A writer learns to craft a murder mystery the hard way. A trucker with a craving for coffee finds his family at the end of the highway. A couple faces the zombie apocalypse. Strange World is the first short story anthology to be curated by the pop culture website Biff Bam Pop. It features previously unpublished works by various authors from across North America, and includes an introduction from New York Times bestsellng author Jonathan Maberry. Featuring stories...

This innovative book explores links between literature and videogames, and how designing and playing games can transform our understanding of literature. It shows how studying literature through the lens of videogames can provide new insights into narrative and creative engagement with the text.The book sets out theories of narrative aesthetics and multimodality in literature and videogames, alongside models of literacy needed for such cultural and creative engagement. It goes on t...

An Inaugural Professorial Lecture At a time when arts education is again marginalized in school curricula, the media arts are most in danger of being lost. This lecture proposes six reasons why schools and policymakers should take the media arts more seriously. It argues for collaboration between the arts, proposing that in today's world a fusion of artistic practices is more common than a separation between them; and challenges the hierarchy of the arts that operates in society and in edu...

The World of Hesiod (1936) examines the world of the Ancient Greeks before Ionian rationalism and the civilisation of Athens. Lying between the Heroic Age and the Lyric Age, Hesiod and the Geometric potters and painters set the scene for the economic, political and social changes that were to follow.

The result of a unique research project exploring the relationship between children's vernacular play cultures and their media-based play, this collection challenges two popular misconceptions about children's play: that it is depleted or even dying out and that it is threatened by contemporary media such as television and computer games. A key element in the research was the digitization and analysis of Iona and Peter Opie's sound recordings of children's playground and street games from ...

Computer games are one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving media of our time. Revenues from console and computer games have now overtaken those from Hollywood movies; and online gaming is one of the fastest-growing areas of the internet. Games are no longer just kids' stuff: the majority of players are now adults, and the market is constantly broadening. The visual style of games has become increasingly sophisticated, and the complexities of game-play are ever more challenging. Meanw...

Curriculum and Assessment in English 3 to 11: A Better Plan provides an overview of the subject in considerable breadth and depth, and offers a clear, balanced and forceful critique of the current language and literacy curriculum and its assessment arrangements for 3- to 11-year-olds in England, and of developments in the area during the past thirty years.The book restates fundamental truths about how pupils speak, read and write English with confidence and control. It des...

"Are you beginning to see past the disability and starting to appreciate the gift?"In this unashamedly honest book, David J. Burns draws on his own lived experience of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to provide guidance on how to take advantage of the supposed disadvantage. The book is filled with often hilarious anecdotes, spanning the confusion of his early diagnosis, to his marriage and life with his four children, as David proffers his advice on how to cope with everything from ...

Discover a new kind of superhero in Pillow-Man!Secret identity: Sam DeVenoe, star shortstop for the Emerson Eagles.One night while Sam is biking home after a game, he has a mysterious encounter and is granted an unusual, slightly odd, maybe even a little bizarre “super” power.As Sam tries to discover the limits of his strange new ability, his best friend Gavin is determined to transform him into crimefighter. But donning a mask and patrolling the street on their bik...

The use of coercion is one of the defining issues of mental health care. Since the earliest attempts to contain and treat the mentally ill, power imbalances have been evident and a cause of controversy. There has always been a delicate balance between respecting autonomy and ensuring that those who most need treatment and support are provided with it. Coercion in Community Mental Health Care: International Perspectives is an essential guide to the current coercive practices worldw...

This data-rich book demonstrates the value of existing national long-term ecological research in Australia for monitoring environmental change and biodiversity. Long-term ecological data are critical for informing trends in biodiversity and environmental change. The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) is a major initiative of the Australian Government and one of its key areas of investment is to provide funding for a network of long-term ecological research plots around Australia (L...

Ludwig Wittgenstein loved movies, and based on his remarks on watching them, there is a strong connection between his experience of watching films and his thoughts on aesthetics. Furthermore, however, Wittgenstein himself has been invoked in recent cinema. Wittgenstein at the Movies is centered on in-depth explorations of two intriguing experimental films on Wittgenstein: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein and Péter Forgács' Wittgenstein Tractatus. The featured essays l...