Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a subterranean literary figure, receiving effusive praise from his fans, befuddled or cautious assessments from reviewers, and scant scholarly attention. Erickson's obscurity comes in part from the difficulty of categorizing his work within current trends in fiction, and in part from the wide variety of concerns that populate his writing: literature, music, film, politics, history, time, and his fascination with his home city of Los Angeles. His dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp, and paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction but difficult to classify neatly within that same realm. He is at once thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that America's triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception-and that he presciently described decades ago certain features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the remarkable consistency of Erickson's vision over time while simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve Erickson will deepen readers' understanding of how Erickson's books work-and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater attention.

Adoption allows families to modify, either overtly or covertly, what is considered to be the natural order. Cures for Chance explores how early modern English theatre questioned the inevitability of the biological family and proposed new models of familial structure, financial inheritance, and gendered familial authority. Because the practice of adoption circumvents sexual reproduction, its portrayal obliges audiences to reconsider ideas of nature and kinship. This study elucidates the ways in which adoptive familial relations were defined, described, and envisioned on stage, particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Middleton. In the plays in question, families and individual characters create, alter, and manage familial relations. Throughout Cures for Chance, adoption is considered in the broader socioeconomic and political climate of the period. Literary works and a wide range of other early modern texts - including treatises on horticulture and natural history and household and conduct manuals - are analysed in their historical and cultural contexts. Erin Ellerbeck argues that dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family by rendering the family unit a social construction rather than a biological certainty, and that in doing so, they evoke the alteration of nature by human hands that was already pervasive at the time.

Mursi is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by a small group of people who live in the Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia, and is one of the most endangered languages of the country. Based on the fieldwork that the author conducted in beautiful villages of the Mursi community, this descriptive grammar is organized into fourteen chapters rich in examples and an appendix containing four transcribed texts. The readers are thus provided with a clear and useful tool, which constitutes and important addition to our knowledge of Mursi and of other related languages spoken in the area. Besides being an empirical data source for linguists interested in typology and endangered language description and documentation, the grammar constitutes an invaluable gift to the speech community.

Bag the perfect A-Level German dictionary this Back to School. Comprehensive and authoritative, the ideal German to English and English to German bilingual dictionary for advanced students of German and professionals, this dictionary has been revised and updated to cover all the latest changes in both languages. Includes the latest vocabulary from a wide range of fields, including the Internet, computing and business. The dictionary also includes special entries on life and culture in German-speaking countries. To help you find the correct translation, long and complex entries are treated in depth and key phrases and set grammatical patterns are highlighted. The clear layout ensures that you find exactly what you need quickly and easily. Contains a comprehensive 'Language in Use section': a full guide to written and oral communication in German.

This is the first broad, detailed grammar of the Giziga language, which belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The language is spoken in parts of the Far North Region of the Republic of Cameroon and can be divided into two dialects, Giziga and Northern Giziga, with about 80,000 native speakers in total. This volume describes the Giziga dialect, occasionally referring to the Northern variety, and aims to provide new information about this and other Afro-Asiatic languages for further research in linguistics, history, anthropology, sociology and related fields. The book will also be a tool helping Giziga speakers preserve their language, history and culture for future generations.