Made on the sixth day of the Creation, a white ram waits patiently in the Garden of Eden. The other animals leave one by one, but the ram waits and waits until he is needed to fulfill God's will by sacrificing himself to save a boy's life. Full color.

The experience of an alpine hunt for the golden-crowned King of the Alaska Alpine, can be a life-changing event for both the hunter and the hunted. It is part of the mystique of sheep hunting-that the ‘sport' learns as much about himself and his capabilities, as he learns about the hunt. In Hunters of the White Sheep you will encounter an eclectic collection of hunters and their backstories as they hunt for the golden-horned rams. Read along and you will be transported to base camps in the sheep mountains by foot, airplane, ATV, jet boat, and bicycle. Once at the base camp, the hunters forgo mechanized transportation and revert to shoe leather as they pursue the white rams over wind-swept ridges, frightening chasms, chilly-blue glaciers, and sometimes, surprisingly gentle hills. Although much hunting information, such as techniques and locations can be gleaned by reading the stories carefully, this is not intended to be a how-to-hunt sheep book.

A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his beguiling and deeply felt debut. In East of the West, Penkov writes with great empathy of centuries of tumult; his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. But even as they wrestle with the weight of history, with the debt to family, with the pangs of exile, the stories in East of the West are always light on their feet, animated by Penkov's unmatched eye for the absurd.

In most countries of the Maghreb, the local Arabic vernaculars are increasingly inundated by vocabulary, grammatical forms, and even syntax from literary Arabic (used in mosques, schools, and media), and oral poetry is receding except for popular song genres. The Arabs of the TimbuktuGao region, by contrast, are a peripheral linguistic minority with little exposure to literary Arabic. They continue to speak a relatively pure beduin Arabic, closely related to varieties spoken in Mauritania and southern Algeria. These texts, recorded in 1986-1989 and presented here in transcription along with facing English translations, document this language, as well as the remarkable verbal culture of these people. The ethnographic texts cover such topics as the annual salt caravans from Timbuktu to Taoudenni, the perils of the pastoral life, and adjustments to city life. The "poetic" texts include recitations of locally familiar poems, typically integrated into narratives or otherwise contextualized. The poems, consisting of quatrains (gaf) and more extended poems (tal'a), are often satirical or even bawdy in nature.Jeffrey Heath is Professor of Linguistics and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of many fieldworkbased works, including grammars, dictionaries, and text collections on languages of Australia and on Songhay languages of West Africa.