Short stories.

In his final years, Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz distilled his storyteller's art to its most essential level. Written with the compression and power of dreams, these poetic vignettes, originally collected in two books, The Dreams and Dreams of Departure, here combined in one volume for the first time. These stories telescope epic tales into tersely haunting miniatures. A man finds his neighborhood has turned into a circus, but his joy turns to anger when he cannot escape it. An obscure writer finally achieves fame-through the epitaph on his grave. A group of friends telling jokes in an alley face the murderous revenge of an ancient Egyptian queen. Figures from Mahfouz's past-women he loved, men who inspired him, even fictional characters from his own novels-float through tales dreamed by a mind too fertile ever to rest, even in sleep. Translated by Raymond Stock

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The uncanny," where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, déjà-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness," the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film, and religion. This is a major critical study that will be welcomed by students and academics but will also be of interest to the general reader.

Departure Story is a coming-of-age novel about a young Guyanese girl named Celestine who wins a scholarship to study at a small liberal arts school in middle America, leaving her broken, dysfunctional family behind. In the midst of an awkward adjustment period, she receives news that her uncle, a notable Guyanese politician, has been shot dead in an act of political violence. Feeling lost in a state of grief, Celestine decides to join the Student Council Diversity Committee, hoping to learn more about the democratic values that her home country's government has been modeled after. She takes up the cause of trying to save an African dance group on campus that is soon to lose its instructor. Tired of going by the book and being ignored, Celestine takes matters into her own hands, ruffling the feathers of the powers that be on campus and alienating so-called friends in the process, all while dealing with her first love, her first heartbreak, and investigating a family secret that she might not actually want to know.

Signs of Reincarnation provides the first comprehensive look at the belief in reincarnation and the evidence for past lives from historical records, anthropological studies, and contemporary research. Matlock discusses various ways the evidence may be interpreted and shows that although reincarnation entails a rejection of the materialist notion that consciousness is generated by the brain, it does not require the acceptance of any radically new concepts or the abandonment of well-established findings in mainstream psychology or biology. This book offers students, scholars, and anyone interested in the possibility of reincarnation an essential grounding in beliefs, cases, and theory, while opening doors for future research into the extension of consciousness beyond our present lives.

The most authoritative and comprehensive book available on dreams and dreaming. Enter the fascinating world of dreams, their mysteries, their meanings: to dream of a bird flying freely represents hopes and aspirations; to dream of winter means a time in life that is not fruitful; to be visited by someone in a dream can mean that there is information, warmth, or love available; to be searching in a dream is an attempt to find an answer to a problem. These are just a few of the 10,000 dream images and interpretations contained in this volume, a book that can bring insight, clarification, and guidance.

Humanity is on the ropes, and after years of fighting a two-front war with losing odds, so is North American Defense Corps officer Andrew Grayson. He dreams of dropping out of the service one day, alongside his pilot girlfriend, but as warfare consumes entire planets and conditions on Earth deteriorate, he wonders if there will be anywhere left for them to go.