These essays look squarely at large, tough, all-encompassing ideas, but they don't ignore the small specifics that multiply into a day, for example, one "lone orchid pressed into an album; its oils have long past stained the paper around it translucent, a wimple of spectral sheen".

What we know about dark matter and what we have yet to discover Astronomical observations have confirmed dark matter’s existence, but what exactly is dark matter? In What Is Dark Matter?, particle physicist Peter Fisher introduces readers to one of the most intriguing frontiers of physics. We cannot actually see dark matter, a mysterious, nonluminous form of matter that is believed to account for about 27 percent of the mass-energy balance in the universe. But we know dark matter is present by observing its ghostly gravitational effects on the behavior and evolution of galaxies. Fisher brings readers quickly up to speed regarding the current state of the dark matter problem, offering relevant historical context as well as a close look at the cutting-edge research focused on revealing dark matter’s true nature. Could dark matter be a new type of particle—an axion or a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP)—or something else? What have physicists ruled out so far—and why? What experimental searches are now underway and planned for the near future, in hopes of detecting dark matter on Earth or in space? Fisher explores these questions and more, illuminating what is known and unknown, and what a triumph it will be when scientists discover dark matter’s identity at last.

The far-flung imperial frontier is no place for greenhorns. Two Toes, the renegade Tigerillian war chief, is off the reservation and slaughtering human settlers west of the Bloody Muddy. Only a half-grown boy with a heart full of vengeance and bottled lightning in both hands stands between the outlaw war chief and the rest of the western frontier. But there are secrets about young Lightning Ryan Taylor that span the known universe. Secrets that have long been kept from young Ryan and that are about to catch up with him, whether he is ready for them or not. Dogged by a native prophecy from the day of his birth and the hardness of his frontier home world, Ryan must stop the renegade, still the wildfire of racial war, and reunite with the mother, whom he thought long dead. Beware the line where science crosses back into magic

Explores "what inspires passion and what defeats it. How we lose it and how we get it back. And, ultimately, [examines] the endless yet endlessly fruitful tug-of-war between freedom and domestication, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves"--

This illustrated and fully updated Third Edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the most authoritative and international survey of world literature in English available. The Guide covers everything from Old English to contemporary writing from all over the English-speaking world. There are entries on writers from Britain and Ireland, the USA, Canada, India, Africa, South Africa, New Zealand, the South Pacific and Australia, as well as on many important poems, novels, literary journals and plays. This new edition has been brought completely up to date with more than 280 new author entries, most of them for living authors. The general reader will find it fascinating to browse and to discover many new writers and works, while students will find it an invaluable resource for daily use. This is a unique work of reference for the twenty-first century that no reader or library should be without.

"If Goldbarth belongs to a school, he is surely its sole member. He's simply . . . one of our most generous working poets." —Rumpus And you perhaps don't like this poem: its free verse or its narrative or the way it uses gender or the heavy-handed word-play of its title. Like I care. I wrote this for me. —from "‘Try the Selfish'" In his latest collection, the incomparable Albert Goldbarth explores all things "self-ish": the origins of identity, the search for ancestry, the neurology of self-awareness, and the line between "self" and "other." Whether one line long or ten pages, whether uproariously comic or steeped in gravitas, these are poems that address our human essence.