This tightly constructed novel is set in the fictitious village of Slatefield, where dinosaur bones were first found in England. The arrival of a writer of popular books at the house of his brother, an Oxford archaeologist, stirs up an old rivalry. A strange stone has been unearthed from a local quarry bearing what looks like an ancient script and the two brothers have very different interpretations of its contents. For the archaeologist it is clearly a fake, but for his brother and his artist wife it opens a window to a prehistoric civilization, going back even to the age of the giant...

In this tongue-in-cheek novel there is a diabolical plot afoot to detonate a dirty bomb on the lawn of the White House involving of all things the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen. Brent, Senator Barrington's naive twit of a son, is an unwitting part of the plot - and its ultimate backfiring. There are dark forces at work beneath the surface and they have their claws in the senator's son - or so they think. We follow Brent's chaotic journey in search of material on global warming for his thesis at Shenektekoot Community College. The senator willingly finances his travels, hoping to keep him out...

Each of the prose poems that constitute the first part of this volume juxtaposes at least two widely different images and ways of reading them. The result - an either/or choice between incompatibles - can be surprising. Those of the second part are based on more free-wheeling association and word play. All good fun.

This book offers a crosslinguistic survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English. It looks at a range of issues from a cross-theoretical perspective, including complexity, argument structure, language contact, and language obsolence.

James, an IT consultant engaged in upgrading the computer system of the Brain Imaging Institute at Cambridge, discovers something strange in the institute's server - a number of encrypted titles of books. But before he can investigate further the institute's director is dismissed for appropriating institute funds to acquire a large quantity of beryllium fluoride from Russia for his own obscure ends. He disappears. Since James' company is engaged in nanotechnological research involving this substance he is more than a little curious to know what the director has been up to. A visit to the...