The Conways and the Kellys, who rule the Valley of the Smugglers, do not welcome strangers. An Excise Officer has been killed and in order to investigate the crime Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, dressed in the disreputable clothes of a horse-thief: enters the valley one step ahead of the police, who are supposed to be chasing him. Nat Bonnay, horse-thief, in time ingratiates himself with the families, in particular with Grandma Conway, for whom he plays "Danny Boy" on a gum leaf and brings tears to the old lady's eyes.
Lock me in any cell in any prison anywhere at any time, wearing only normal clothes and I'll escape in a week.' For Professor Van Dusen, otherwise known as 'The Thinking Machine', nothing is impossible. Logic is his passion. One hour later he finds himself locked up in Chisholm prison and has to use all his mental resources to find the solution to the problem.
Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.26 | Fiction literature | 17 February 2011
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Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker
Mister B. Gone marks the long-awaited return of Clive Barker, the great master of the macabre, to the classic horror story. This bone-chilling novel, in which a medieval devil speaks directly to his reader--his tone murderous one moment, seductive the next--is a never-before-published memoir allegedly penned in the year 1438. The demon has embedded himself in the very words of this tale of terror, turning the book itself into a dangerous object, laced with menace only too ready to break free and exert its power.
From Asgard to Valhalla - The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths
Whether they focus on Thor's powerful hammer, the mysterious valkyries, the palatial home of the gods - Asgard - or ravenous wolves and fierce elemental giants, the Norse myths are packed with vivid incident. But at the centre of their cosmos stands a gnarled old ash tree from which all distances and times are measured. When the old tree creaks, Ragnarok - the end of the world and of the gods themselves - is at hand. It is from this tree that Odin, father of the gods, hanged himself in search of the wisdom of the dead: a disturbing image of divine sacrifice far removed from the feasting and fighting of his otherworld home, Valhalla.
Our title, the “anthropology of the alien,” sounds like a contradiction in terms. Anthropos is man, anthropology the study of man. The alien, however, is something else: alius, other than. But other than what? Obviously man. The alien is the creation of a need—man’s need to designate something that is genuinely outside himself, something that is truly nonman, that has no initial relation to man except for the fact that it has no relation. Why man needs the alien is the subject of these essays. For it is through learning to relate to the alien that man has learned to study himself.
