"Kociejowski draws on all these aspects of his life in these engaging, idiosyncratic personal essays ... [that] proffer the reader equal measures of autobiography, insight and quirky charm." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post In the game of bocce, no matter how intensely you study the world's surface, there is always a chance an unseen pebble will knock your ball in an unexpected direction. In these essays, poet, antiquarian bookseller, and celebrated travel writer Marius Kociejowski chronicles serendipitous encounters with authors, manuscripts, and eccentrics, in which “the curious workings of fate” and “art's unbidden swerve” intervene to shift the course of fortune. Carried by keen wit, aphoristic prose, and a rich sense of characterization, and featuring chance meetings and comic misadventures with such figures as Bruce Chatwin, Zbigniew Herbert, and Javier Marías, The Pebble Chance is a sumptuous offering of belles lettres exploring the incandescent moments when skill and providence collide.

Essays and anecdotes from travel-writer, poet, and bookseller Marius Kociejowski, including pieces on encounters with Bruce Chatwin and Javier Marías.

Under a daisy Oli finds a pebble. Everyone he shows it to tells him to throw it away. But Oli just knows he’ll find a use for it one day. At last he meets a very sad girl and finds he was right all along. His pebble is special after all.

Join lovable little penguin Pebble as he sneaks away from an important family visit! Will Pebble realize that it's much more fun to be with his family than on his own? Children will love to spot Pebble, with his heart-shaped tummy, in each scene!

One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in Chicago, 1949. The next he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empire. Earth, as he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioactivity ruining much of its soil--so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at the age of sixty. Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two. This is young Isaac Asimov's first novel, full of wonders and ideas, the book that launched the novels of the Galactic Empire, culminating in the Foundation series. This is Golden Age SF at its finest. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

At fifteen years old, Abigail Costa might not know much, but there are three things she's absolutely certain of: Her grandmother, Nonna, is a superhero and she wants to be just like her one day. The world is round and she wants to see absolutely every inch of it. And she and Elliot Peterson will be best friends for life. After over a decade of getting up to no good together and spending every possible moment in one another's company, it seems impossible that anything could ever change. Enter: the new girl. With perfect blonde hair and a body to die for, she's everything Abbi never realised she wanted to be. And as she starts to notice that something isn't right with Nonna, she finds that some of her certainties aren't quite so certain anymore, and loneliness forces her to dig deep for a strength she never knew she had.

A fascinating account of the breakthrough ideas that transformed probability and statistics In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact. Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms begin with Gerolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century physician, mathematician, and professional gambler who helped develop the idea that chance actually can be measured. They describe how later thinkers showed how the judgment of chance also can be measured, how frequency is related to chance, and how chance, judgment, and frequency could be unified. Diaconis and Skyrms explain how Thomas Bayes laid the foundation of modern statistics, and they explore David Hume’s problem of induction, Andrey Kolmogorov’s general mathematical framework for probability, the application of computability to chance, and why chance is essential to modern physics. A final idea—that we are psychologically predisposed to error when judging chance—is taken up through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Complete with a brief probability refresher, Ten Great Ideas about Chance is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to understand the secrets of probability and how they were discovered.