Can our interactions with wildlife help answer life' s big questions? In Be(wilder), acclaimed urban ecologist Darryl Jones explores how people around the world interact with wildlife. He spends time with bearded pigs in Borneo, rock ptarmigans in the Arctic, birdwatchers in Iowa and his hometown of Wagga Wagga, and conservationist farmers in Australia' s Snowy Mountains. Along the way, Jones asks some big questions. Is it possible for farming and conservation to work together? How can urb...

In Curlews on Vulture Street, acclaimed urban ecologist Darryl Jones reveals the not-so-secret lives of the most common birds that share our towns and cities. Despite the noise, heat, dust and fumes, the ceaseless movement, light and toxins, many birds successfully live their lives among us. And not just furtively in the shadows. Ibis steal our lunch, brush turkeys rearrange gardens, and magpies chase us screaming from near their nest. From his childhood in a country town noticing blackbir...

Feeding the Birds at Your Table is designed to provide detailed, comprehensive advice and suggestions for people wishing to feed wild birds in Australia from their own backyards and balconies. Millions of Australians feed wild birds in their gardens, yet there is currently little information or advice to tell them how to do this properly. This book provides the first readily available source of reliable information relevant to Australia. What's more, it is written by an expert who feeds bi...

Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James is an unlikely producer of ghost-stories. An eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge, his classic supernatural tales have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb. They draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination runs riot.Lonely country ...

A definitive annotated edition of one of the greatest of Terry Pratchett’s multi-million-bestselling Discworld novels'A master storyteller' A.S. Byatt‘Both comic and dark, blending high fantasy, twisted storytelling and all manner of wordplay ... a fine place to start reading Pratchett’ The New York Times Book ReviewCommander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is in hot pursuit of a serial killer. The...

M. R. James: greatest of all ghost story writers, a repressed member of the English establishment struggling against changing times Every Christmas around the turn of the twentieth century, Montague Rhodes James would gather his friends and students together in his rooms at King's College Cambridge, for what he once described as a 'dark séance', in which he read a new ghost story by candlelight at midnight. But the ghost stories are only one aspect of the life and writing ...

'I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...' Considered by many to be the most terrifying writer in English, M. R. James was an eminent scholar who spent his entire adult life in the academic surroundings of Eton and Cambridge. His classic supernatural tales draw on the terrors of the everyday, in which documents and objects unleash terrible forces, often in closed rooms and night-time settings where imagination ...

'There was a rumour, too, that he was a devil-worshipper, or something of that sort, and also that he had the evil eye...' Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced. Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own medical background, his travels, and his increasing interest in spiritualism and the occult to produce a spectacular array of Gothic Tales. Many of Doyle's writings are recognised as the very greatest tales of terror. They r...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Four o'clock in the morning, and the lights are on and still there's no way we're going to sleep, not after the film we just saw. The book we just read. Fear is one of the most primal human emotions, and one of the hardest to reason with and dispel. So why do we scare ourselves? It seems almost mad that we would frighten ourselves for fun, and yet there are thousands of books, films, games, and other forms of entertain...

The modern horror story grew and developed across the nineteenth century, embracing categories as diverse as ghost stories, the supernatural and psychological horror, medical and scientific horror, colonial horror, and tales of the uncanny and precognition. This anthology brings together twenty-nine of the greatest horror stories of the period, from 1816 to 1912, from the British, Irish, American, and European traditions. It ranges widely across the sub-genres to encompass authors whose te...

"I never can resist a touch of the dramatic." The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is now best remembered for its concluding story in which the great detective appears to plunge to his death into the waters at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. However, the collection also brings the reader back to the beginnings of Holmes' career, involving a mutiny at sea and a treasure hunt in a Sussex country house, and a ...

'The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals...' A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Edward slowly realises his danger and the extremes of the Doctor's experiments. Saturated in pain and disgust, suffused with grotesque and often unbeara...