A resourceful samurai and a faithful daughter. A spirit of the moon and a dragon king.This collection of 15 traditional Japanese folktales transports readers to a time of adventure and enchantment. Drawn from the works of folklorists Lafcadio Hearn and Yei Theodora Ozaki, these tales are by turns terrifying, exhilarating, and poetic.• Striking illustrations by contemporary Japanese artist Kotaro Chiba• Special gift edition features an embossed, textured case with metallic gold ink, and a satin ribbon page marker• Part of the popular Tales series, featuring Nordic Tales, Celtic Tales, Tales of India, and Tales of East AfricaFans of Ghostly Tales, and Japanese Notebooks will love this book.This book is ideal for:• Fans of fairytales, folklore, ghost stories, Greek mythology, roman mythology, Chinese mythology, and Celtic mythology• Anyone interested in Japan's history books and culture studies• People of Japanese heritage• Collectors of illustrated classics

    In her gothic visions of small-town America, Jackson, the author of such masterworks as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, turns an ordinary world into a supernatural nightmare. This eclectic collection goes beyond her horror writing, revealing the full spectrum of her literary genius. In addition to Come Along with Me, Jackson's unfinished novel about the quirky inner life of a lonely widow, it features sixteen short stories and three lectures she delivered during her last years.

    With this brilliantly inventive collection, Ali Smith joins the campaign to save our public libraries and celebrate their true place in our culture and history.

    More than one-quarter of the population of Ireland died of starvation or associated disease, or were forced to emigrate. Ireland after the famine was a completely different country in many ways.The direct causes of the famine are simple to understand-a large part of the population of Ireland, mainly the poorest families, had become completely dependent on the potato as a source of food. In 1845, the blight appeared, a disease which affected the potato crop. Successive failures of the potato crop in Ireland led to more than one million people dying as a direct result.What is less easy to understand is why this famine was confined to Ireland and why the British government did not do more to help. The potato blight affected parts of Great Britain and other countries in Europe, but nowhere else did it lead to famine. For much of the famine, food continued to be exported from Ireland, and at its height, there was food stored in warehouses which could have been used to alleviate the suffering of the starving-that it was not represents at the very least a complete failure of understanding on the part of the British government.Inside you will read about...✓ Farming in Ireland✓ The Blight Arrives✓ Full-blown Famine✓ Mass Emigration✓ Poor Laws, Revolt, and the Return of the Blight✓ Aftermath and LegacyAnd much more!The Great Famine left a legacy of distrust and animosity between large segments of the population of Ireland and Great Britain, and this in part led to the movements which finally produced Irish independence. The famine also left a deep impression on the psyche of the people of Eire, and even today, Ireland remains at the forefront of international famine relief.This is the story of the Irish Potato Famine.

    A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside.After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.Everything feels as though it’s looking up; Richard is put into local authority care and regains his health. However, after nearly five blissful years in a rural care home filled with loving friends, it soon unfolds that his turbulent start in life is only the beginning…Based on a devastating true story, this inspirational memoir follows Richard’s traumatic birth, abusive childhood, and search for the truth.

    They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our law courts, to interpret events in our newspapers and social media. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human.There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story – from Joseph Campbell’s well-worn theories about myth and archetype to recent attempts to crack the ‘Bestseller Code’. But few have used a scientific approach. This is curious, for if we are to truly understand storytelling in its grandest sense, we must first come to understand the ultimate storyteller – the human brain.In this scalpel-sharp, thought-provoking book, Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us, leading us on a journey from the Hebrew scriptures to Mr Men, from Booker Prize-winning literature to box set TV. Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories – and make sense of our chaotic modern world.

    It takes an incredible lot of time, and often for no measurable results in sales. Some of you may have spent hours, days, weeks, even months, writing blogs, getting active on Facebook and Twitter in order to promote your book. Then you look at your sales figures for the last weeks or months, and your heart sinks. Why isn’t this working? So, have you ever wondered how other books seem to come out of nowhere and become Best Sellers? Ever suspected that there are some tricks you don’t know about that others are using to promote their book? Well, you would be right. In this book I’m going to show you the secrets many of the more successful authors use to help promote and sell their books on Amazon. These are rock solid proven methods that are sure to make your book more visible on the only online store that counts – Amazon. This Secret Guide To Becoming A Best Seller reveals many of the lesser known tactics to promoting your Book on Amazon, including: The Best Way To Promote Your Book The Wrong Way To Promote Your Book What They Won't Tell You About Promoting Your Book How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Marketing Campaigns Finding The Best Revenue Opportunities Finding Engaged Readers Who Will Read Your Book How The Best Seller System Works What It Takes To Get You There Hot New Releases - How To Get Your Book There Investigating The Secrets Of Amazon's Search Box The Best Ways To Advertise Your Book To New Readers Book Reviews And Why They Are So Important And More … This book is literally a secret guide to your biggest challenge on Amazon: getting discovered.

    Then her life was irreversibly transformed—and so was her philosophy. In this wholly unexpected personal account, the author of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (2009) offers us a Vindication of Life as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. The story of Cristina and her little daughter, Eurydice, is a tale of redemption and self-reinvention. It is about expanding definitions of love--and it is about confronting death. Not least, it speaks to us of life’s sweeping ironies: Sometimes bad luck is the new good luck, and the realization of your worst fears may be the greatest gift you can receive.Biography: Nehring first acquired national attention through her fiery criticism in the pages of Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. A "compassionate contrarian," she won many awards for her politically incorrect cultural and literary essays. Her first book, A Vindication of Love (Harper Collins, 2009) argues for a bolder, braver, wilder form of modern loving, drawing extensively on literary and historical analysis. It was published to wide acclaim and translated into several languages. Nehring also works as a travel writer for Condé Nast Traveler, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in Paris and Los Angeles.

    Frank wore a big fake head. Nobody outside his inner circle knew his true identity. This became the subject of feverish speculation during his zenith years. Together, they rode relatively high. Then it all went wrong.Twenty-five years later and Jon has co-written a movie, Frank, inspired by his time in this great and bizarre band. Frank is set for release in 2014, starring Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Domhnall Gleeson and directed by Lenny Abrahamson.Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie is a memoir of funny, sad times and a tribute to outsider artists too wonderfully strange to ever make it in the mainstream. It tells the true story behind the fictionalized movie.

    He lands an enviable gig writing about shopping and fashion for the city’s major newspaper, but an ill-fated promotional junket gets Albo into hot water. He becomes a gossip item and finds himself caught in an acrimonious war between Old and New Media. Here's a gimlet-eyed account of the back-biting media scene, a glimpse into the inner workings of the fashion crowd, and a candid portrait of what it takes to survive as a writer in today’s chattering and watchful New York City."I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion: favors and junkets and banquets and gifts that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work. Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag."

    In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre.In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker’s hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place.

    I spent time looking for a book which would show me how a "raw" story was developed through drafts, with comments received and the changes made. Struggling to find such a work, I decided to create my own, being transparent and honest in the details. Using the story that gained me an offer of a place on a Master's in Creative Writing, SHORT STORY will take you through three drafts of the work.The book details not only the major revisions, feedback given by a professional novelist and an academic, but also has a bunch of tips from my writers toolbox condensed between the drafts. I hope that the process provides something useful for you, be it a tip from the writing toolbox, a look at the editing process, or motivation in knowing that you can do better than I did!

    The story Pages from a Young Girl's Journal won Aickman the World Fantasy Award in 1975. It was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1973 before appearing in this collection.Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full, being more ambiguous than standard ghost stories. Throughout the stories the reader is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story (Pages from a Young Girl's Journal) but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.• The Swords • The Real Road to the Church • Niemandswasser • Pages from a Young Girl's Journal• The Hospice • The Same Dog • Meeting Mr. Millar • The Clock Watcher

    –Tom Clancy I met Riley in a small tavern in Peru. As we were both ex-pats and enjoyed the same libations, we got to talking. One thing led to another and he told me he had a story he thought would make a good book. By this time, he knew that I had written and published a number of books, most as a ghost-writer. Before our conversation started, he asked me if I believed in the paranormal--ghosts and spirits, that kind of thing. I told him I kept an open mind. That's when he told me about Skinwalker Ranch, a ranch property in Utah believed to be the location of a portal between worlds or into some alternate dimension, depending on your take on these things. He explained that the property was purchased by one of the wealthiest men in America, Robert Bigelow, who bought it from a family which had experienced some fantastic encounters with alien entities, unidentifiable anomalies and disembodied voices. Following the purchase, Mr. Bigelow hired a team of scientists and security experts to both investigate the alleged paranormal activity and keep the property free of trespassers and thrill seekers. Riley was one of those security experts. His story tells of his own personal experiences and encounters, not only while working on the ranch itself, but how the entities he attracted interrupted his life some 500 miles away. The climax of his tale--and he tells it in a way that is so real and genuine that it is hard to deny--is actually passing through the portal and to the other side--the only property guard to report such an encounter. Here for the first time anywhere and in any form is Riley's story. If you have read the other fantastic books written about Skinwalker Ranch, or are interested in the paranormal and the concept of portals, this book is a must read for you. Read and learn what's really out there!

    But many of those bicycles disappear into basements and garages when the warm months end, parked there by owners fearful of the cold, snow and ice that winter brings. But does it have to be that way?Canadian writer and journalist Tom Babin started questioning this dogma after being stuck in winter commuter traffic one dreary and cold December morning and dreaming about the happiness that bicycle commuting had brought him all summer long. So he did something about it. He pulled on some thermal underwear, dragged his bike down from the rafters of his garage and set out on a mission to answer a simple but beguiling question: is it possible to happily ride a bike in winter? That question took him places he never expected. Over years of trial and error, research and more than his share of snow and ice, he discovered an unknown history of biking for snow and ice, and a new generation designed to make riding in winter safe and fun. He unearthed the world's most bike-friendly winter city and some new approaches to winter cycling from places all over the world. He also looked inward, to discover how the modern world shapes our attitudes toward winter. And perhaps most importantly, he discovered the unique kind of bliss that can only come by pedalling through softly falling snow on a quiet winter night.