Book by Dundes, Alan, Pagter, Carl

Lord Snowdon's close-up photographic studies reveal the balance, harmony and form of wild flowers. The accompanying text looks at the characteristics of the flowers, and at the folklore and traditions associated with them.

Book by Vilnay, Zev

Stanley G. Weinbaum's classic horror novel, originally entitled "The Mad Brain". When an unassuming man's personality changes dramatically toward the sinister, the woman he loves seeks help from a psychologist, leading to a disturbing discovery.

Why do humans hold onto traditions? Many pundits predicted that modernization and the rise of a mass culture would displace traditions, especially in America, but cultural practices still bear out the importance of rituals and customs in the development of identity, heritage, and community. In Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture , Simon J. Bronner discusses the underlying reasons for the continuing significance of traditions, delving into their social and psychological roles in everyday life, from old-time crafts to folk creativity on the Internet. Challenging prevailing notions of tradition as a relic of the past, Explaining Traditions provides deep insight into the nuances and purposes of living traditions in relation to modernity. Bronner's work forces readers to examine their own traditions and imparts a better understanding of raging controversies over the sustainability of traditions in the modern world.

I have always been interested in the wild and nature. Ever since I was a small boy, play in the fields and woodlands near my home in England. I was attracted by the immense diversity of life, and awed by each plant, tree, insect, animal and bird. I saw back then a wonderful world, here we were blessed by the four seasons. How things change though, over the years; the climate, urbanisation, and fields make way for new projects to benefit us. So in this series of poems, I have tried to capture what things in nature I have seen and loved. I hope they are enjoyed by all who read them.

" ... not a large book, but that makes all the more admirable the way the author succeeds in doing justice to so many of the most important subjects in folkloristics. This book is a key work, and should be made compulsory reading in every university in which folkloristics is studied." --Jon Hnefill Aoalsteinsson, Asian Folklore Studies "With this book Alan Dundes has once again demonstrated what a brilliant essayist he is: learned, thought-provoking and entertaining. He has much inspiration to give to anthropologists, and he is quite indispensable to folklore scholarship." --Bengt af Klintberg, Ethnos "If there were still a question whether Alan Dundes is America's leading folklorist, then the essays in this volume ... should dispel it once and for all. An internationally acclaimed scholar is at work here, for whom foUclore really matters in all of its varied aspects." --Wolfgang Mieder, University of Vennont "A maverick folklorist, Alan Dundes challenges his colleagues and readers with erudition and candor. His essays are insightful and entertaining, exploring folklore with an amazing breadth. " --Dan Ben-Amos, University of Pennsylvania "As always, a reader is dazzled by the range of Dundes erudition. He doesn't just cite things, he digests them."-Gary Alan Fine, University of Minnesota "For over two decades, he has been a major voice urging folklorists (and historians and literary critics, for that manner) to move beyond mere description to true interpretation of cultural texts in their contexts. These essays continue that message, and they do so with fresh power." --Jay Mechling, University of California, Davis "These recent essays from the pen of a passionate folklorist include two classics on the history of the field. The Fabrication of 'Fakelore' and The Anthropologist and the Comparative Method in Folklore' are required reading for anyone seriously interested in folklore as a discipline." --Barbara Kirshenblan-Gimblett, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Web of Life weaves its suggestive interpretation of Jewish culture in the Palestine of late antiquity on the warp of a singular, breathtakingly tragic, and sublime rabbinic text, Lamentations Rabbah. The textual analyses that form the core of the book are informed by a range of theoretical paradigms rarely brought to bear on rabbinic literature: structural analysis of mythologies and folktales, performative approaches to textual production, feminist theory, psychoanalytical analysis of culture, cultural criticism, and folk narrative genre analysis. The concept of context as the hermeneutic basis for literary interpretation reactivates the written text and subverts the hierarchical structures with which it has been traditionally identified. This book reinterprets rabbinic culture as an arena of multiple dialogues that traverse traditional concepts of identity regarding gender, nation, religion, and territory. The author's approach is permeated by the idea that scholarly writing about ancient texts is invigorated by an existential hermeneutic rooted in the universality of human experience. She thus resorts to personal experience as an idiom of communication between author and reader and between human beings of our time and of the past. This research acknowledges the overlap of poetic and analytical language as well as the language of analysis and everyday life. In eliciting folk narrative discourses inside the rabbinic text, the book challenges traditional views about the social basis that engendered these texts. It suggests the subversive potential of the constitutive texts of Jewish culture from late antiquity to the present by pointing out the inherent multi-vocality of the text, adding to the conventionally acknowledged synagogue and academy the home, the marketplace, and other private and public socializing institutions.

The collection comprises numerous folktales that have been passed down through generations in Southern India. These stories often feature common folktale elements such as moral lessons, mythical creatures, gods and goddesses, and heroic feats. Key elements typically found in the tales include: Mythical Creatures and Deities: Many stories involve encounters with gods, goddesses, demons, and other mythical beings, reflecting the religious and spiritual beliefs of Southern India. Moral Lessons: The tales often convey moral lessons or ethical teachings, emphasizing virtues such as honesty, bravery, wisdom, and kindness. Cultural Traditions: The stories provide insights into the cultural traditions, customs, and societal norms of Southern Indian communities. They often depict everyday life, rituals, and the social structure of the time.

This illustrated book recounts the story of The Magic Pomegranate, a well-known Jewish folktale. In this engaging story, three brothers journey to three different lands in search of adventure. When they meet again, each brother has brought back a gift from his travels. One brother has an enchanted looking glass. Another has a flying carpet. The third brother has a magic pomegranate. But no sooner have the brothers begun to enjoy their gifts than they learn some troubling news: a princess in a far-off kingdom has fallen ill. Only the brothers and their magic gifts can save her. Will the brothers be able to help the princess? Which gift will make her well? Read this enchanting story to find out.

This study of the struggles for recognition and justice by the Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en Indian peoples of northwestern British Columbia, includes profiles of their leadership, history, culture, beliefs and folklore, and describes the progress of their land claims.

A practical investigation into story-theatre and the art of telling stories through theatre, by the renowned director who founded Shared Experience Theatre Company. In Then What Happens?, Mike Alfreds makes the case for putting story and storytelling back at the heart of theatre. He explores the whole process of adapting for the stage, and investigates the particular techniques - many of them highly sophisticated - that actors require when performing 'story-theatre'. The book includes over two hundred exercises, improvisations and workshops dealing with the practical aspects of story-theatre, such as building an ensemble, creating a physical vocabulary, and transforming written narrative into drama. It draws on examples ranging from traditional legends and folklore, through the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh, to contemporary fiction. Alfreds shows how each story demands its own particular set of dramatic choices, opening up endless possibilities for performance. Then What Happens? - like the author's tremendously successful first book, Different Every Night - will be invaluable to directors and actors, to dramatists working in the field of adaptation, to those devising and working from improvisation, and to any theatregoer who has been moved by the power of an unfolding story to ask: 'Then what happens?'

The Torch-Bearers tells the story of an itinerant Anarchist preacher who comes to the corrupt city of Geronta in the company of a fellow vagabond, where he begins preaching in parables, that being his preferred method of enlightenment. He hears a number of other story-tellers narrating their own parables, to which he opposes his own in order to expose their ideological flaws. Here, presented in English for the first time in a superb translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most interesting novels of the Symbolist Movement--the elaborate fruit of author Bernard Lazare's wholehearted commitment to both Symbolist and Anarchist ideals. This striking literary experiment, testing the hypothesis that the raw materials of myth, legend and folklore, which had been redeployed and pastiched so successfully by the Movement, could be adapted to Anarchist purposes.

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Work Hard and You Shall be Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire (paperback)