock band, Herrera races through the hallucinations of a nation that remains just outside of paradise. With dazzling poems that roar from the darkest corners of our minds toward an ecstatic celebration of the lushness of language, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream is a celebration of a world that is both sacred and cruel, a world of "Poesy Chicano style undone wild" by one of the most daring poets of our time.

In a galaxy gone insane only mad person would fight for freedom. That person is Eris, a charismatic spy with a violent borderline personality and emotional amnesia—she doesn’t remember her loyalties. This allows her to pass from world to world without mental scanners detecting her long-term intentions, making her a “border crosser.” The Asylum cabal has artificially amplified Eris’s condition so that she’ll cause interstellar chaos for the limited time she survives. When Eris discovers the Asylum’s manipulation of her, she sets out to find its hidden leaders and destroy them. From decadent old Earth to the frontier estates of Mars, Eris hunts her first quarry, the Asylum’s architect of genocides. Her chase then leads her out to the stars, where she discovers still deadlier dangers from humanity’s past and her own. As she fights galaxy-spanning nightmares, Eris knows that her dream of revenge will fail unless she can somehow recover her own mind. “An electric shock to the senses from page one, Doyle's twisty story caroms from sex and psyche to AI and the destruction of worlds. Our conductor on this non-stop ride, Eris—a worthy heir to Buffy and Xena—is the unique and ferocious hero we didn't know we needed.” —Ashley Gable, writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Person of Interest. “Darkly comic and slyly allusive, Border Crosser is a ripping good tale shot through with mordant social commentary. A fresh and intelligent take on forbidden AI, religious zealotry, borderline personality, sex, art, and genocide—not necessarily in that order—that stuck in my head and left me hankering for a sequel.” —Jo Miller, winner of four Emmy Awards, writer for The Daily Show (2009-2015), and late-night comedy showrunner. “This is not your parents' space opera! A cross between the Stainless Steel Rat, Jerry Cornelius, and Tank Girl, the titular agent is the antihero for our times. Doyle impresses with a strong voice, a unique narrator, and a challenging far-future setting that dangerously mirrors our present world.” —Alex Shvartsman, author of The Middling Affliction. "Here is a novel that starts at a gallop and then accelerates. Tom Doyle’s invention is sly and continuous, his command of the ins and outs of science fiction adventure is exhilarating. And in the redoubtable Eris, he has created a character who is smart and sexy and more than a little twisted. Border Crosser is a book you won’t soon forget." —James Patrick Kelly, Nebula Award winning author of Burn. "Tom Doyle’s Border Crosser is a hyperkinetic tour of a sprawling solar system and galaxy in a dark and delirious future. Doyle explores the deep, painful and unpleasant aspects of the psyche, showcasing some of the more repellent examples of human behavior, yet manages to bring a surprising amount of decency and affection to his story. The book speeds along at a breakneck pace, and will astonish you, wrench your heart, snatch your breath away, make you laugh, and move you." —Richard Paul Russo, author of Ship of Fools. "The bastard love-child of Philip K. Dick and the Marquis De Sade, BORDER CROSSER will sink into your mind like one of Frank Herbert's stone burners. This is revolutionary science fiction." —David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens.

Johnny Rico is back. After risking his life as an Afghanistan stop-loss soldier, an experience he described in the cult phenomenon Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green, he now dares to embed himself on both sides of America’s most dangerous domestic conflict–the war for and against illegal immigration–in an exhilarating new exercise in immersion journalism. The gonzo author–part Hunter Thompson, part George Plimpton–explores a seemingly insoluble issue by getting his hands dirty and his boots on the ground. As a “typically spoiled American” who doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish, he takes it upon himself to try to cross the Mexican border into the United States illegally. Eager to tell the story from all sides–or simply to get good material for his book–Rico also travels treacherously with the Border Patrol, meets extreme immigrant advocates who publish maps for illegals, visits a modern-day “underground railroad” in Texas, and hunts for miscreants with angry vigilantes. In such hot spots as the Tecate Line, a forty-five-mile stretch of hills on California’s southern fringe, and Arizona’s Amnesty Trail, the single busiest part of the U.S. border, Rico encounters Los Zetas, the paramilitatry group that has taken over Mexico’s drug cartels, interviews the volunteer Minutemen, who believe in an imminent and apocalyptic Mexican invasion, and tries to recruit coyotes (human smugglers, usually fortified by meth and cocaine). In his heedless and openly opportunistic style, Rico unearths more truths about this explosive subject than most traditional reporters could ever hope to. Border Crosser is another knockout from this new-generation journalist, at once a concerned citizen, courageous spy, and unparalleled author.

Each time a border is crossed there are cultural, political, and social issues to be considered. Applying the metaphor of the 'border crossing' from one temporal or spatial territory into another, Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film examines the way classic Russian texts have been altered to suit new cinematic environments. In these essays, international scholars examine how political and economic circumstances, from a shifting Soviet political landscape to the perceived demands of American and European markets, have played a crucial role in dictating how filmmakers transpose their cinematic hypertext into a new environment. Rather than focus on the degree of accuracy or fidelity with which these films address their originating texts, this innovative collection explores the role of ideological, political, and other cultural pressures that can affect the transformation of literary narratives into cinematic offerings.

From the author of the cult hit Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green, another riveting book of immersion journalism, exploring the violent, poignant, and darkly comic world of illegal immigration Johnny Rico set out to cross the Mexican border as the natives do—over the fence and through the desert: a task that, in theory, seemed easy to execute, but was complicated by the messy reality of Border Patrol, drug cartels, and human-smuggling “coyotes.” Posing as a journalist covering “that whole border issue,” Rico rode along with and interviewed illegal immigrants, the Minutemen (citizen activists who patrol the border), and humanitarian groups, such as Humane Borders, that put water in the desert for crossing immigrants. In the process, Rico saw the issue of illegal immigration from all sides—that of Mexican illegals, law enforcement, migrant activists, farmers, employers, day labor site managers, and angry citizens. Ending with Rico’s own frenetic last-minute crossing,Border Crosseris simultaneously an adventure travelogue, an analysis of border politics, and a frenzied tale of a misfit hungry for adventure and desperate to find his place in the world.

This collection focuses on metaphorical as well as temporal and physical border-crossing in writing from and about Japan. With a strong consciousness of gender and socio-historic contexts, contributors to the book adopt an intercultural and interdisciplinary approach to examine the writing of authors whose works break free from the confines of hegemonic Japanese literary endeavour. By demonstrating how the texts analysed step outside the space of ‘Japan’, they accordingly foreground the volatility of textual expression related to that space. The authors discussed include Takahashi Mutsuo and Nagai Kafū, both of whom take literary inspiration from geographical sites outside Japan. Several chapters examine the work of exemplary border-crossing poet, novelist and essayist, Itō Hiromi. There are discussions of the work of Tawada Yōko whose ability to publish in German and Japanese marks her also as a representative writer of border-crossing texts. Two chapters address works by Murakami Haruki who, although clearly affiliating with western cultural form, is rarely discussed in specific border-crossing terms. The chapter on Ainu narratives invokes topics such as translation, indigeneity and myth, while an analysis of Japanese prisoner-of-war narratives notes the language and border-crossing nexus. A vital collection for scholars and students of Japanese literature.