From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes a riveting tour de force that examines emigration, dislocation, and dread. “The coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose we have.” —The New York Times Book Review No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T107681 A compilation of the leading articles of Marchamont Nedham's Mercurius politicus. Edited by R. Barron. London: printed for A. Millar and T. Cadell, G. Kearsly, and H. Parker, 1767. xxviii,176p.; 8°

Based on a lifetime of researching and writing about their home county of Winston, the husband and wife team of Don and Amy Dodd have crafted a unique pictorial retrospective that conveys a serene sense of what it was like to grow up in the hills of Winston. Outlining the highlights of this Appalachian county's history, from its opposition to the Confederacy to its slow evolution from its rustic, rural roots of the mid-nineteenth century, two hundred photographs illustrate a century of hill country culture. A sparsely settled, isolated county of small farms with uncultivated, forested land, most of Winston County was out of the mainstream of Southern life for much of its history. The creation of the Bankhead National Forest preserved almost 200,000 acres of forested land, primarily in Winston, to perpetuate this "stranded frontier" into the post-World War II era. The story setting is scenic--fast-flowing creeks, waterfalls, bluffs, caves, natural bridges, and dense forests--and the characters match the stage--individualistic, rugged pioneers, more than a thousand mentioned by name within these pages. Winston has long resisted change, has held fast to traditional values, and, as seen in this treasured volume, is a place as unique as any other in America.

The author of City of Refuge returns with a startling and powerful novel of race, violence, and identity set on the eve of the Civil War. The year is 1855. Blackface minstrelsy is the most popular form of entertainment in a nation about to be torn apart by the battle over slavery. Henry Sims, a fugitive slave and a brilliant musician, has escaped to Philadelphia, where he earns money living by his wits and performing on the street. He is befriended by James Douglass, leader of a popular minstrel troupe struggling to compete with dozens of similar ensembles, who imagines that Henry’s skill and magnetism might restore his troupe’s sagging fortunes. The problem is that black and white performers are not allowed to appear together onstage. Together, the two concoct a masquerade to protect Henry’s identity, and Henry creates a sensation in his first appearances with the troupe. Yet even as their plan begins to reverse the troupe’s decline, a brutal slave hunter named Tull Burton has been employed by Henry’s former master to track down the runaway and retrieve him, by any means necessary. Bursting with narrative tension and unforgettable characters, shot through with unexpected turns and insight, A Free State is a thrilling reimagining of the American story by a novelist at the height of his powers.

One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A Way in the World, published seven years ago. Half a Life is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste—a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer—strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her—carried along, really—to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man’s determined refusal of what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, “Everything goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.” A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, Half a Life is an indelible feat of the imagination.

Across a century, Victoria Bynum reinterprets the cultural, social, and political meaning of Mississippi's longest civil war, waged in the Free State of Jones, the southeastern Mississippi county that was home to a Unionist stronghold during the Civil War and home to a large and complex mixed-race community in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature What happens when we attempt to exchange the life we are given for something better? Five people, in very different circumstances, from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, and a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city, find out the meanings of dislocation, and the desire for more. Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel delivers a devastating and haunting exploration of the unquenchable human urge to strive for a different life.

Legend of the Free State of Jones was the first authoritative explanation of just what did happen in Jones County in 1864 to give rise to the legend and now to a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey.

Against Marriage argues that marriage violates both equality and liberty and should not be recognized by the state. Clare Chambers shows how feminist and liberal principles require creation of a marriage-free state: one in which private marriages, whether religious or secular, would have no legal status. Part One makes the case against marriage. Chambers investigates the critique of marriage that has developed within feminist and liberal theory. Feminists have long argued that state-recognised marriage is a violation of equality. Chambers endorses the feminist view and argues, in contrast to recent egalitarian pro-marriage movements, that same-sex marriage is not enough to make marriage equal. The egalitarian case against marriage is the most fundamental argument of Against Marriage. But Chambers also argues that state-recognised marriage violates liberty, including the political liberal version of liberty that is based on neutrality between conceptions of the good. Part Two sets out the case for the marriage-free state. Chambers criticizes recent arguments that traditional marriage should be replaced with either a reformed version of marriage, such as civil partnership, or a purely contractual model of relationship regulation. She then sets out a new model for the legal regulation of personal relationships. Instead of regulating by status, the state should regulate relationships according to the practices they involve. Instead of regulating relationships holistically, assuming that relationship practices are bundled together in one significant relationship, the marriage-free state regulates practices on a piecemeal basis. The marriage-free state thus employs piecemeal, practice-based regulation. It may regulate private marriages, including religious marriages, so as to protect equality. But it takes no interest in defining or protecting the meaning of marriage.

In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man — an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.