I received Kenneth Grahames The Wind in the Willows as a present on my seventh birthday. My mother probably read it to me at least fifty times in the next few years. A cousin suggested it as a gift for me. One of her teachers fi nished out class time reading aloud from her favorite books, of which The Wind in the Willows was one. I later learned that my cousins teacher continued to read it every other year for the rest of her life. Her devotion to it and the comment of an adult fictional character on TV that The Wind in the Willows was her favorite book convinced me that it isnt just for children and that I could go back to it. I now read it once a year.

Chronicling sixteenth-century Spain to the present day, Beyond Human aims to decentre the human and acknowledge the material historicity of more-than-human nature. The book explores key questions relating to ecological equity, justice, and responsibility within and beyond Spain in the Anthropocene. Examining relations between Iberian cultural practices, historical developments, and ecological processes, Maryanne L. Leone, Shanna Lino, and the contributors to this volume reveal the structures that uphold and dismantle the non-human–human dichotomy and nature-culture divide. The book critiques works from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century in a wide range of genres, including comedia, royal treatises, agricultural reports, paintings, satirical essays, horror fiction and film, young adult and speculative literature, poetry, graphic novels, and television series. The authors contend that Spanish cultural studies must expose the material historicity that entangles today’s ecological crises and ecosocial injustices with previous, future, and contemporary entities. The book argues that this will require the simultaneous decentring of the human and of the Anthropocene as an ecocritical framework. By standardizing ecosocial analysis and widening avenues for ecopedagogical approaches, Beyond Human participates in the ecocentric transformation of Hispanic cultural studies.

The first year of the Korean War was a tumultuous series of epic battles, ending in a legendary and harrowing retreat. In the summer of 1950, British and Australian troops were dispatched to fight with UN forces in the savage struggle against communism in Korea. After both triumph and tragedy while breaking out of the “Pusan Perimeter,” 27th Brigade – the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Middlesex battalions, soon joined by the Royal Australians – spearheaded the UN drive north. After a spectacular series of battles, victory beckoned. 27th Brigade was halted to allow the Americans the glory of reaching the Chinese border. But across the rugged border, in a shock counter-offensive, China stormed south. In a desperate action, 27th Brigade fought its way out of the trap, to join the UN Command on a harrowing, 200-mile ‘bug out.” And across the peninsula, surrounded by eight enemy divisions in terrain higher than Cassino and temperatures colder than Stalingrad, 41 Commando fought alongside US Marines at Chosin Reservoir – ‘Hellfire Valley’, the most nightmarish battle fought by American or British troops in living memory - and escaped annihilation by a hair’s breadth.

Sailor flees her home to avoid an attack by gang members. She stashes herself in the garage of her neighbor, Timi, who invents equipment at a military black site and who also tinkers in his garage. One of the gang members, Rocky, tails her into the garage, so Sailor takes her chances with Timi’s invisibility device still under development instead of facing the gang’s violence. Rather than become invisible, Sailor transports to a world, Notia, in another universe, but Rocky pursues her there. The ruler or caretaker for that territory, Slick, dips into the minds of all living creatures as easily as dipping a toe into water. Meanwhile, Timi supposes his device killed his neighbor, so he struggles with ironing out the final kinks in it while his boss, the colonel, schemes to get his hands on it. Sailor’s driving urge to return home pales with the possible military invasion of Notia by the colonel. Compounding that with the decimation of Earth as well leaves Sailor, Timi, and Slick as the only three to avert the destruction of two worlds. The story celebrates individualism and friendship. It also challenges the notion that striving toward a goal is the only way to reach it. As Slick says, “A better strategy sometimes is to escape what binds you to your particular rut, break through the barriers restraining you, so to speak, and then your paths to possibilities open up.”

In this stimulating collection of essays, twenty scholars apply new theoretical approaches to the fiction and poetry of southern writers ranging from Poe to Dickey, from Faulkner to Hurston. Departing from earlier traditions of southern literary scholarship, this book seeks not to create a new orthodoxy but to suggest the diversity of critical tools that can now be used to explore the literature and culture of the South. Including essays based on deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist theory, the book features contributions from such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Joan DeJean. Yet, for all their variety, the essayists share the same central concern. "We have in common," writes Jefferson Humphries, "one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not in the immanence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the 'human sciences' that study both, are interrelated." Instead of simply taking "the South" for granted, the contributors to this volume see it as a text and an idea--as something whose ideological underpinnings, complexities, and contradictions must be subjected to close reading and questioning. Southern Literature and Literary Theory represents a major effort to redefine the relationship of southern writing and the South itself to the larger world.

This volume brings together sixteen articles on the religions, literatures and histories of South and Central Asia in tribute to Patrick Olivelle, one of North America’s leading Sanskritists and historians of early India. Over the last four decades, the focus of his scholarship has been on the ascetic and legal traditions of India, but his work as both a researcher and a teacher extends beyond early Indian religion and literature. ‘Religion and Identity and South Asia and Beyond’ is a testament to that influence. The contributions in this volume, many by former students of Olivelle, are committed to linguistic and historical rigor, combined with sensitivity to how the study of Asia has been changing over the last several decades.

Back from their mission as the Bad Love Tigers to secure the secrets of Area 51 and the White Hole Project, the Bad Love Gang are summoned to the Oval Office by President Gerald Ford. They receive his blessing to use the White Hole Project to attempt intergalactic space travel in search of the cure for Hannah Lieb’s breast cancer. But Ford warns them that their arch-enemy, Russian KGB super-agent Borya Krovopuskov, remains at large and a constant threat.