Easily Distracted Tales

What will you discover in this volume of Easily-Distracted Tales? A racist gentleman suffering from Cotard's delusion! A play in real time for production companies with overbudgeted lighting departments that feel capable of attracting forgiving audiences! Several discussions on the nature of reality, all of which are inconclusive! A drinking glass which is completely empty of lemonade! Secrets and lies! A healthy, award-winning recipe for garlic knots! (Cut from the final draft!) True facts, buoyed by false facts! Your super-powered origins! Fairies performing martial arts! Several references to unpopular songs! An advice column from the afterlife! Less-frequent exclamation points than in this promotional summary! Blood! (A little.) Sex! (Somewhat more.) Rock and roll! (Far less.) The effects of caffeinated beverages on the progress of western civilization and the Enlightenment! Disguised alien interlopers sent on an information-gathering mission! More? Yes, definitely more!

The darkly passionate short stories of Thomas Hardy are compelling explorations of love, social class, superstition and legend. This collection contains many of his finest and most representative, and includes ‘The Withered Arm’, an eerie depiction of arcane witchcraft in nineteenth-century England; ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’, in which a beautiful man’s tragic disfigurement by fire is savagely exploited by his rival; ‘The Son’s Veto’, showing the cruelty of an educated youth towards his ignorant but tender mother; and ‘The Distracted Preacher’, the story of one man’s conflict between heartfelt love and his own sense of moral and civic duty. By turns moving and poetic, and surprisingly modern and brutally macabre, these eloquent tales may be numbered among the greatest creations of Hardy’s genius.

This engaging introduction to the Russian folktale considers the origin, structure, and language of folktale; tale-tellers and their audiences; the relationship of folktale to Russian ritual life; and the folktale types that are translated in subsequent volumes of The Complete Russian Folktale.

This book is inspired by folktales that my grandmother narrated to me when I was a child. Growing up in rural Zimbabwe, we would sit around the fire in our mud hut after dinner and listen to my grandmothers storytelling long into the night. This book is a collection of different folktales that happened a long time ago, somewhere deep in the forests of Zimbabwe. The folktales sometimes feature some interaction between and among animals and sometimes a combination of animals and humans. The folktales are didactic in nature, thus they often end up depicting important life lessons.

Ever since Robinson Crusoe washed ashore, the castaway story has survived and prospered, inspiring a multitude of writers of adventure fiction to imitate and adapt its mythic elements. In his brilliant critical study of this popular genre, Christopher Palmer traces the castaway tales’ history and changes through periods of settlement, violence, and reconciliation, and across genres and languages. Showing how subsequent authors have parodied or inverted the castaway tale, Palmer concentrates on the period following H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. These much darker visions are seen in later novels including William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory. In these and other variations, the castaway becomes a cannibal, the castaway’s island is relocated to center of London, female castaways mock the traditional masculinity of the original Crusoe, or Friday ceases to be a biddable servant. By the mid-twentieth century, the castaway tale has plunged into violence and madness, only to see it return in young adult novels—such as Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Terry Pratchett’s Nation—to the buoyancy and optimism of the original. The result is a fascinating series of revisions of violence and pessimism, but also reconciliation.

These stories of heroism and magic, and of terrifying encounters with Baba Yaga, Zmei the serpent and Koschchei the Immortal, represent at least one example of every wondertale type known in Russia.

What is sociology? Why is it important? Sociologists’ Tales is the first book to offer a unique window into the thoughts and experiences of key UK sociologists from different generations, many internationally recognised, asking what sociology means to them. It reveals the changing context of sociology and how this has shaped their practice. Providing a valuable insight into why sociology is so fascinating, it gives advice to those wanting to study or develop a career in sociology reflecting on why the contributors chose their career, how they have managed to do it and what advice they would offer the next generation. This unique volume provides an understanding of sociology and its importance, and will have wide appeal among students, young sociologists thinking about their future and professional sociologists alike.