Alfred Polly lives in the imaginary town of Fishbourne in Kent, England. A miserable Mr. Polly. He hates Foxbourne, he hates Foxbourne High Street, he hates his shop and his wife and his neighbours – every blessed neighbour – and with indescribable bitterness he hates himself.

In Kenya and Somalia, most of the population (over 80%) lives in rural areas and therefore derive their livelihoods and incomes from agriculture and livestock production. Thus it is pertinent that environmental and water management be give priority when coming up with suitable conservation technologies. Future options of integrated water resources management for agriculture and livestock production will include: water resources management; adapting water resource management to climate change; response to key drivers of change; an integrated watershed management approach and rainwater harvesting and conservation for sustainable agriculture and livestock production. This book presents a broad spectrum of environment and water management technological options available to most of Kenya's and Somalia’s rural communities. The areas covered by this publication include:? Dryland environments and agriculture; Dryland agriculture and conservation technologies in Kenya; Agricultural watershed management in Kenya; Runoff water Management Systems; Drivers of change for water availability and use for agriculture; Djabia rainwater harvesting system in Lamu, Kenya; Trans-boundary integrated river water management; Integrated land and water management in the Nyando River Catchment Area, Lake Victoria Basin, Kenya; and Key environmental considerations in river basins management in Kenya and Somalia.

Hryhory Skovoroda is considered by many as the first great Slavic philosopher and poet. Written over a period stretching from the 1750s until 1785, his The Garden of Divine Songs is a unique collection of 30 poems, featuring a complex system of strophic structures and with only a few of the songs written in a traditional way. Skovoroda never repeats one and the same strophic structure; this being the case, his Garden of Divine Songs according to writer-scholar Valery Shevchuk functions as a “practical guide to the art of poetry”, exemplifying all the meters and strophic patterns that were possible in Ukrainian poetry of that time. The poet makes masterful use of the accomplishments of academic poetry; the so-called “songs of the world” are the most prominent poems in this collection. These songs are an expression of Skovoroda's views in poetic form, and many ideas from The Garden of Divine Songs, such as the search for happiness in the world in song 21, would later form the basis for some of Skovoroda’s philosophical treatises. Skovoroda’s originality, and his ability to approach the most cardinal problems of human existence, stem from his capacity to combine known motifs, borrowed from literary sources such as classical texts, the Bible, and ancient Ukrainian poetic works, with his own system of thinking that focuses on his philosophy of the heart. The complete poems of Skovoroda are appearing in their entirety here in English for the first time, accompanied by a guest introduction by prominent Ukrainian writer Valery Shevchuk. This title has been realised by a team of the following dedicated professionals: Translated by Michael M. Naydan with an introduction by Valery Shevchuk Translations Edited by Olha Tytarenko Maxim Hodak - Максим Ходак (Publisher), Max Mendor - Макс Мендор (Director), Ksenia Papazova (Managing Editor).

Here am I, come four hundred miles out of my way to get what is left of the folk-lore of these people, before they are utterly demoralised by missionaries and the military, and all I find are a lot of impossible legends about a sandy-haired scrub of an infantry lieutenant. How he is invulnerable—how he can jump over elephants—how he can fly.

Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) is arguably the greatest Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century and has been described as a “tillerman’s Orpheus” by Ukrainian poet and literary critic Vasyl Barka. With his innovative poetics, deep spirituality and creative word play, Tychyna deserves a place among the pantheon of his European contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Osip Mandelstam. His early collections Clarinets of the Sun (1918), The Plow (1920), Instead of Sonnets and Octaves (1920), The Wind from Ukraine (1924), and his poetic cycle In the Orchestra of the Cosmos (1921) mark the pinnacle of his creativity and poetically document the emotional and spiritual toll of the Revolution of 1917 as well as the Civil War and its aftermath in Ukraine. Tychyna coined the term “Clarinetism” to describe his earliest works, which intrinsically exhibit the clarity and the haunting sound of a clarinet. He harkens back to ancient Greek literature to form what has been called the “tragic lyric” in his short collection Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, which gives a personal, humanistic understanding to the tragic events of the Revolution. John Fizer has noted Tychyna’s close affinity with Walt Whitman’s cosmism, particularly in his cycle In the Orchestra of the Cosmos. While Tychyna in may ways displays the moral conscience of his times in his early works, later in his life he acquiesced to Soviet authorities in order to survive the horrors of Stalin’s regime. He was forced by authorities to refuse a nomination for the Nobel Prize, the only reason for which would have been his Ukrainian ethnicity. This edition of Tychyna’s complete early works includes translations of all his major early collections as well as his poetic masterpieces “Mother was Pealing Potatoes,” “Funeral of My Friend,” and his highly patriotic “In Memory of the Thirty.” The volume includes a guest introduction by eminent Ukrainian poet Viktor Neborak. Translated by Michael M. Naydan.

Jaroslav Ha?ek is known by readers around the world as the author of The Good Soldier ?vejk, one of the greatest comic novels of all time. Not all of his fans are aware of his six year anabasis in Russia, however, which began with his capture on the front lines of Galicia during the First World War. The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia, translated by Charles S. Kraszewski, brings that fascinating period in Ha?ek's life to the attention of the English reader. Comprised of fifty-two short stories and other writings from Ha?ek's stay in Sovietising Russia, The Secret History collects the Bugulma stories, in which Ha?ek trains his satirical eye on the infant communist utopia, as well as non-fiction works by Ha?ek, who played a not insignificant role in the progress of the Soviet Revolution in Siberia, before his return to his native Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s. These include propagandistic pamphlets and newspaper articles, letters, and official scripts dating from his agitation as a communist operative among Austro-Hungarian citizens stranded in the Soviet Union, all of which provide a fascinating context for his good-humoured fiction, which rivals his great novel in rollicking fun. The Secret History of My Sojourn in Russia presents the reader with 52 of the most entertaining, and chilling, examples of his Russian period, containing both humorous fiction and deadly serious propaganda. Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

A young boy from the housing estates comes across a copse of old oaks to which he can escape, as to an oasis of calm. Although he may forget about it once he becomes an adult and “puts aside the things of childhood,” it will remain a locus of balance, decades later, for a single mother struggling with the difficulties of raising the child she loves. A husband, on the lip of an ugly divorce, drives across town in the middle of the night to rescue his wife, abandoned by her lover, and then — as she falls asleep in the car — takes the long way home, to prolong a moment such as he has not experienced in years. An elderly doctor, self-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, makes use of the few precious moments of consciousness granted him each morning to pass on to his grandson what he has learned about life and living responsibly. Loss, and permanence, the ephemeral and the eternal, are common themes of Jan?Balabán’s collection of short stories?Maybe We’re Leaving, presented here in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski. With psychological insight that rivals the great novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the twenty-one linked narratives that make up the collection present us with everyday people, with everyday problems — and teach us to love and respect the former, and bear the latter. Translation of this book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Edited, translated, and introduced by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, this bilingual anthology presents Russian short poems of the last half-century. It showcases thirty poets from Russia, and displays a variety of works by authors who all come from different backgrounds. Some of them are well-known not only locally but also internationally due to festival appearances and translations into European languages; among them are Gennady Aigi, Gennady Alexeyev, Vladimir Aristov, Sergey Biryukov, Konstantin Kedrov, Igor Kholin, Viktor Krivulin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Genrikh Sapgir, and Sergey Stratanovsky. The next Russian poetic generation also features prominently in the collection. Such poets as Tatyana Grauz, Dmitri Grigoriev, Alexander Makarov-Krotkov, Yuri Milorava, Asya Shneiderman and Alina Vitukhnovskaya are the ones Russians like to read today. This anthology shows Russia looking back at itself, and reveals the post-World-War Russian reality from the perspective of some of the best Russian creative minds. Here we find a poetry of dissent and of quiet observation, of fierce emotions, and of deep inner thoughts.

Long ago in Norroway there lived a lady who had three daughters. Now they were all pretty, and one night they fell a-talking of whom they meant to marry.

Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.

Richard Larch is a young man with talent and ambition. He moves to London to make his way in life. He takes a clerk's position in a law office and in his spare time makes attempts at writing and falling in love.

About the end of the year 1639, a troop of horsemen arrived, towards midday, in a little village at the northern extremity of the province of Auvergne, from the direction of Paris. The country folk assembled at the noise, and found it to proceed from the provost of the mounted police and his men. The heat was excessive, the horses were bathed in sweat, the horsemen covered with dust, and the party seemed on its return from an important expedition. A man left the escort, and asked an old woman who was spinning at her door if there was not an inn in the place.

About the end of the reign of the Emperor Paul I—that is to say, towards the middle of the first year of the nineteenth century—just as four o'clock in the afternoon was sounding from the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, whose gilded vane overlooks the ramparts of the fortress, a crowd, composed of all sorts and conditions of people, began to gather in front of a house which belonged to General Count Tchermayloff, formerly military governor of a fair-sized town in the government of Pultava. The first spectators had been attracted by the preparations which they saw had been made in the middle of the courtyard for administering torture with the knout. One of the general's serfs, he who acted as barber, was to be the victim.

Toward the close of the year 1657, a very plain carriage, with no arms painted on it, stopped, about eight o'clock one evening, before the door of a house in the rue Hautefeuille, at which two other coaches were already standing. A lackey at once got down to open the carriage door; but a sweet, though rather tremulous voice stopped him, saying, 'Wait, while I see whether this is the place.'

When a quilting event falls to pieces, Beatrice works to patch things up. Dappled Hills quilters are eagerly anticipating new events at the Patchwork Cottage quilt shop. The shop’s owner, Posy, has announced ‘Sew and Tell’ socials and a mystery quilt group project. But one day, instead of emailed quilt instructions, the quilters receive a disturbing message about a fellow quilter. When that quilter mysteriously meets her maker, Beatrice decides to use her sleuthing skills to find the killer before more lives are cut short.

This carefully crafted ebook is formatted with a functional and detailed table of contents.Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-language writer of novels and short stories, regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Kafka strongly influenced genres such as existentialism. Most of his works, such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), "Der Prozess" ("The Trial"), and "Das Schloss" ("The Castle"), are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations. Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In his lifetime, most of the population of Prague spoke Czech, and the division between Czech- and German-speaking people was a tangible reality, as both groups were strengthening their national identity. The Jewish community often found itself in between the two sentiments, naturally raising questions about a place to which one belongs. Kafka himself was fluent in both languages, considering German his mother tongue. Kafka trained as a lawyer and, after completing his legal education, obtained employment with an insurance company. He began to write short stories in his spare time. For the rest of his life, he complained about the little time he had to devote to what he came to regard as his calling. He regretted having to devote so much attention to his "Brotberuf" ("day job", literally "bread job"). Kafka preferred to communicate by letter; he wrote hundreds of letters to family and close female friends, including his father, his fiancée Felice Bauer, and his youngest sister Ottla. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major effect on his writing. He also suffered conflict over being Jewish, feeling that it had little to do with him, although critics argue that it influenced his writing.This collection contains the following works:- The Metamorphosis- A Country Doctor- A Hunger Artist- A Report for an Academy- An Imperial Message- Before the Law- In the Penal Colony- Jackals and Arabs- The Great Wall of China- The Hunter Gracchus- The Trial- Up in the Gallery

LITTLE ELISA:?“A Time Traveler Story”??“..There will always be a missing piece in life. It could be either something that is left undone or someone who you could not be able to come together with. Maybe the last piece has all the meaning of our lives and therefore it is always hidden” said Elisa, before she started her talk.??It might be a specific moment that we have to spend the rest of our lives searching that missing diamond piece. Because, without that last piece, nothing will be complete..”??“..Similar to this, what was the missing piece and the true meaning of Alice’s life before she became Elisa? She had to discover it. But she would have to take a really long trip to discover this..”??TRAVELER PILGRIM:?Before I met Elisa, I had read such thing like below, in the book of the Muslim: “This life of the world is nothing But a Pastime and a Game.” ?(Quran, The Book of Islam)??“How could this be possible? Or is this the true meaning of the life?” were the questions that I asked myself since I read this. ?Is there an imaginary world and a real one? ??But after meeting Elisa and seeing these alternative (imaginary) worlds, I slowly realized that I am in a world of amusement indeed. ??Finally I could see that everything is a fictitious game in this book. I am sure that you will agree with me and rethink about the “truth” as you keep reading this book in which Elisa lived and my interesting trips with Elisa..??And you’ll be remember that In the universe, ?Everything has both an imaginary view and a real one, after this long trip!.??“..Could the life we live and we consider as real be a fancy and funny fiction? What is reality? ?This has been discussed again and again, throughout history. It has inspired artists and philosophers.”??He was just a little boy according to his parents. ?Time has passed quickly. But he decided not to lose his childish spirit in spite of everything. He would find a way to implement his belief about finding the elixir of youth and the eternity of life. ??- “Soon we will take a step into a new period by discovering the truth in this alternative world!” he was saying while searching for the elixir of immortality all the time.??"A black rabbit sneaked into a white hole.."?What was that? ?There was not the world we knew, everything was meaningless but a brand new world and a vision were awaiting for the rabbit.."??The Miraculous “WONDERLAND”: ?Where EVERYTHING is POSSIBLE..

Charles Dickens was born on 1812, in Portsea, England. His parents were middle-class, but they suffered financially as a result of living beyond their means. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family's dire straits forced him to quit school and work in a blacking factory, a place where shoe polish is made. Within weeks, his father was put in debtor's prison, where Dickens's mother and siblings eventually joined him. At this point, Dickens lived on his own and continued to work at the factory for several months. The horrific conditions in the factory haunted him for the rest of his life, as did the experience of temporary orphanhood. Apparently, Dickens never forgot the day when a more senior boy in the warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens in how to do his work more efficiently. For Dickens, that instruction may have represented the first step toward his full integration into the misery and tedium of working-class life. The more senior boy's name was Bob Fagin. Dickens's residual resentment of him reached a fevered pitch in the characterization of the villain Fagin in Oliver Twist.??After inheriting some money, Dickens's father got out of prison and Charles returned to school. As a young adult, he worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. His experience as a journalist kept him in close contact with the darker social conditions of the Industrial Revolution, and he grew disillusioned with the attempts of lawmakers to alleviate those conditions. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens became famous and began to make money from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which was serialized in 1836 and published in book form the following year.??In 1837, the first installment of Oliver Twist appeared in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany, which Dickens was then editing. It was accompanied by illustrations by George Cruikshank, which still accompany many editions of the novel today. Even at this early date, some critics accused Dickens of writing too quickly and too prolifically, since he was paid by the word for his serialized novels. Yet the passion behind Oliver Twist, animated in part by Dickens’s own childhood experiences and in part by his outrage at the living conditions of the poor that he had witnessed as a journalist, touched his contemporary readers. Greatly successful, the novel was a thinly veiled protest against the Poor Law of 1834.??In 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and ten children, he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated, ending a long series of marital difficulties. Dickens remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels—among them Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Bleak House—continued to earn critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.??The Poor Laws: Oliver Twist’s Social Commentary?Oliver Twist opens with a bitter invective directed at the nineteenth-century English Poor Laws. These laws were a distorted manifestation of the Victorian middle class’s emphasis on the virtues of hard work. England in the 1830s was rapidly undergoing a transformation from an agricultural, rural economy to an urban, industrial nation. The growing middle class had achieved an economic influence equal to, if not greater than, that of the British aristocracy.??In the 1830s, the middle class clamored for a share of political power with the landed gentry, bringing about a restructuring of the voting system. Parliament passed the Reform Act, which granted the right to vote to previously disenfranchised middle-class citizens. This desire gave rise to the Evangelical religious movement and inspired sweeping economic and political change.

This fourth novel of Boothby's Dr. Nikola series reveals that Nikola has discovered all of the facts necessary to extend a human being's life. He has studied science and magic secrets of Tibetan monks. He explains: ?"It has been a long and tedious search, but such labour only makes success the sweeter. The machinery is now prepared; all that remains is to fit the various parts together. In six months' time, if all goes well, I will have a man walking upon this earth who, under certain conditions, shall live a thousand years."??To assist him, he hires a destitute young physician, who explains his predicament: ?"As ill luck would have it, however, I had got into the wrong set, and before I had been two years in the hospital was over head and ears in such a quagmire of debt and difficulties that it looked as if nothing but an absolute miracle co-uld serve to extricate me." ?That miracle seems to have come to him in the person of Dr. Nikola.??The nefarious and wealthy Nikola has purchased a remote castle in the north of England, where the seclusion will allow him and his new assistant and Nikola's deaf-mute malformed Chinese servant to conduct his grand experiment on a human subject. ? AUTHOR: Guy Newell Boothby was an Australian novelist and writer, born in Adelaide, son of Thomas Wilde Boothby, who for a time was a member of the South Australian Legislative Assembly. Guy Boothby's grandfather was Benjamin Boothby (1803-1868), judge of the supreme court of South Australia from 1853 to 1867. When Boothby was six, he traveled to England with his mother. Around 1890, he took the position of private secretary to the mayor of Adelaide, Australia, but was not content with the work due to little opportunity for advancement. He turned to his writing talents, writing librettos for 2 comic operas and stories about Australian life. Boothby moved back to the United Kingdom in 1894. He wrote over 50 books in the course of a decade, before dying of pneumonia in Bournemouth. Some of Boothby's earlier works were non-fiction, but later he turned to writing novels. He was once well known for his series of five novels about Doctor Nikola, an occultist anti-hero seeking immortality and world domination.

D.J. and her dad moved far from the small town and only home she ever knew. Now she’s starting middle school in the city with kids she’s never met. She tries to make friends, but they all appear to be slaves to screen time. D.J. just likes to garden, nurturing plants, watching them grow and thrive. It seems she’ll never find a way to fit in, but then she awakens in a gorgeous garden where she meets Persephone, Goddess of Spring. She must be dreaming; her new friend can’t possibly be real—and what could she know about getting along with gamers? D.J. really needs some ideas, or she might never find her own place in a complicated world. ? Daisy, Bold & Beautiful is the debut novel of middle-schooler Ellie Collins, daughter of award-winning author Stephanie Collins. Boys and girls alike will appreciate Ellie’s keen eye for the challenges of growing up that she and her friends must face. Discover the wonderful writing of Ellie now, then follow her to learn about her writing and more books to come.

THE OYSTER; WHERE, HOW, AND WHEN?TO FIND, BREED, COOK, AND EAT IT!??OF the Millions who live to eat and eat to live in this wide world of ours, how few are there who do not, at proper times and seasons, enjoy a good oyster. It may not be an ungrateful task, therefore, if I endeavour to inform them what species of animal the little succulent shell-fish is, that affords to man so much gastronomical enjoyment—how born and bred and nurtured; when, and where; and, lastly, how best it may be eaten, whether in its living and natural state, or having undergone the ordeal of cooking by the skill of a superior artist.??Now let us proceed to open the oyster.???The Oyster! The mere writing of the word creates sensations of succulence—gastronomical pleasures, nutritive food, easy digestion, palatable indulgence—then go sleep in peace!??Lobster salads, beef and veal, truffles and chestnuts, all good in their way, are, nevertheless, attended with evil consequences to the human frame.??But oysters—ye pleasant companions of the midnight hours, or the mid-day feast; is there a man, woman or child in all Europe—ay, or in Asia, Africa, or America—who does not owe you a debt of gratitude which they repay to the full by the enjoyment of your society tete-a-tete? ??You are eaten raw and alive, cooked and scolloped, in sauce and without sauce. ?True, true, oh oyster! ??Thou art the best beloved of the loved!