Download or read book Edgeland written by Jake Halpern and published by Bonnier Publishing Fiction Ltd.. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The companion novel to the New York Times bestselling NIGHTFALL Thousands of miles due south from the Polar North is is the island of Edgeland. Here, day and night last for 72 hours. And here is one of the natural wonders of this world: a whirlpool thirty miles wide and a hundred miles around. This is the Drain. Anything sucked into its frothing, turbulent waters is never seen again. Wren has spent most of her life on Edgeland, watching people bring their dead to the island's famous bone houses to be blessed and prepared for the afterlife. There the dead are loaded into boats with treasure and sent over the cliff, and into the Drain. Orphaned and alone, Wren dreams of escaping Edgeland, and her chance finally comes when furriers from the Polar north arrive with their dead, and treasure for their dead. With the help of her friend Alec, Wren plans to loot one of the boats before it enters the Drain. But the boat - with Alec and Wren onboard - is sucked into the whirlpool. What they discover over the abyss is beyond what either of them could have imagined.
Download or read book Nightfall written by Jake Halpern and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dark will bring your worst nightmares to light in this gripping and eerie survival story! On Marin’s island, sunrise doesn’t come every twenty-four hours—it comes every twenty-eight years. Now the sun is just a sliver of light on the horizon. The weather is turning cold and the shadows are growing long. Because sunset triggers the tide to roll out hundreds of miles, the islanders are frantically preparing to sail south, where they will wait out the long Night. Marin and her twin brother, Kana, help their anxious parents ready the house for departure. Locks must be taken off doors. Furniture must be arranged. Tables must be set. The rituals are puzzling—bizarre, even—but none of the adults in town will discuss why it has to be done this way. Just as the ships are about to sail, a teenage boy goes missing—the twins’ friend Line. Marin and Kana are the only ones who know the truth about where Line’s gone, and the only way to rescue him is by doing it themselves. But Night is falling. Their island is changing. And it may already be too late.
Download or read book Edgelands written by Michael Symmons Roberts and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst. Edgelands forms a critique of what we value as 'wild', and allows our allotments, railways, motorways, wasteland and water a presence in the world, and a strange beauty all of their own.
Download or read book Edgeland written by Jake Halpern and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An upper-middle grade thriller by the New York Times bestselling Nightfall authors–perfect for fans of James Dashner’s Maze Runner books. Thousands of miles south of the island of Bliss, day and night last for 72 hours. Here is one of the natural wonders of this world: a whirlpool thirty miles wide and a hundred miles around. This is the Drain. Anything sucked into its frothing, turbulent waters is never seen again. Wren has spent most of her life on Edgeland, a nearby island where people bring their dead to be blessed and prepared for the afterlife. There the dead are loaded into boats with treasure and sent over the cliff, and into the Drain. Orphaned and alone, Wren dreams of escaping Edgeland, and her chance finally comes when furriers from the Polar north arrive with their dead, and treasure for their dead. With the help of her friend Alec, Wren plans to loot one of the boats before it enters the Drain. But the boat--with Alec and Wren onboard--is sucked into the whirlpool. What they discover beyond the abyss is beyond what anyone could have imagined.
Download or read book Common Ground written by Rob Cowen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Even in our parceled-out, paved-over urban environs, nature is all around us, it is in us. It is us. This is what Rob Cowen discovered after moving to a new home in northern England. After ten years in London, he was suddenly adrift, searching for a sense of connection. He found himself drawn to a square-mile patch of waste ground at the edge of town. Scrappy, weed-filled, this heart-shaped tangle of land was the very definition of overlooked - a thoroughly in-between place that capitalism had no further use for, leaving nature to take its course. Wandering in meadows, woods, hedges, and fields, Cowen found it was also a magical, mysterious place, haunted and haunting, abandoned but wildly alive - and he fell in fascinated love."--Book jacket.
Download or read book Dormia written by Jake Halpern and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing Alfonso Perplexon, hero of the epic fantasy tale Dormia! Alfonso Perplexon is an unusual sleeper. He climbs trees, raises falcons, even shoots deadly accurate arrows, all in his sleep. No one can figure out why. Then one evening a man arrives at Alfonso’s door, claiming to be Alfonso’s long-lost uncle Hill. This uncle tells a fantastical tale: Alfonso’s ancestors hail from Dormia—an ancient kingdom of gifted sleepers—which is hidden in the snowy peaks of the Ural Mountains. According to Hill, Dormia exists thanks to a tree known as the Founding Tree, with roots that pump life into the frozen valley. But the Founding Tree is now dying, and in a matter of days, Dormia faces an icy apocalypse. Dormia’s salvation lies with the Great Sleeper, who possesses the special powers to enter a sleep trance and grow a new Founding Tree. Hill suspects that Alfonso is just such a person. In fact, Alfonso’s sleeping-self has already hatched this tree. Now the question is: Can Alfonso and his uncle deliver it in time? They must hurry, but they also must be careful not to be followed by Dormia’s age-old enemy, the Dragoonya, who are always hunting for one of the secret entryways into Dormia. Alfonso agrees to take the tree to Dormia, and thus begins one of the greatest adventures a twelve-year-old boy could ever wish for. As he woke up from a late afternoon nap, Alfonso blinked open his eyes and discovered that he was perched at the top of a gigantic pine tree – some two-hundred feet above the ground. The view was spectacular. Alfonso could see for miles in every direction and he could even make out his house in the distant hamlet of World’s End, Minnesota. Unfortunately, there was no time to enjoy the view. The small branch that Alfonso stood upon was covered with gleaming snow and creaked dangerously under the pressure of his weight. Icy gusts of wind shook the entire treetop. Alfonso looked down grimly at the ground far below. If he fell, he would most certainly die. “Oh brother,” muttered Alfonso to himself. “Not again.”
Download or read book Forest Prairie Edge written by Merle Massie and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2014-04-26 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saskatchewan is the anchor and epitome of the ‘prairie’ provinces, even though half of the province is covered by boreal forest. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily-understood ‘regions’ has reduced the Saskatchewan identity to its southern prairie denominator and has distorted cultural and historical interpretations to favor the prairie south. Forest Prairie Edge is a deep-time investigation of the edge land, or ecotone, between the open prairies and boreal forest region of Saskatchewan. Ecotones are transitions from one landscape to another, where social, economic, and cultural practices of different landscapes are blended. Using place history and edge theory, Massie considers the role and importance of the edge ecotone in building a diverse social and economic past that contradicts traditional “prairie” narratives around settlement, economic development, and culture. She offers a refreshing new perspective that overturns long-held assumptions of the prairies and the Canadian west.
Download or read book The Red Wraith Book 1 of The Red Wraith Series written by Nick Wisseman and published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-06 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic awakens in Early America. The Red Wraith is born.Cast into exile by his tribe for being spawn of human and spirit, Naysin is lost in a world of change as pale men from the sea arrive to plunder the riches of the New World. Guided only by the devious facets of his spirit father, Naysin has no choice but to master his powers to survive the destruction of his people. But the nature of those talents is both light and dark.And so the legend of the Red Wraith begins.On the island of Bimshire, Naysin inspires a slave rebellion before abandoning it; near his former home, he marches European settlers to their deaths; and in the forests of Edgeland, he ends a battle by massacring both sides. Such acts cause much of the New World to see him as an indigenous monster who delights in butchering white innocents. The infamy is well-earned, but when Naysin encounters a group of fellow magic-users, he realizes he may yet have a chance to set things right.He just has to conquer the only thing that ensures his survival: the dual facets of his father.
Download or read book River written by Esther Kinsky and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a series of solitary walks around London, a woman recalls the rivers she's encountered in prose reminiscent of Sebald.
Download or read book Big Box Swindle written by Stacy Mitchell and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Book Sense Pick and Annual Highlight With a New Afterword In less than two decades, large retail chains have become the most powerful corporations in America. In this deft and revealing book, Stacy Mitchell illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling many of our most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement—and she shows how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back. Mitchell traces the dramatic growth of mega-retailers—from big boxes like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Costco, and Staples to chains like Starbucks, Olive Garden, Blockbuster, and Old Navy—and the precipitous decline of independent businesses. Drawing on examples from virtually every state in the country, she unearths the extraordinary impact of these companies and the big-box mentality on everything from soaring gasoline consumption to rising poverty rates, failing family farms, and declining voting levels. Along the way, Mitchell exposes the shocking role government policy has played in the expansion of mega-retailers and builds a compelling case that communities composed of many small, locally owned businesses are healthier and more prosperous than those dominated by a few large chains. More than a critique, Big-Box Swindle provides an invigorating account of how some communities have successfully countered the spread of big boxes and rebuilt their local economies. Since 2000, more than two hundred big-box development projects have been halted by groups of ordinary citizens, and scores of towns and cities have adopted laws that favor small-scale, local business development and limit the proliferation of chains. From cutting-edge land-use policies to innovative cooperative small-business initiatives, Mitchell offers communities concrete strategies that can stave off mega-retailers and create a more prosperous and sustainable future.
Download or read book Perou Hyde Tunnel Vision written by and published by Reel Art Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passion project from celebrated portrait photographer Perou with accompanying text from Karl Hyde of dance music duo Underworld, Tunnel Vision is a hypnotic portrait of England's underpasses. Photographed at night, you can almost hear the ominous hum of the broken strip-lighting, the knot of fear in the gut, the prickling silence of these desolate, urban landscapes. These unloved spaces are notoriously menacing, graffiti-ridden, inconvenient and prone to flooding. Yet through Perou's lens, the architecture is also elevated to something beyond itself, at times even ethereal.
Download or read book Scarp written by Nick Papadimitriou and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR An extraordinary book by a man with a unique and inspiring perspective, SCARP will change the way you view the places and spaces around you, and reveal a forgotten London you never knew existed. Nick Papadimitriou has spent a lifetime living on the margins, walking and documenting the landscapes surrounding his home in Child's Hill, North London, in a study he calls Deep Topography. Part meditation on nature and walking, part memoir and part social history, his arresting debut is first and foremost a personal inquiry into the spirit of a place: a 14-mile broken ridge of land on the fringes of Northern London known as Scarp. Conspicuous but largely forgotten, a vast yet largely invisible presence hovering just beyond the metropolis, Scarp is a vast storehouse of regional memory. We join the author as he explores and reimagines this brooding, pregnant landscape, meticulously observing his surroundings, finding surprising connections and revealing lost slices of the past. SCARP captures the satisfying experience of a long, reflective walk. Whether talking about the beauty of a bird or a telegraph pole, deaths at a roundabout or his own troubled past, Papadimitriou celebrates the poetry in the everyday. His captivating prose reveals that the world around us is alive and intrinsically valuable in ways that the trappings of day-to-day life lead us to forget, and allows us to re-connect with something more authentic, more immediate, more profound.
Download or read book Applied Ballardianism written by Simon Sellars and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An existential odyssey weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm. The mediascapes of late capitalism reconfigure erotic responses and trigger primal aggression; under constant surveillance, we occupy simulations of ourselves, private estates on a hyperconnected globe; fictions reprogram reality, memories are rewritten by the future… Fleeing the excesses of 1990s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, prophet of the post-postmodern, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality. Plagued by obsessive fears, defeated by the tedium of academia, yet still certain that everything connects to Ballard, his academic thesis collapses into a series of delirious travelogues, deranged speculations and tormented meditations on time, memory, and loss. Abandoning literary interpretation and renouncing all scholarly distance, he finally accepts the deep assignment that has run throughout his entire life, and embarks on a rogue fieldwork project: Applied Ballardianism, a new discipline and a new ideal for living. Only the darkest impulses, the most morbid obsessions, and the most apocalyptic paranoia can uncover the technological mutations of inner space. An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world where everything connects and global technological delirium is the norm—a world become unmistakably Ballardian.
Download or read book Reign of Ash written by Gail Z. Martin and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most exciting writers of fantasy adventure comes the second novel in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, a tale of unpredictable magic, battling warlords, and an exile's quest for vengeance. "A book that will take over readers' thoughts until long after the final page." —RT Book Reviews Survival is just the beginning. Blaine McFadden endured six long years in the brutal Velant prison colony, exiled for murder. War devastated his homeland of Donderath and destroyed the magic on which the Ascendant Kingdoms relied. Now Blaine and a small group of fellow exiles have returned to a lawless wasteland, where unrestrained magic storms wreak havoc and monsters roam free. Yet, amidst the chaos, rumors persist of a new magic that could restore the kingdoms. But the key lies with a dangerous, ancient ritual and a group of vanished survivors. Now McFadden's only hope is a small, desperate, quickly rallied army. Together they must make one last stand knowing that if they fail, the civilization of the Ascendant Kingdoms dies with them. The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga Ice Forged Reign of Ash War of Shadows Shadow and Flame
Download or read book Traces written by Patricia Wiltshire and published by Blink. This book was released on 2019-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Traces, Professor Patricia Wiltshire will take you on a journey through the fascinating edge-land where nature and crime are intertwined. She'll take you on a journey searching for bodies of loved ones - through woodlands, along hedgerows, field-edges, and through plantations - solving time since death, and disposal of remains, from ditches to living rooms. She will give you glimpses of her own history: her loves, her losses, and the narrow, little valley in Wales where she first woke-up to the wonders of the natural world. And Pat will show you how her work with a microscope reveals tell-tale traces of the world around us, and how these have taken suspects of the darkest of criminal activities to court. From flowers, fungi, tree trunks, and car pedals - to walking boots, carpets, and even corpses' hair: Traces is a fascinating, unique, and utterly compelling book on the universal themes of life, death, and one's indelible link with nature.
Download or read book Electric Eden written by Rob Young and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is a seminal book on British music and cultural heritage, that spans the visionary classical and folk tradition from the nineteenth-century to the present day. 'A thoroughly enjoyable read and likely to remain the best-written overview for a long time.' GUARDIAN 'A perfectly timed, perfectly pitched alternative history of English folk music . . . wide-ranging, insightful, authoritative, thoroughly entertaining.' NEW STATESMAN 'A stunning achievement.' SIMON REYNOLDS 'A masterpiece.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER 'Excellent . . . blissfully quotable.' NEW YORK TIMES 'An authoritative account.' THE TIMES 'Consistently absorbing.' INDEPENDENT 'An impassioned and infectious rallying cry of a book.' SUNDAY TIMES In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations - song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators. In a sweeping panorama of Albion's soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism. An attempt to isolate the 'Britishness' of British music - a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity - Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain's folk music and Arcadian dreams. 'A treat.' TIME OUT 'Young is a fine writer.' MOJO 'Young's immense narrative is both educative and gripping.' UNCUT 'A multitudinous, fascinating and beautifully written account.' TLS
Download or read book The Unofficial Countryside written by Richard Mabey and published by Little Toller Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. The Unofficial Countryside is a timely reminder of how nature flourishes against the odds, surviving in the most obscure and surprising places. First published 1973 by William Collins Sons & Co.
