America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin Of Others.

In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books: Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. Morrison also writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin colour to reveal character or drive narrative.

Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.

With his bestseller, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates established himself as a unique voice in his generation of American authors; a brilliant writer and thinker in the tradition of James Baldwin.

In his keenly anticipated new book, The Message, he explores the urgent question of how our stories – our reporting, imaginative narratives and mythmaking – both expose and distort our realities. Travelling to three resonant sites of conflict, he illuminates how the stories we tell – as well as the ones we don’t – work to shape us.

The first of the book’s three main parts finds Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination. He then takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in this capital of the confederacy, with statues of segregationists still looming over its public squares. Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world – and our own souls – and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

The two-volume Oxford Companion to American Politics is the first reference work to provide detailed, in-depth coverage of all aspects of American Politics. Top scholars of American Politics have written entries that surpass all previous reference material on the subject and provide scholars and students with ready access to sophisticated, comprehensive material. Long entries form the core of the book, covering such topics as climate change, terrorism, welfare policies, nuclear proliferation, voting behavior, and think tanks. Each of these entries include high-level scrutiny of the literature, history and future of the topic. The Companion also includes a number of entries from the 2001 Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, revised as necessary to bring coverage of such topics as foreign aid, and nuclear weapons up to date. In the current context of political gridlock, international tension, economic underperformance and social division, students of American politics need to focus on more than the inner workings of their own political institutions, important as that focus is. They also need to approach their work with as wide an understanding of our contemporary international and domestic economic, social and cultural conditions as it is possible for them quickly and easily to acquire. The Oxford Companion to American Politics has been designed precisely to meet the full range of those needs.

All 14 episodes from the fourth season of the US biker drama series. Led by Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), the outlaw motorcycle club Sons of Anarchy exerts a mafia-like hold over the small Northern Californian town of Charming. In this season, as the members of SAMCRO regroup after their prison stretch, a new business alliance brings unforeseen dangers. The episodes are: 'Out', 'Booster', 'Dorylus', 'Una Venta', 'Brick', 'With an X', 'Fruit for the Crows', 'Family Recipe', 'Kiss', 'Hands', 'Call of Duty', 'Burnt and Purged Away', 'To Be, Act 1' and 'To Be, Act 2'.

Pianists of all ages and abilities will enjoy brightening the season with these great arrangements by acclaimed arranger Dan Coates. In this collection, 40 of the world's most beloved Christmas songs are made fun and easy to play, while retaining a full and impressive sound. Titles: Away in a Manger * Believe (from The Polar Express) * Blue Christmas * The Christmas Waltz * Deck the Hall * Fel?z Navidad * The First No?l * Frosty the Snowman * God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen * Good King Wenceslas * Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer * Happy Xmas (War Is Over) * Hark The Herald Angels Sing * Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas * I'll Be Home for Christmas * It Came Upon the Midnight Clear * It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year * Jingle Bell Rock * Jingle Bells * Joy to the World * Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow * The Little Drummer Boy * Nuttin' for Christmas * O Christmas Tree (O Tannenbaum) * O Come, All Ye Faithful * O Come, O Come, Emmanuel * O Holy Night * O Little Town of Bethlehem * Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree * Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer * Santa Baby * Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town * Silent Night * Sleigh Ride * The Twelve Days of Christmas * Ukranian Bell Carol * Up on the Housetop * We Wish You a Merry Christmas * Winter Wonderland * You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.

Triple bill of police thrillers. 'Big Bang' (2011) stars Antonio Banderas as a Los Angeles private detective handed an unusual assignment. When Ned Cruz (Banderas) is approached by a Russian boxer (Robert Maillet) to find his missing girlfriend (Sienna Guillory) and the $30 million worth of diamonds in her possession, it is clear that this will not be an everyday job. Can Cruz make sense of the bizarre circumstances and track down the missing girl? 'Bad Cop' (2010) is an action thriller set in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Johnny Strong stars as Sean Riley, a beleaguered police detective struggling to cope with the recent death of his young son and the subsequent breakdown of his marriage. After a call goes horribly wrong, Riley looks set to lose his job - unless he can solve a series of brutal murders that have sent the city spiralling into gang warfare. In 'Operation Endgame' (2010) a top-secret facility underneath Washington D.C. finds two competing teams of assassins - code-named according to a deck of Tarot cards - at work. When a new employee known only as The Fool (Joe Anderson) arrives for his first day of work, he is alarmed to find his new boss murdered and the entire building rigged with explosives. The Fool must race against the clock to identify the killer and make his escape. Zach Galifianakis, Brandon T. Jackson and Maggie Q co-star.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.