This book explores the ways and means by which English threatens the vitality and diversity of other languages and cultures in the modern world. Using the metaphor of the Hydra monster from ancient Greek mythology, it explores the use and misuse of English in a wide range of contexts, revealing how the dominance of English is being confronted and counteracted around the globe. The authors explore the language policy challenges for governments and education systems at all levels, and show how changing the role of English can lead to greater success in education for a larger proportion of children. Through personal accounts, poems, essays and case studies, the book calls for greater efforts to ensure the maintenance of the world's linguistic and cultural diversity.

In far too many places, the worldwide trade in English-language teaching, testing and publishing has become a self-perpetuating, self-congratulating, neocolonial monster ... a veritable multi-headed Hydra. Too often the English language industry aggressively promotes itself as some sort of "uplifting", "essential", "proper" or even "better" means of communication than any other language. Unfortunately, its relentless global outreach is taking place at the direct expense, and the active denigration, of local and regional languages - not to mention individual identities. English Language as Hydra brings together the voices of linguists, literary figures and teaching professionals in a wide-ranging expose of this monstrous Hydra in action on four continents. It provides a showcase of the diverse and powerful impacts that this ever-evolving, gluttonous beast has had on so many non-English language cultures - as well as the surreptitious, drug-like ways in which it can infiltrate individual psyches.

BEHIND THE TATTOOED FACE, A STRANGER STANDS. HE OWNS THE EARTH. HE IS WHITE. Vaughan Rapatahana's first novel is a rollicking road trip through the 'skinny country' where a guerilla war is raging between Indigenous rebels and a Pakeha government controlled by foreign interests. Redneck assassins, secret-agents, biker gangs and feminist groups all cross paths as Mahon, an ex-university philosophy lecturer, and his gun 'Molly' blast their way across the country in a black Mark IV. While homage is paid to Vaughan Rapatahana's existential and post-modern heroes, the voice is indubitably his own: sardonic, hectic, eclectic, at times laugh-out-loud funny and always deliciously subversive. - James Norcliffe

An intense new collection of poems by this poet from Aotearoa-New Zealand, replete with references to his indigenous heritage and his travels and travails around the globe: Rapatahana lives in Hong Kong and has homes also in Philippines and Aotearoa.

This is a collection of my many reviews of books by Colin Wilson, author of the seminal The Outsider (1956) and England's leading Existentialist philosopher, as well as my extrapolations from the ideas of Wilson into the realms of original metaphysical philosophy.