The Eighth Continent And Other Stories

This powerful and enriching collection of nine stories explores and illuminates the fusion of intimate and public dramas. Focusing on the persistence of personal memory amid political and historical upheaval, the tales in The Eighth Continent portray the impact of broad political and historical events on individual lives, success in the face of low expectations and the humor that redeems everyday struggles. In rich evocative language, award winning author Alba Ambert invokes strong characters and demonstrates the cool detachment of modern life. Populating the stories are engrossing individuals: underground revolutionaries faced with fear of betrayal; a woman who looks back at a massacre she witnessed as a child and the wrenching consequences of this event on her life; a linguist who makes a dangerous trip to a tropical island and finds a language on the verge of extinction; and a young woman in a mental hospital who challenges our perception of truth and lies, sanity and insanity.

HAVE YOU EVER WANTED TO CREATE A PLACE WHERE YOU COULD MAKE YOUR OWN RULES? Evie and Rick Lane are determined to transform the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a real life pile of floating garbage—into an eighth continent, using a special formula developed by their father. This new continent will be a place where their family can make their own rules and live free from the intervention of Winterpole, a global governing agency run by bumbling bureaucrats. But eleven-year-old pink-and-plastic-obsessed Vesuvia Piffle, the secret mastermind behind the villainous Condo Corp, also has her sights set on this new land, and she wants to use it to build a kind of Miami-on-steroids. Now, it’s a race against time and across the world as the kids gather the items they need to create their continent. Because whoever controls the eighth continent controls our future. And the future can’t be both “green” and pink. BUILD IT - RUN IT - RULE IT at 8thContinentBooks.com

“An eye-opening and enchanting book by one of our major scientist-explorers.” —Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife Nicknamed the “Real-Life Lorax” by National Geographic, the biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman—aka “CanopyMeg”—takes us on an adventure into the “eighth continent” of the world's treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate action Welcome to the eighth continent! As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn’t monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees. Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world’s foremost arbornauts, known as the “real-life Lorax.” She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world. With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman’s irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia’s rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland’s Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia’s last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change. A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world—even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber—the only girl at the science fair—who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere. Includes black-and-white illustrations

In this expertly crafted, richly detailed guide, Raymond Leslie Williams explores the cultural, political, and historical events that have shaped the Latin American and Caribbean novel since the end of World War II. In addition to works originally composed in English, Williams covers novels written in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Haitian Creole, and traces the profound influence of modernization, revolution, and democratization on the writing of this era. Beginning in 1945, Williams introduces major trends by region, including the Caribbean and U.S. Latino novel, the Mexican and Central American novel, the Andean novel, the Southern Cone novel, and the novel of Brazil. He discusses the rise of the modernist novel in the 1940s, led by Jorge Luis Borges's reaffirmation of the right of invention, and covers the advent of the postmodern generation of the 1990s in Brazil, the Generation of the "Crack" in Mexico, and the McOndo generation in other parts of Latin America. An alphabetical guide offers biographies of authors, coverage of major topics, and brief introductions to individual novels. It also addresses such areas as women's writing, Afro-Latin American writing, and magic realism. The guide's final section includes an annotated bibliography of introductory studies on the Latin American and Caribbean novel, national literary traditions, and the work of individual authors. From early attempts to synthesize postcolonial concerns with modernist aesthetics to the current focus on urban violence and globalization, The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel Since 1945 presents a comprehensive, accessible portrait of a thoroughly diverse and complex branch of world literature.

The stories in this collection span almost one thousand years of story-telling in India. Most originate in North India and all were written by Jain monks for the edification and amusement of the faithful. The treasures of India`s heritage of story-telling are known to us today mainly from these Jain stories which have been carefully preserved through the years. The Stories in The Clever Adulteress have been translated by a renowned group of scholars from India, North America and Europe. Each translator has chosen his or her favorites from the vast treasures of Jain literature.

There has been a dramatic increase in the amount of narrative work published by Chicana and Latina authors in the past 5 to 10 years. Nonetheless, there has been little attempt to catalog this material. This reference provides convenient access to all forms of narrative written by Chicana and Latina authors from the early 1940s through 2002. In doing so, it helps users locate these works and surveys the growth of this vast body of literature. The volume cites more than 2,750 short stories, novels, novel excerpts, and autobiographies written by some 600 Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Dominican American, and Nuyorican women authors. These citations are grouped in five indexes: an author/title index, title/author index, anthology index, novel index, and autobiography index. Short annotations are provided for the anthologies, novels, and autobiographies. Thus the user who knows the title of a work can discover the author, the other works the author has written, and the anthologies in which the author's shorter pieces have been reprinted, along with information about particular works.

Combining pieces of nonfiction, fiction, and parody, this collection of writing reflects contemporary women's lives as they struggle with coming of age, relationships, and parenthood.