Valentine Michael Smith, born and raised on Mars, arrives on Earth stunning Western culture with his superhuman abilities.[...]

This is Noah Oakman sixteen, Bowie believer, concise historian, disillusioned swimmer, son, brother, friend.Then Noah gets hypnotized.Now Noah sees changes: his mother has a scar on her face that wasnt there before; his old dog, who once walked with a limp, is suddenly lithe; his best friend, a [...]

A six-time winner of the Project Censored Award draws on his work as a BBC undercover journalist to discuss such topics as the War on Terror, the Republican agenda for the 2008 election, and media practices that are keeping the Bush Administration's practices from getting reported by the mass media.[...]

Douglas R Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Godel, Escher, Bach - an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, a soul, a consciousness, an 'I' arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be[...]

In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate[...]

A wealth of evidence for doubters and disbelievers "Whether ita s the latest shark cartilage scam, or some new a repressed memorya idiocy that besets you, I suggest you carry a copy of this dictionary at all times, or at least have it within reach as first aid for psychic attacks. We need all the [...]

In September of 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson, then in his mid-thirties, moved with his family to Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England, where in the brief span of 23 months he revised A Child's Garden of Verses and wrote the novels Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr[...]

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic--even read by Queen Victoria. Inspired by three specific scenes in a dream Robert Louis Stevenson had (including one in which Mr. Hyde transforms right before the eyes of his purs[...]

Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethni[...]

With high mortality rates, it has been assumed that the poor in Victorian and Edwardian Britain did not mourn their dead. Contesting this approach, Julie-Marie Strange studies the expression of grief among the working class, demonstrating that poverty increased - rather than deadened - it. She illus[...]