On the eve of the Annual Storytelling Contest, the town of Weeping Willow is plagued by the mysterious disappearance of the minds of its most prominent citizens, leaving them a blank and empty shell devoid of all memories and stories from their lifetimes. Only one boy can see the connection between the robberies and the appearance of an old-fashioned radio, and his investigation leads him into an adventure full of excitement and danger...Orie Alexander, an 11-year-old boy with the knack for getting himself into trouble, finds that solving the mystery of the missing stories more difficult than he thought when his inquiries bring him from an old abandoned theater all the way to the eerie house of a once-great magician. With time running out and the life of his grandfather and the rest of the town at stake, Orie must face his fears and solve the mystery of the stolen stories!This is the first chapter in a series of exciting adventures for Orie Alexander.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

First published in 1924, The Thief of Bagdad has been reprinted only once in the past years! The story begins when Achmed, the most skillful thief in the city-state of Bagdad, steals into the Palace of the Caliph in search of loot; but one look at the city's Princess, and he discovers a greater treasure, for it is the Princess who becomes the thief, stealing his heart instead. Achmed Abdullah's classic fantasy novel, based on the silent film of the same title, starring Douglas Fairbanks. Achmed Abdullah, a pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, was born of a Russian Orthodox father and a Muslim mother. He was raised in Britain and educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in the British Army in France, China and India. He is most noted for his pulp stories of crime, mystery and adventure. He wrote screenplays for some successful films. He was the author of the progressive Siamese drama Chang, an Academy Award nominated film made in 1927. He earned an Academy Award nomination for collaborating on the screenplay to the 1935 film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this comparative study of a selection of The Arabian Nights stories in a cross-cultural context, brings together a number of disciplines and subject areas to examine the workings of narrative. It predominantly focuses on the ways in which the Arabian Nights have transformed as its stories have travelled across historical eras, cultures, genres and media. Departing from the familiar approaches of influence and textual studies, this book locates its central inquiry in the theoretical questions surrounding the workings of ideology, genre and genre ideology in shaping and transforming stories. The ten essays included in this volume respond to a general question, ‘what can the transformation of Nights stories in their travels tell us about narrative and storytelling, and their function in a particular culture?’ Following a Nights story in its travels from past to present, from Middle East to Europe and from literature to film, the book engages in close comparative analyses of ideological variations found in a variety of texts. These analyses allow new modes of reading texts and make it possible to breach new horizons for thinking about narrative. This Book was previously published as a special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures entitled Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on Arabian Nights.

A number of ancient novelists were skilful storytellers and resourceful literary artists, and their works are often carefully individualised presentations of an ancient and distinguished heritage. Ancient Fiction, first published in 1984, examines the tales retold by these novelists in light of more recently discovered Near Eastern texts, and in this way offers a tentative solution to Rohde’s celebrated problem about the origins of the Greek novel. Among the surprises that emerge are an ancient stratum of the Arabian Nights and a possible Tristan-Romance, as well as an animal Satyricon and a human Golden Ass. This new framework is, however, incidental to an examination of the achievements of ancient novelists in their own right. In presenting character, structuring narrative, imposing a veneer of sophistication or contriving a religious ethos, these writers demonstrate that their work is worthy of sympathetic study, rather dismissal as the pulp fiction of the ancient world.

"An exemplary biography—exhaustively researched, fair-minded and easy to read. It can nestle on the same shelf as David McCullough’s Truman, a high compliment indeed." —The Wall Street Journal The definitive biography of Herbert Hoover, one of the most remarkable Americans of the twentieth century—a wholly original account that will forever change the way Americans understand the man, his presidency, his battle against the Great Depression, and their own history. An impoverished orphan who built a fortune. A great humanitarian. A president elected in a landslide and then resoundingly defeated four years later. Arguably the father of both New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism, Herbert Hoover lived one of the most extraordinary American lives of the twentieth century. Yet however astonishing, his accomplishments are often eclipsed by the perception that Hoover was inept and heartless in the face of the Great Depression. Now, Kenneth Whyte vividly recreates Hoover’s rich and dramatic life in all its complex glory. He follows Hoover through his Iowa boyhood, his cutthroat business career, his brilliant rescue of millions of lives during World War I and the 1927 Mississippi floods, his misconstrued presidency, his defeat at the hands of a ruthless Franklin Roosevelt, his devastating years in the political wilderness, his return to grace as Truman's emissary to help European refugees after World War II, and his final vindication in the days of Kennedy's "New Frontier." Ultimately, Whyte brings to light Hoover’s complexities and contradictions—his modesty and ambition, his ruthlessness and extreme generosity—as well as his profound political legacy. Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times is the epic, poignant story of the deprived boy who, through force of will, made himself the most accomplished figure in the land, and who experienced a range of achievements and failures unmatched by any American of his, or perhaps any, era. Here, for the first time, is the definitive biography that fully captures the colossal scale of Hoover’s momentous life and volatile times.