A Scottish-born writer based in the Dominican Republic here brings together seven of his pieces that originally appeared in the New Yorker, remarkable stories about his experiences in Spain, Latin America, Scotland and New York. The subject matter ranges from the lives and works of Borges, Neruda, Gracia Marquez and Jimenez, to learning a foreign language, to the differences between living in a home of one's own and living in the houses of other people. Reid also discusses his reasons for choosing to live under the Spanish dictatorship, toward which he had a strong antipathy. "Being in Spain always felt much more like belonging to a conspiracy against the regime than like condoning it." The best known of these essays is "Digging Up Scotland," a long account of the author's return in 1980 to St. Andrew's on the North Sea with his son Jasper and friends to find a box they had buried in 1971.

This comprehensive study examines British shipbuilding and industrial relations from 1870 to 1950, addressing economic, social and political history to provide an holistic approach to industry, trade-unionism and the early history of the Labour Party. Examining the impact of new machinery, of independent rank-and-file movements and of craft and trade unions, The Tide of Democracy provides an authoritative account of industrial action in shipyards in the period and their effect on the birth and development of the Labour Party. This volume is clearly presented, elegantly written and suffused with a distinctly human touch which brings the technical material to life. Unique in the combined attention it gives to Scottish and English history, and drawing upon an impressive range of primary sources, this volume will be indispensable for specialist researchers, undergraduates and postgraduate students. -- .

Follow unexpected possibilities on fanciful and humorous journeys, powered by the limitlessness of the imagination and the openness of the human spirit. SUPPOSING I looked in the mirror one day and saw someone who wasn't me at all... SUPPOSING I sailed around the world and when I was a mile from my hometown, I just turned the boat and sailed round again the other way... SUPPOSING... Supposing leads to pondering a chain of hypothetical events that play with the way that things are, daring to imagine a world beyond the laws of physics and unbeholden to societal conventions. Each sentence may start with the same word "SUPPOSING," but it's impossible to predict where the zany musings will lead! Alastair Reid's text, still as delightful and fresh as it was in 1960, is accompanied by new, dazzlingly vibrant illustrations from JooHee Yoon.

What can words be, or rather, what can't they be? Poet Alastair Reid introduces children and adults to the wondrous waywardness of words in "Ounce Dice Trice," a delicious confection and a wildly unexpected exploration of sound and sense and nonsense that is like nothing else. Reid offers light words (willow, whirr, spinnaker) and heavy words (galoshes, mugwump, crumb), words on the move and odd words, words that read both ways and words that read the wrong way around (rezagrats), along with much else. Accompanied by Ben Shahn's glorious drawings, "Ounce Dice Trice" is a book of endless delights, not to mention the only place where you can find the answer to the question: What is a gongoozler? Well, all I can say is quoz.

Translations by Alatair Reid

Pablo Neruda is one of the most widely read poets in the world. A Nobel Prize winner and a man with legions of friends, he loved and wrote about everything is nature as well as objects of all descriptions. In this book, through Neruda's words, his friends' words, and magnificent photographs, we can to know his magical world, and ultimately the man himself.

Neruda's elegant and lyrical poetry, presented here bilingually with superb translations by Alastair Reid, reveals a man of great warmth and complex thought. A passionate acquirer, he collected ships in bottles, shells, postcards, ships' figureheards, sextants, clocks, stones, books, hats, and more. These objects served as extensions of his imagination, the vocabulary of his poems.

Luis Poirot's evocative photographs of Neruda, his possessions, and his surroundings provide a dramatic, yet intimate narrative alongside his poetry. Neruda's house in Isla Negra, facing the Pacific Ocean (he collected houses, too, and made them into original, often whimsical, objects in themselves) is where most of Poirot's photographs were taken. We are witness to the manner in which Neruda imbued this house, and all it contained, with his own vitality, style, and large imagination.

More than twenty of Neruda's friends, including Julio Cortëzar, Eduardo Galeano, Alastair Reid, Diego Muños, Roberto Matta, and his wife Matilde Urrutia, offer personal insights and humorous memories of this prolific poet. A striking portrait by Poirot accompanies each testimony.

An aura of Neruda prevails throughout this hypnotic journey of words and photographs. Even when the words are not his own, even when the camera is not focused on him, Neruda's presence haunts and inspires.

An important collection that includes some of the Nobel Prize winner's own favorite poems.

"The Sea"
A single entity, but no blood.
A single caress, death or a rose.
The sea comes in and puts our lives together
and attacks alone and spreads itself and sing
sin nights and days and men and living creatures.
Its essence-fire and cold; movement, movement.

Pablo Neruda himself regarded Fully Empowered -- which first appeared in Spanish in 1962 under the title Plenos Poderes -- as a particular favorite, in part because it came out of a most fruitful period in his life. These thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics to characteristic Neruda odes to magnificent meditations on the office of poet, including poems that would undoubtedly claim a place in any selection of Neruda's greatest work. "The People" ("El Pueblo"), about the state of the working man in Chile's past and present, and the most celebrated of Neruda's later poems, completes this reflective, graceful collection.

These lively and eclectic narratives, by the author of "Shadow Without a Name," move from the scorching heat of the Gobi desert to the glacial heights of Mount Everest: here, among others, are the stories of a Scottish engineer who builds an exact replica of the city of Edinburgh in the dunes; of a dying, cross-dressing pilot who allegedly climbs Mount Everest and then mysteriously disappears; and of a monk who conjures the devil to prove the devil’ s existence.
Based on history, legend, and an awe-inspiring power of invention, "Antipodes" delights, terrifies, and entrances.

Alastair Reid began publishing poetry in the "New Yorker" in 1951 and has since contributed reviews, translations, stories, and reportage as well. Having lived variously in Scotland, the United States, Spain, France, Greece, Switzerland, Central and South America, Reid has until recently called Magazine his only permanent address.

Many of the poems in "Weathering" arise from Reid's itinerant life. Chosen by the poet from previous books published on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1950s, they range from the windowed corridors of New York city to Isla Negra, Chile, where the poet sits 'with the Pacific between my toes.'

Whether lyric or narrative, whether moved by wit, irony, or humor, all Reid's poems test the strength of language to 'summon the moment when amazement ran through the senses like a flame' and gauge the power of words to catch fire in an instant of realization. Including translations of poems by Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jose Emilio Pacheco, "Weathering" displays the diverse talents of the poet, the recurring preoccupations of the itinerant traveler, seeking to encompass the world with words.

Extravagaria marks an important stage in Neruda's progress as a poet. The book was written just after he had returned to Chile after many wanderings and moved to his beloved Isla Negra on the Pacific coast. These sixty-eight poems thus denote a resting point, a rediscovery of sea and land, and an "autumnal period" (as the poet himself called it). In this book, Neruda developed a lyric poetry decidedly more personal than his earlier work.

Legacies is the author's own selection from his work, and represents the many facets of Padilla's art: his lyrical love poems, his almost Audenesque meditations on other poets, his deceptively simple verses about history.