DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Quirt" by B. M. Bower. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

John Hobson, a geneticist, wakes one morning to find his watch stopped at 6.12. The streets are deserted, there are no signs of life or death anywhere, and every clock he finds has stopped: at 6.12. Is Hobson the last person left on the planet? Inventive and suspenseful, The Quiet Earth is a confronting journey into the future, and a dark past. This new edition of Craig Harrison's highly sought-after 1981 novel, which was later made into a cult film starring Bruno Lawrence, Pete Smith and Alison Routledge, comes with an introduction by Bernard Beckett. Craig Harrison was born in Leeds in 1942. He left for New Zealand in 1966 after being appointed a lecturer at Massey University. There he devised a course in art history, which he taught until his retirement in 2000. His award-winning play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (1974) was performed for a quarter of a century, including in the Soviet Union. He is the author of five other plays, including Ground Level (1974), which led to a television series, Joe & Koro. Craig's most recent book, the young-adult comedy The Dumpster Saga, was a finalist in the 2008 New Zealand Post Book Awards. He lives in Palmerston North. 'Cuts to the heart of our most basic fears...compelling...a classic.' Bernard Beckett 'Excellent...The inevitability of the horror has a Hitchcock quality.' Listener

Orality and Literacy investigates the interactions of the oral and the literate through close studies of particular cultures at specific historical moments. Rejecting the 'great-divide' theory of orality and literacy as separate and opposite to one another, the contributors posit that whatever meanings the two concepts have are products of their ever-changing relationships to one another. Through topics as diverse as Aboriginal Canadian societies, Ukrainian-Canadian narratives, and communities in ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and twentieth-century Asia, these cross-disciplinary essays reveal the powerful ways in which cultural assumptions, such as those about truth, disclosure, performance, privacy, and ethics, can affect a society's uses of and approaches to both the written and the oral. The fresh perspectives in Orality and Literacy reinvigorate the subject, illuminating complex interrelationships rather than relying on universal generalizations about how literacy and orality function.

Quirt Creek flowed sluggishly between willows which sagged none too gracefully across its deeper pools, or languished beside the rocky stretches that were bone dry from July to October, with a narrow channel in the center where what water there was hurrie