17 essays selected from the magazine "Fantasy and science fiction."

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) loved to give interviews. He was famous for encouraging interruptions of the solitary task of writing. These twenty-four welcomed interruptions are representative of the many he allowed over a twenty-five-year period. Included here are his conversations with such interviewers as Irving Howe, Laurie Colwin, Richard Burgin, and Herbert R. Lottman. In these talks Singer discusses the nature of his writing, its ethnic roots, his demonology, the importance of free will, and the place of storytelling in human life. The interviews with Singer reveal both his impish sense of humor and a determination that sustained him through many years of limited acclaim and comparative neglect by critics. Yiddishists often faulted him for refusing to use his talent as a force for change in the world, Jewish readers often deplored his use of pre-Enlightenment folk material, and academics could not take too seriously a writer who insisted on telling stories that emphasized plot and character. Yet he was not deterred from his astonishing and beloved work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Fiction. Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor. "Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. Any run of the mill story has those. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Appel's that kind of trafficker. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all. It's a beginning. SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."--TJ Beitelman

In a model study Jacob Price illuminates the dynamic growth of Britain’s foreign trade in the eighteenth century through an investigation of the investment patterns and credit institutions that financed that expansion. Concentrating on the trade between Britain and the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland, for which a unique set of records exists, Price surveys the ways in which commerce developed and working capital was mobilized in Britain to support expanding overseas trade. Price develops the clearest picture ever of the financial environment within Britain as it affected Southern colonies in the preindustrial age. He does so by determining the kind of capital resources merchants in foreign trade actually commanded and measuring how much of their own wealth merchants brought to trade. In great and absorbing detail he discusses also the development of merchant-oriented banks in London and other ports, reinvestment of profits, long-term borrowing on bond, and the long-term credit provided to export merchants by wholesalers in textiles, ironmongery, and other industries. The relationship of debt to the coming of the American Revolution is also treated. Tobacco growers suffered more than others from a psychological unease caused by immense debt and were more revolutionary than farmers with less intensive capital needs and, hence, with lighter debt. This history will enlighten Anglo-American historians, economic historians, and historians of the American revolutionary era.

Inspired by the author's career as a sportswriter for the Washington Post, Squeeze Play tells the story of female reporter A. B. Berkowitz, who is assigned to cover the men of the Washington Senators -- the worst team in major league baseball. Life in the locker room shows her not just the players'…um…assets but also their all-too-human frailties. Love for the game and love for the newspaper business are the stars in this hilarious and heartbreaking novel that "will have you singing a rousing chorus of 'Take Me Out to the Locker Room'"(People).

A collection of jump-rope and other play rhymes from seventeen countries, including Brazil, India, Israel, Greece, Armenia, and the United States, in both English and the original language.

The wings he is born with give a young boy nothing but unhappiness until he flies over the mountain to rescue his herdsman father.

Relates how a turnip farmer's daughter outwits the fearsome witch Baba Yaga.

Orphaned while still a young girl, Curry befriends the woodland creatures by untangling their matted fur with a comb given to her by her dying mother. In return, the animals protect Curry from the terrifying beast that roams the forest and from the wicked sorceress who searches endlessly for the charm that will lead her to fabled riches. Full-color illustrations.

A mermaid who cannot speak is banished from her undersea home and sent to live on land as a human where she is found by a 12-year-old girl with a hearing impairment.

After his family is evicted from their Scottish farm, fifteen-year-old Roddy forms an unlikely friendship with a notorious rogue who helps him outwit a tyrant landlord in order to find a family treasure and make his way to America.

Even though she comes from a long line of successful witches, Isabel finds it impossible to conjure up an evil spell and dreads her first Witches' Convention where she is expected to do her worst.

The second volume of Jane Yolen's fantasy anthology series contains original stories and poetry by Ursual K. Le Guin, Barbara Hambly, Carol Janes Bangs, Marvin Bell, Patricia McKillip, Delia Sherman, Susan Solomont, Richard Kearns, Diane Duane, and Barbara Can Noord, and 26 others. A diverse collection of the best in original short fantasy.

As Dickens and Balzac did for their time, so John Berger does for ours, rendering the movement of a people and the passing of a way of life in his masterwork, the Into Their Labours trilogy.

The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma on January 24, 1848, initiated one of the largest migrations in US history. Between 1849 and 1855, hundreds of thousands of migrants arrived in Northern California hoping to find gold in the foothills of th

This important collection of essays opens with a pivotal essay on the implications of the moral duties which arise out of concern for the well-being of others. The first part of the book concentrates on the consequences of two central aspects of well-being: the importance of membership in groups - the role of belonging - and the active character of well-being - that it largely consists in successful activities. Both aspects have far-reaching political implications' explored in essays on free expression, national self-determination, and multiculturalism, among others. Against the background of the moral and political views developed in the first part, the second part of the book explores various aspects of the dynamic inter-relations between law and morality, offering some building blocks towards a theory of law.

Joseph Roth has been described as ?one of the greatest writers in German of this century? ("The Times"). With tragic foresight, "Right and Left," first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and economic tyranny of Berlin in the twenties, the same territory covered trenchantly in Roth's reportage, recently published as "What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33." After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father's banking empire. Increasingly beset by skyrocketing inflation, and dismayed by his brother's infatuation with the brownshirts, Bernheim turns to an outsider for help?a profiteering Russian ?migr? whose advice proves alternately advantageous and disastrous. Too late to change his fate, he realizes he has been decieved by a master in the craft of manipulation.

It has long been known that the modern Chinese language inherited numerous terms from Japanese and that Japanese coined many of those terms in the last decades of the 19th century. These seven essays address the actual processes by which a discreet number of terms came into being, how they outdistanced competitors, and the persons and texts involved in the process. Rather than relying on received tropes of translation heritage, these essays delve much deeper into the particularities of their cases. They set a standard for subsequent scholarship.