The Wooden Village

The second novel in the 'Rivers of Babylon' trilogy, translated from the Slovak, this outrageous black satire centres on a 'wooden village' of kiosks erected around a city hotel. It follows the post-communist rise of a mafia thug to be the leading 'businessman' of Bratislava, and of a perverted car-park attendant to the status of a porn-film scriptwriter, while others sink to pimping, robbing and baby-trafficking. Into this world, risking his life, comes a naive Slovak-American entrepreneur. 'Rivers of Babylon 1' was praised by William Boyd: "A tremendous novel, powered by an uncompromising ferocious energy and exhibiting a brutally dark sense of humour that is both ruthless and exhilarating. An amazing find.Ó The power is fully sustained in this novel.

"Moving from the wide world to the snugness of home and back out again, Village by the Sea tells the story of longing for the comforts of home"--

First published in 1937, this woodworking classic reveals a fascinating look into the social structure of a 19th-century English town and a carpenter's place in it. Encapsulating a time prior to power tools and mass production, when woodworkers made virtually everything, Walter Rose writes eloquently on a number of topics, including running a country business; the carpenter's shop; working on a farm, new home, and windmill; undertaking; and furniture repairs. Manifesting the importance of skill and the attitudes of the craftsman to his tools and work, this book will be of great interest to any carpenter or woodworker with an appreciation for the history of their craft.

New England colonists, Wood argues, brought with them a cultural predisposition toward dispersed settlements within agricultural spaces called "towns" and "villages." Rarely compact in form, these communities did, however, encourage individual landholding. By the early nineteenth century, town centers, where meetinghouses stood, began to develop into the center villages we recognize today. Just as rural New England began its economic decline, Wood shows, romantics associated these proto-urban places with idealized colonial village communities as the source of both village form and commercial success.

In this cumulative tale, a chirping cricket calms a worried mouse, a prowling cat, and other restless creatures, helping them to finally fall asleep.

The ten stories in In the Village of Viger portray the life of a rural village as it faces the darkness of its own future. An established milliner, Madame Laroque, is upset by the advent of a younger, more popular rival. An innkeeper’s obsession with the Franco-Prussian War drives his descent into madness. A gardener longs to return to the village in France where his mother was born. At once comical, farcical, and tragic, this superb collection, first published in 1896, anticipates later collections of linked short stories including Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? and Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House.

Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children's agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children's cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.