If Lions Could Speak is the first collection from Paul Park, acclaimed author of The Starbridge Chronicles, Coelestis, and The Gospel of Corax. Subtle, stylish, at once forthrightly simple and ingeniously complex, the pieces gathered here are compelling and penetrating explorations of cultural difference and psychological crisis, regret and reconciliation. It is a marvelous literary labyrinth, a realm of memory palaces, eerie doppelgangers, terrifying theocracies, implosive revelations. Here time travel, sordid and ludicrous, becomes emblematic of how all lives are led; here, disease is an index to how the past is rewritten; here, the Other, extravagantly alien or simply alienated, can collapse into the Self with the suddenness of a lethal gunshot. Sometimes sardonically hilarious, sometimes gravely humane, always fiercely shocking, these stories constitute one of the finest bodies of short fiction by any contemporary SF writer. "Paul Park's short stories are subtle, blunt, funny, distressing, strange, true--all these qualities, often all at once--they are like those dreams or nightmares that seem to plumb right to the meaning of things. In other words, beautiful fiction." --Kim Stanley Robinson "Genre writing is both a liberation and a confinement. If those who don't read science fiction could discover Paul Park, they would find a writer as complex, as skillful, as ambitious and as many-faceted as any they will find under any rubric. I hope this collection will help them discover him. The rest of us can simply open and enjoy." --John Crowley "Paul Park does not remind us of James Sallis or Marcel Proust; the mark of genius is that it never makes us recall anyone else, not even earlier selves." --Gene Wolfe

With an ever-expanding array of biomaterials and implant devices appearing in the field, Spinal Reconstruction: Clinical Examples of Applied Basic Science, Biomechanics and Engineering helps surgeons assess and utilize the latest technologies to improve the reconstruction of the spine and enhance the reconstitution of diseased spinal segments. With illustrative descriptions of specific clinical scenarios, this guide helps surgeons select the best devices and materials for reconstructive procedures and considers issues in biocompatibility, biostability, and structure-function relationships for enhanced patient outcomes and mobility. With more than 350 figures and photographs, this book: Details current strategies in minimally invasive spine surgery as currently applied to the lumbar spine Covers the myriad of patient factors, orthobiologic grafting alternatives, and technique-driven mechanical options encountered in spinal care and reconstruction Identifies new surgical techniques for spinal fusion, vertebral compression fractures, and arthroplasty Discusses the basic mechanisms and clinical application of currently available operative treatments Supplies the most up-to-date information on the evaluation, diagnosis, and operative treatment of spinal pain, deformity, and disease

With an ever-expanding array of biomaterials and implant devices appearing in the field, Spinal Reconstruction: Clinical Examples of Applied Basic Science, Biomechanics and Engineering helps surgeons assess and utilize the latest technologies to improve the reconstruction of the spine and enhance the reconstitution of diseased spinal segments. With illustrative descriptions of specific clinical scenarios, this guide helps surgeons select the best devices and materials for reconstructive procedures and considers issues in biocompatibility, biostability, and structure-function relationships for enhanced patient outcomes and mobility. With more than 350 figures and photographs, this book: Details current strategies in minimally invasive spine surgery as currently applied to the lumbar spine Covers the myriad of patient factors, orthobiologic grafting alternatives, and technique-driven mechanical options encountered in spinal care and reconstruction Identifies new surgical techniques for spinal fusion, vertebral compression fractures, and arthroplasty Discusses the basic mechanisms and clinical application of currently available operative treatments Supplies the most up-to-date information on the evaluation, diagnosis, and operative treatment of spinal pain, deformity, and disease

Paul Park returns to science fiction after completing his impressive four-volume fantasy, A Princess of Roumania, with an extraordinary, intense, compressed SF novel containing three parts, each set in its own alternate-history universe. The sections are all rooted in Virginia and the Battle of the Crater, and are also grounded in the real history of the Park family, from differing points of view. They are gorgeously imaginative and carefully constructed, and reverberate richly with one another. The first section is set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in a world in which the Queen of the North has negotiated a two-nation settlement. The second, taking place in northwestern Massachusetts, investigates a secret project during World War II, in a time somewhat like the present. The third is set in the near-future United States, with aliens from history. The cumulative effect is awesome. There hasn't been a three part novel this ambitious in science fiction since Gene Wolfe's classic The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Endangered Species - Youth Music Foundation has launched a pound]1m initiative that will put specific musical instruments into the hands of over 5,000 children, Double Bass is one of them. The Abracadabra Strings team have already created a highly successful series; now two more consultants have added their expertise to make a first-class tutor for double bass. Teachers and students alike will be delighted with this collection of carefully graded well known tunes which includes many duets and trios as well as solo pieces. Of particular interest to teachers wil be the tie-in with Abracadabra Violin, Viola and Cello; the double bass book contains all the same pieces in all the same keys, enabling students of the different instruments to make music together from lesson 1. The CD contains performances of each item played on double bass, accompanied by the piano (the written music can be found in Abracadabra Strings Piano Accompaniments). The double bass and piano are recorded on separate channels; if CD machines have this facility, students can turn down either channel to listen to each instrument on its own.

This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where "Roumania" is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town.
The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda -- with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda -- is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in.
This story is a triumph of contemporary fantasy.

In 1996 Paul Park published The Gospel of Corax, a highly acclaimed rendering of a theosophist legend, describing Jesus of Nazareth's journey to the Indian subcontinent and Tibet. In Three Marys, his new novel, Park returns to first-century Palestine to recreate with penetrating insight the historical community of Jesus, and to follow the first tangled strands of Christianity after his death. Here is Jesus's world as it very likely was, confused, conflicted, rife with messianic rumor and factional ambition; here is the brazen cruelty of Roman occupation and the domestic oppression that mirrored it, seen through the eyes of the women who knew Jesus best. This is the story not only of Christ but of the three Marys who survived him and were true to him, each in their own way. Their inner and outer narratives, sometimes tortured, sometimes rhapsodic, make up the spare but radiant tapestry of this novel. There is Mary of Magdala, visionary and wandering, perhaps Jeshua's wife; there is his mother Mary, tough, charismatic, earthy, ultimately desolated by his loss; and there is Mary of Bethany, the girl who followed Jeshua in his last days and has to bear the burden of her undying brother Lazarus for decades afterwards. Outcasts because of their sex, yet possessors between them of some fragmented sense of the true ineffable nature of Christ the man and Christ the messiah, they are presented with luminous tragic humanity and given proper voice at last. Paul Park is one of contemporary American literature's most subtle and original explorers of religious experience. As exotic in coloring and as rich in understanding as his superb science fantasy novels, Three Marys is a masterpiece of historical and spiritual reconstruction. Paul Park lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

If Lions Could Speak is the first collection from Paul Park, acclaimed author of The Starbridge Chronicles, Coelestis, and The Gospel of Corax. Subtle, stylish, at once forthrightly simple and ingeniously complex, the pieces gathered here are compelling and penetrating explorations of cultural difference and psychological crisis, regret and reconciliation. It is a marvelous literary labyrinth, a realm of memory palaces, eerie doppelgangers, terrifying theocracies, implosive revelations. Here time travel, sordid and ludicrous, becomes emblematic of how all lives are led; here, disease is an index to how the past is rewritten; here, the Other, extravagantly alien or simply alienated, can collapse into the Self with the suddenness of a lethal gunshot. Sometimes sardonically hilarious, sometimes gravely humane, always fiercely shocking, these stories constitute one of the finest bodies of short fiction by any contemporary SF writer."Paul Park's short stories are subtle, blunt, funny, distressing, strange, true--all these qualities, often all at once--they are like those dreams or nightmares that seem to plumb right to the meaning of things. In other words, beautiful fiction."--Kim Stanley Robinson."Genre writing is both a liberation and a confinement. If those who don't read science fiction could discover Paul Park, they would find a writer as complex, as skillful, as ambitious and as many-faceted as any they will find under any rubric. I hope this collection will help them discover him. The rest of us can simply open and enjoy."--John Crowley."Paul Park does not remind us of James Sallis or Marcel Proust; the mark of genius is that it never makes us recall anyone else, not even earlierselves."--Gene Wolfe.

In 1996 Paul Park published The Gospel of Corax, a highly acclaimed rendering of a theosophist legend, describing Jesus of Nazareth's journey to the Indian subcontinent and Tibet. In Three Marys, his new novel, Park returns to first-century Palestine to recreate with penetrating insight the historical community of Jesus, and to follow the first tangled strands of Christianity after his death. Here is Jesus's world as it very likely was, confused, conflicted, rife with messianic rumor and factional ambition; here is the brazen cruelty of Roman occupation and the domestic oppression that mirrored it, seen through the eyes of the women who knew Jesus best. This is the story not only of Christ but of the three Marys who survived him and were true to him, each in their own way. Their inner and outer narratives, sometimes tortured, sometimes rhapsodic, make up the spare but radiant tapestry of this novel. There is Mary of Magdala, visionary and wandering, perhaps Jeshua's wife; there is his mother Mary, tough, charismatic, earthy, ultimately desolated by his loss; and there is Mary of Bethany, the girl who followed Jeshua in his last days and has to bear the burden of her undying brother Lazarus for decades afterwards. Outcasts because of their sex, yet possessors between them of some fragmented sense of the true ineffable nature of Christ the man and Christ the messiah, they are presented with luminous tragic humanity and given proper voice at last. Paul Park is one of contemporary American literature's most subtle and original explorers of religious experience. As exotic in coloring and as rich in understanding as his superb science fantasy novels, Three Marys is a masterpiece of historicaland spiritual reconstruction.