The Irish landscape is alive with pagan powers, gods and spirits. Inside every hill are feasting halls of otherworldly beings who sometimes emerge into our realm, or entice the unwary into theirs. Lakes and rivers have their own divinities, sacred pagan springs cure everything from toothache to insanity, and gods and goddesses live on in ancient stones. In this fascinating and beautiful book Hector McDonnell describes how Ireland's pre-Christian beliefs still shape its rich customs and beliefs today. WOODEN BOOKS are small but packed with information. "Fascinating" FINANCIAL TIMES. "Beautiful" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS. "Rich and Artful" THE LANCET. "Genuinely mind-expanding" FORTEAN TIMES. "Excellent" NEW SCIENTIST. "Stunning" NEW YORK TIMES. Small books, big ideas.

On May 18, 1605, George Waymouth, captain of the English ship Archangel, anchored in the lee of Monhegan Island, finding shelter from a three-day storm. Putting ashore, the crew found fresh water to drink, wood to burn, and lobsters aplenty in the shoreline rocks. Today, lobstering and lobstermen are American icons of rugged individualism, and their way of life has enlivened and colored the countless bays and coves of New England. The Lobstering Life puts readers in the boats, on the docks, in the bars, and in the lives of the men and women who pull "bugs" from the sea to sustain a cussedly independent, much admired way of life. Not since Peter Matthiessen's bestselling Men's Lives has this trade been so vibrantly brought to life.

The photographic journey begins in the streets of Jo'burg in the late 1970's and ends in the rural and desert landscapes of the millennium. It is not a political A to Z or a documentary of our political past, but an observation of the lives of ordinary people and their daily survival choices as they have struggled and overcome the limiting circumstances of their lives - or simply reflected the tenor of their times. Most of the images are unpublished because they were taken in a time when there was no space for the ordinary. They 'fell through the cracks' because they were often considered too 'off beat' to make it. These photographs capture glimpses of life between the cracks before, after and while the political wheel was turning. They are about how people try to survive in so many different and extraordinary ways and the survival choices they make under often extreme conditions of hardship how they reflected themselves and how I absorbed their reflections, how they danced with reality, made light in the dark spaces, embraced each other at great risk.

Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout the country they call home. The Topographic Imaginary is the first book to study this important and flourishing trend. It examines work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but which, as Ari J. Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than they initially appear. From views of building sites in Paris, peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, images that signal the emergence of a "topographic turn" in contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and sensing France's diverse national territory. As Blatt suggests, they also represent a visual laboratory through which to investigate how landscape "scapes" our understanding of French culture. In their efforts to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of France's shared common space, topographic photographs animate conversations about capital and class; cities and their peripheries; the politics and impact of development; migration and borders; memory, history, and affect; empire and postcolonialism; national identity; and the changing environment. The Topographic Imaginary thus reveals how attending to place in pictures provides valuable insight into the disposition of a nation in flux.