Best of
21st-Century

1998

The Mirror of Beauty


Shamsur Rahman Faruqi - 1998
    The splendour of imperial Delhi flares one last time. The young daughter of a craftsman in the city elopes with an officer of the East India Company. And so we are drawn into the story of Wazir Khanam: a dazzlingly beautiful and fiercely independent woman who takes a series of lovers, including a Navab and a Mughal prince--and whom history remembers as the mother of the famous poet Dagh. But it is not just one life that this novel sets out to capture: it paints in rapturous detail an entire civilization.Beginning with the story of an enigmatic and gifted painter in a village near Kishangarh, The Mirror of Beauty embarks on an epic journey that sweeps through the death-giving deserts of Rajputana, the verdant valley of Kashmir and the glorious cosmopolis of Delhi, the craft of miniature painting and the art of carpet designing, scintillating musical performances and recurring paintings of mysterious, alluring women. Its scope breathtaking, its language beguiling, and its style sumptuous, this is a work of profound beauty, depth and power.

Caffeine Blues: Wake Up to the Hidden Dangers of America's #1 Drug


Stephen Cherniske - 1998
    A natural component of coffee, tea and chocolate, and added to drugs, soft drinks, candy and many other products, the truth about caffeine is that it can affect brain function, hormone balance, and sleep patterns, while increasing your risk of osteoporosis, diabetes, ulcers, PMS, stroke, heart disease and certain types of cancer.Discover a step-by-step, clinically-proven program that reduces your caffeine intake, and effective ways to boost your energy with nutrients, healthy beverages, better sleep and high-energy habits.

Excitability


Diane Williams - 1998
    "Excitability" collects the best of Diane Williams' bold, often hilarious stories of love, sex, death, and the family.

Codex Derynianus: Being a Comprehensive Guide to the Peoples, Places & Things of the Derynye & the Human Worlds of the XI Kingdoms


Katherine Kurtz - 1998
    Now fans can have the entire text of that edition along with extensive new material. This encyclopedic overview details Katherine Kurtz's Deryni world and reveals many never-before-told details of the people, places, and objects of importance to the world of the magic-wielding Deryni. The book is packed with chronologies of events, genealogies of the peoples, and colorful maps of the Deryni world, exploring every aspect of the Eleven Kingdoms. In addition to being an authoritative reference, Codex Derynianus is also an ambitious work of creative fiction as penned by Brother Theophilus from within the setting of the Eleven Kingdoms, providing original stories, vignettes, humorous pieces, serials, and poems that expand and enrich the Deryni universe.

Veils


Hélène Cixous - 1998
    "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs—including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body.Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here—in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies.However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the imminence of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.

Shibboleth: My Revolting Life


Penny Rimbaud - 1998
    Penny Rimbaud, founder, lyricist, and drummer of Crass, a band unique in the history of rock 'n' roll. Crass took the idealism of punk seriously. When Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten screamed "No Future" the challenge was taken. In the space of seven short years, from 1977 to their breakup in 1984, Crass almost single-handedly breathed life back into the then moribund peace and anarchist movements. They birthed a huge underground network of do-it-yourself activism, fanzines, record labels, activist action groups, and concert halls. While remaining on their own independent record label, and steadfastly refusing any interviews with the major press, they managed to sell literally millions of records. Their political "pranks" included the now infamous "KGB tapes," trumpeted among others, on the front page of the New York Times, and the duping of Total Loving magazine into including a Crass song (ranting against the patriarchy of marriage) as the "perfect song to play on your wedding day." In this book, Penny takes us from his strict lower-middle class childhood and his experiences in art school to the Crass years, the hippies, and Free Festivals, including the now legendary, illegal Stonehenge Festival, of which Rimbaud was a cofounder.Shibboleth also includes, for the first time, the full story of Wally Hope—"The Last of the Hippies," close friend of Rimbaud, cofounder of the Stonehenge Festival, and who was murdered by the State while incarcerated in a mental institution.

Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding Method


Quentin Skinner - 1998
    This collection includes some of his most important philosophical and methodological statements written over the past four decades, each carefully revised for publication in this form. In a series of seminal essays Professor Skinner sets forth the intellectual principles that inform his work. Writing as a practising historian, he considers the theoretical difficulties inherent in the pursuit of knowledge and interpretation, and elucidates the methodology which finds its expression in his two successive volumes. All of Professor Skinner's work is characterised by philosophical power, limpid clarity, and elegance of exposition; these essays, many of which are now recognised classics, provide a fascinating and convenient digest of the development of his thought. Professor Skinner has been awarded the Balzan Prize Life Time Achievement Award for Political Thought, History and Theory. Full details of this award can be found at http: //www.balzan.it/News_eng.aspx?ID=2474

Collins Scrabble Dictionary


Collins - 1998
    This first edition of the 'Collins Scrabble Dictionary' is a helpful item for all Scrabble players, allowing players to settle disputes over eligibility of words.

Essential Winetasting: The Complete Practical Winetasting Course


Michael Schuster - 1998
    Before the bottle; Introduction 7; 1 You and your senses 8; Sight 8; Smell 12; Taste and tasting 16; Words and qualities 24; Values 29; 2 Viticulture and vinification 34; In the vineyard 34; The grape 36; Dry white winemaking 40; Sweet white winemaking 42; Red winemaking 44; Oak 47; Winemakers 49; In the bottle; 3 Naming wines 53; 4 White.

Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia


Stephen Oppenheimer - 1998
    At the end of the Ice Age, Southeast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Borneo. In Eden in the East, Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia—rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed—was the lost civilization that fertilized the Great cultures of the Middle East 6,000 years ago. He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, creation stories, myths, linguistics, and DNA analysis to argue that this founding civilization was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age.

The Witch's Dog


Frank Rodgers - 1998
    His friends don't think he can as witches don't usually have dogs as pets - they have cats, spiders and bats. But when Wilf sees an advertisement for a witch's pet he decides to apply. He disguises himself as a cat which nearly works until his disguise falls apart. But Weenie the witch hasn't had any other applicants and so decides to give Wilf a try. He helps Weenie with her flying and her spells and ends up as Witch's Pet of the Year at the Annual Show.

Father of Lies


Brian Evenson - 1998
    Feshtig. Through the therapist's detailed notes, correspondence from the church, and the provost himself, the provost's sickness emerges and the reader is drawn into the disturbing inner workings of a violent pedophile.The provost relays his crimes in excruciating detail. 'God told me that where evil made its mark, good must follow, burning evil out and purifying the body.' Fochs describes a dream in which he sodomizes two boys from the parish in an effort to exorcise their sins. Soon thereafter, two boys come forward accusing Fochs of that very deed. In another dream he strangles and dismembers a young girl in the woods near his house, where a child from his parish is later found.As the provost's dreams are discovered to be reality and accusations against him are made public, the church is forced to respond. In an effort to protect one of its own, and, in turn, to protect itself, the Committee for the Strengthening of the church demands that Dr. Feshtig turn over his notes about Provost Fochs. This marks the beginning of the church's all-out effort to cover up for the provost -- and launches the race to the novel's final revelation of whether good, in the form of the law, or evil, in the hands of the provost (and by association the church), will prevail.Brian Evenson holds the reader to the page until the novel's fateful end. En route, he questions whether obedience to God justifies taking every possible liberty, right or wrong. And he brings to light how an institution supposed to be under divine guidance can be as eager as its worldly counterpart to soil its hands in the furthering of the cause of supposed righteousness.

New Selected Poems


Les Murray - 1998
    For working always beyondyour own intelligence. --from "The Instrument"New Selected Poems contains Les Murray's own gathering from the full range of his poetry--from the 1960s through Taller When Prone (2004) and including previously uncollected work. One of the finest poets writing today, Murray reinvents himself with each new collection. Whether writing about the indignities of childhood or the depths of depression, or evoking the rhythms of the natural world; whether writing in a sharply rendered Australian vernacular or a perfectly pitched King's English, his versatility and vitality are a constant. New Selected Poems is the poet's choice of his essential works: an indispensable collection for readers who already love his poetry, and an ideal introduction for those who are new to it.