In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works - among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to LifeÊis not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic - it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

Hailed by Andre Gide as the patron saint of all outsiders, Simone Weil's short life was ample testimony to her beliefs. In 1942 she fled France along with her family, going firstly to America. She then moved back to London in order to work with de Gaulle. Published posthumously The Need for Roots was a direct result of this collaboration. Its purpose was to help rebuild France after the war. In this, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual. She wrote that one of the basic obligations we have as human beings is to not let another suffer from hunger. Equally as important, however, is our duty towards our community: we may have declared various human rights, but we have overlooked the obligations and this has left us self-righteous and rootless. She could easily have been issuing a direct warning to us today, the citizens of Century 21.

This work, in two volumes, offers an examination of the Haisla language and its two major dialects, including a description of its phonemics and phonetics, an approximate 14,550 word lexical dictionary with English gloss and root identification, and a list of Haisla roots with English gloss and a derivative survey.

The Blackfoot Dictionary is a comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of Blackfoot. This third edition of the critically acclaimed dictionary adds more than 1,100 new entries, major additions to verb stems, and the inclusion of vai, vii, vta, and viti syntactic categories.

A heartwarming story about a girl who feels like her life is out of her control-and the inspirational friendship between her pet sheepadoodle and an orphaned fawn that she's determined to protect. Sienna Chen loves helping her parents run their B&B and hanging out with her best friend, a sheepadoodle named Jules. Her world is chaotic, but she knows that by staying on top of everything she can help her parent's business succeed. No matter how much pressure builds, she's determined not to let them down. One day Sienna finds Jules playing with a baby fawn. Sienna names the fawn Persimmon, and learns that it has been orphaned and injured. But taking care of Jules, helping her parents, and hiding Persimmon is a lot for Sienna to take on. And when Persimmon finds herself in danger, things become even worse! With the help of a new friend, Sienna will have to save Persimmon and learn how to prevent her anxiety from overwhelming her life.

This work arose from the desire to teach foreign students in North America a particular variety of language used in their disciplines (speech situations), whereupon the inadequacy or non-existence of previous study became apparent. Given this raison d'etre, the work first illustrates one approach to the analysis of language in order to test whether something of significance can be said about the typology of texts and discourse. The approach chosen is Systemic Functional Grammar, with its roots in the Prague School of Linguistics and the London School of J.R. Firth, a theory that is particularly able to show how situational factors affect codal choices. Secondly, the author proceeds to use this theory and one language variety (academic speech) to illustrate the influence of speech situational components on the codal selections in the language variety. Since the impetus for the work is pedagogical, the book concludes with a brief reappraisal of the analysis model and a discussion of some of the pedagogical implications stemming from the analysis. Since the work is also theoretical, the implications of the study for the model of grammar are thoroughly explored.