This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.
‘Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.’ Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, RIDDLEY WALKER is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.
Married mother of two Emily is flattered by her younger co-worker Ray's attention, but she never gives it a second thought until he makes a pass at her and she likes the kiss. When Emily confesses her transgression to her husband Ian, he doesn't give the reaction she expects. Not only does Ian not mind, her encourages Emily to see Ray again outside of work and respond to his advances. Emily is shocked, but can't fight her excitement at the idea. The married couple goes down a dangerous road and Emily fears where it may end. Includes the first 2 chapters of Because He's Watching: Ian's Obsession by Kenny Wright.
"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy. . . . Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and—this matters most—intensely ponderable." —Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review "This is what literature is meant to be." —Anthony Burgess "Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style. . . . The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." —Anthony Thwaite, Observer "Extraordinary . . . Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." —John Leonard, The New York Times "Highly enjoyable . . . An intriguing plot . . . Ferociously inventive." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek "Astounding . . . Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." —Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan "An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' —Paul Gray, Time Riddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state—and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture—rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author.
“An imaginative, entertaining adventure story.”-E.F. Bleiler “Enchantment is just what this writer exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years have been unable to wear away.”-Graham Green There are few equals to the thrilling adventure-fantasy novels of H. Rider Haggard, and of all of his series the Ayesha novels have been the favorites of his fans. In this final chronological installment of the novels, Ayesha: The Return of She (1905) the adventures of intrigue, the supernatural, and love continue, yet this time in the deep exotic wilds of the Asian continent. After the immortal African Queen Ayesha, or “She”, apparently perishes in a tower of fire, the Englishman Horace Holly and his adopted son Leo Vincey return home from their African journey. Twenty years later, the pair are still haunted by the strange memories of the beautiful but cruel supernatural being “She”, and eventually Leo is afflicted by powerful visions of her presence. In agreement that she is still roaming the earth, Holly and Leo set out for Asia, and eventually to “Thibet”, where they make perilous journeys through the jungles and mountainous peaks of the uncharted wild. Through battles with immortals, death-hounds and sorceresses they are finally re-united with Ayesha. As Holly and Leo are pulled further into the world of the occult it becomes clear that the Queen’s ambitions are nefarious, yet they have inexplicably fallen into the allure of her powers. A classic of gothic-fantasy literature, this final installment of the Ayesha series succeeds at creating one of the most exotic and mysterious mythical worlds ever created.
Often I have wondered, idly enough, what happened to them there; whether they were dead, or perhaps droning their lives away as monks in some Thibetan Lamasery, or studying magic and practising asceticism under the tuition of the Eastern Masters trusting that thus they would build a bridge by which they might pass to the side of their adored Immortal. Now at length, when I had not thought of them for months, without a single warning sign, out of the blue as it were, comes the answer to these wonderings..FROM THE BOOKS.
THEY'RE SWARMING FOR THE KILL . . . AND WE ARE THE PREY! Everybody knows how despicable the alien Fibians are. Allies of the fanatic Mollie rebels against the human Commonwealth, they show no mercy, they have no remorse, and they find human flesh delectable¾at least when served live. Fielding a gigantic starfleet against Earth and its colonies, they march like the giant spiders they resemble through humanity's nightmares, and soon they will march across its devastated worlds. When the captain of the starship Invincible is incapacitated after a Fibian attack, only Peter Raeder¾former fighter pilot, starship flight engineer, and unorthodox hero of the war against the Mollies¾can be entrusted with command of the ship. His mission: to track down the alien raiders who took out his captain, and then to start hitting the enemy behind the lines. It's a suicide mission, and Raeder knows it . . . until the fortunes of battle drive him deeper into alien space than he'd ever intended to go, the Invincible too damaged ever to return home. There he discovers that the monstrous Fibians may not be monsters after all . . . At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
