A slim but powerful work of metafiction by a Nobel Prize-winning French writer and intellectual. André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand. Marshlands is both a poised satire of literary pretension and a superb literary invention, and Damion Searls’s new translation of this early masterwork by one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature brings out all the sparkle of the original.

This publication is a completion report for "UNEP Support for Environmental Management of the Iraqi Marshlands" project, which was one of the largest environmental projects conducted within the framework of the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) Iraq Trust Fund. The publication presents the background of the project, project activities, and major outputs and results. It also makes recommendations on additional initiatives to improve the environmental conditions for the Marshlands area as well as for the country. Through this project, UNEP supported sustainable management and rehabilitation of the Iraqi Marshlands in the post-conflict and reconstruction period of 2004 to 2009, by monitoring environmental conditions, raising capacity of Iraqi decision makers, and providing drinking water, sanitation, and wetland management options on a pilot basis through the applications of Environmentally Sound Technologies (ESTs). Based on the success of this project, UNEP's initiatives in this area are now transitioning to focus on more longer-term management programming. This project was implemented with financial support from the UNDG Iraq Trust Fund and the Governments of Japan and Italy.

With a penchant for wine and women, Tyler is not the kind of man to let the law stand in his way. Rich, arrogant and spoiled, when his love of wine and cognac leads to the death of a young couple walking along a country lane, he'll do anything to avoid the consequences - including driving his car to his property in Mallorca so the English police can't examine it. When Superior Chief Salas orders all inspectors on the island to determine whether Tyler is in their area, laid-back Inspector Enrique Alvarez regards it, like all work, as an unwanted interruption to his lifestyle. He soon discovers, however, that this routine inquiry has far-reaching consequences he could never have foreseen.

This text is for those wishing to develop an understanding of a cultural legacy and lifestyle that survives today only as a fragmented cultural inheritance. The book illustrates how the economy and lives of the Ma'dan (Marsh Arabs) that spans over 5000 years remained similar to the ancient practices of their Sumerian forebears.