Siberia: a vast and ancient territory, a mystery to the world outside its borders. Rick Wirick and his wife have gone to Siberia to adopt a baby girl. Rather than produce a straightforward account of this journey, so profound and personal in itself, Wirick has chosen instead to absorb Siberia, to immerse himself in its history, legends, social reality and natural splendour in order to evoke for his new daughter the grandeur of her birthplace. In one hundred interlocking vignettes, Wirick has created a sophisticated and passionate vision. Personal in conception, unique in structure, One Hundred Siberian Postcards is an inspiring and unusual introduction to a very far-away land. 'Wirick combines the lyrical with the unexpected in perfectly calibrated prose.' Rose George 'Tales from a parallel universe which is also strangely our own ... a genre-busting masterpiece.' Hugo Williams 'Some years ago, Richard Wirick and his wife (who already had two children of their own) adopted a baby girl from a Siberian orphanage. One Hundred Siberian Postcards is a gift for her, evoking the scenic grandeur of her birthplace, alongside the ramshackle quality of much Russian life ... comprising folk tales, beliefs, customs, moments from Siberian history, extracts from Russian writers, reflections on childhood and consciousness, and dreams, with a touch of magic realism, as when someone watching a case being X-rayed at an airport sees "dozens of little men ... sawing timber inside the Samsonite".' Tom Aitken, TLS 'Richard Wirick's deeply felt, beautifully written palm-of-the-hand-tales that make up 100 Siberian Postcards are as luminous as Basho's Narrow Road to Oku and as moving as the Hemingway vignettes of In Our Time. Yet Wirick's profoundly moving book is unlike anything else I've read; an ode to Siberia as much as it is to the human condition.' Samantha Gillison, author of The King of America 'Attentive and compassionate, Richard Wirick has journeyed through Siberia and returned with it. These 'postcards' provide startling glimpses into the fraught, yet tenacious, Russian spirit.' John Witte, Editor of Northwest Review 'Richard Wirick is an insurance lawyer with the soul - and the pen - of a poet.' Anna Reid, author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine 'Compassionate and literate ... He has a mystic's confidence in the power of his imagination to prise bits of truth out of the frigid landscape.' Caroline McGinn, The New Statesman 'The best postcards are like poems: reptilian in a different way, they shed their excess skin of details and dates, and dart in on a little narrative, a clear image that speaks of the writer's experience. Richard Wirick has a it down to a fine art. An insurance lawyer from Los Angeles, he and his wife travelled to Siberia to adopt a baby girl. Having immersed himself in the landscape and culture, he returned with enough stories and still lifes to make 100 perfect postcards.' Tom Gatti, The Times

Narcotic euphoria meets the demands of everyday life in Richard Wirick’s brilliant new collection of interlocking stories. Whether depicting a Valium-fogged lawyer representing a car painter who cooked a client in his kiln, or revealing a Gulf War orderly’s drift in and out of morphine dreams during an aerial Medevac surgery, Wirick’s stories are rich with the social contexts in which sedation’s acolytes emerge, come forward to flourish, and then often violently explode or fade away. With a finesse that invigorates and then jars the reader, Wirick maneuvers between narratives of shimmering hallucinations and ecstatic mood-peaks. But Kicking In is not just another drug book. A gut punch to the notion that the drug war stems from society’s fringe element, Wirick shines a light on the ways presumably democratic governments use depressants and stimulants to keep selected segments of the population marginalized and disenfranchised. The result is a masterful collection — a vividly terrifying yet startlingly prosaic consideration of the varieties of drug users’ experience with what Coleridge called “the milk of Paradise.”

For those that have mastered the basics of memoir and wish to probe this brand of creative nonfiction further, Writing the Radical Memoir uses salient theories about memory and the self to challenge assumptions about how we remember and tell the truth of our lives when we write about it. Innovative in approach and making new critical ideas accessible, each chapter maps out the key principles of such writers as Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Philippe Le Jeune and Joseph Campbell, invokes literary examples to show how other writers have mastered the idea before reflecting on how you can practically apply the theory to your writing. With original exercises and prompts for further reading that bridge the gap between the theoretical and how it might be put into practice, the book is attentive to the multiple facets of the genre of nonfiction writing generally, covering such topics as: - The writer/ reader contract - How to embark on a thematic/ symbolic exploration of themes and incidents in your life - How neuro-scientific theory can inform our understanding of memory and recall and what happens to our memories when we remember them - Character development and the ethics of writing about real people - How constructing your identity in memoir offers a chance to push back against traditional structures - That memoir might not be preservation of your past but a process of self-erasure - How J. M. Coetzee's Autrebiography trilogy challenges traditional biography By bringing together lived experience, post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, praxis and artistic vision as a unique approach to writing memoir, this book encourages you to think the self, how it is portrayed, created, erased and made strange through the process of writing and remembering.

Central Asia has long stood at the crossroads of history. It was the staging ground for the armies of the Mongol Empire, for the nineteenth-century struggle between the Russian and British empires, and for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. Today, multinationals and nations compete for the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Sea and for control of the pipelines. Yet “Stanland” is still, to many, a terra incognita, a geographical blank. Beginning in the mid-1990s, academic and journalist David Mould’s career took him to the region on Fulbright Fellowships and contracts as a media trainer and consultant for UNESCO and USAID, among others. In Postcards from Stanland, he takes readers along with him on his encounters with the people, landscapes, and customs of the diverse countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—he came to love. He talks with teachers, students, politicians, environmental activists, bloggers, cab drivers, merchants, Peace Corps volunteers, and more. Until now, few books for a nonspecialist readership have been written on the region, and while Mould brings his own considerable expertise to bear on his account—for example, he is one of the few scholars to have conducted research on post-Soviet media in the region—the book is above all a tapestry of place and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the post-Soviet world.

The internationalization of higher education is a world-wide phenomenon, subject to multiple interpretations at national, institutional and individual levels. Still, much of the mainstream literature on this topic is concentrated on a small number of countries and a narrow range of key topics. To address this gap, The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education offers a broader set of perspectives from outside the dominant English-speaking and Western European paradigms, while simultaneously focusing on dimensions of internationalization that are known to be under-researched. Additionally, the editors give primacy to next generation perspectives, not only to amplify our current understanding of key issues around the world, but also to shine a light on possible future agendas for this important aspect of contemporary higher education. The notions of new modes, new topics, and new contexts frame the analysis, providing new pathways for exploring and understanding distinct aspects of this crucially important phenomenon in higher education around the world. Key topics covered include: the current state of research and analysis on the internationalization of higher education aspects of internationalization and international activities which have not previously been explored or have limited current exposure how research into internationalization is conducted, showcasing innovative methodological practices a synthesis of common themes and differences in relation to the future agenda of topics, modes and contexts for internationalization an identification of key areas for future research A thoughtful guide for considering the many possible directions ahead for internationalization in higher education, The Future Agenda for Internationalization in Higher Education is essential reading for academic researchers and graduate students, as well as international education practitioners and leaders keen to make sense of evolving trends in this field.

During the fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary eras, picture postcards were an important medium of communication for Russians of all backgrounds. In Open Letters, the most comprehensive study of Russian picture postcards to date, Alison Rowley uses this medium to explore a variety of aspects of Russian popular culture. The book is lavishly illustrated with more than 130 images, most of which have never been published before. Through her examinations of postcards, Rowley addresses a diverse range of topics: how landscape postcards conveyed notions of imperialism; the role of postcards in the rise of celebrity culture; depictions of the body on erotic and pornographic postcards; how postcards were employed to promote differing interpretations of the First World War; and the use of postcards by revolutionary groups seeking to overthrow the Tsarist government. Rowley determines the extent to which Russia was embedded in Europe-wide cultural trends by situating the Russian case within a larger European context.