This book and its sister volume, LNAI 3613 and 3614, constitute the proce- ings of the Second International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD 2005), jointly held with the First International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC 2005, LNCS 3610, 3611, and 3612) from - gust 27-29, 2005 in Changsha, Hunan, China. FSKD 2005 successfully attracted 1249 submissions from 32 countries/regions (the joint ICNC-FSKD 2005 received 3136 submissions). After rigorous reviews, 333 high-quality papers, i. e., 206 long papers and 127 short papers, were included in the FSKD 2005...

This user-friendly resource is the perfect reference for English-language readers who are eager to explore fiction from around the world. Profiling hundreds of titles and authors from 1945 to today, with an emphasis on fiction published in the past two decades, this guide introduces the styles, trends, and genres of the world's literatures, from Scandinavian crime thrillers and cutting-edge Chinese works to Latin American narco-fiction and award-winning French novels.

The book's critical selection of titles defines the arc of a country's literary development. Entries illuminate the...