The animal theme is probably the oldest in literature. Cavemen told stories of hunts, of talking animals and probably of animal-like gods. The first book of the Bible places the serpent in paradise, speaking wisely to the first man and woman. Classical authors like Lucian and Apuleius wrote satires in which pretentious people turned into lowly animals, like a jackass. William Shakespeare created his own memorable jackass, and Miguel de Cervantes had his witty talking dogs. In our century, Franz Kafka presented the learned address of a highly refined ape to a scientific academy. Probably no writer worth his salt has not at one time or other picked up the theme. A little-known, but fascinating contribution to this tradition is [Mundo animal, or Animal World, by the Argentine author, Antonio di Benedetto. It is strangely different from its celebrated predecessors. Kafka, for example, impresses the reader with a striking artistic conception, ingenious logic and magnificent language in each story. Di Benedetto''s stories do not impress in this way. Written in conversational and even intentionally awkward language, they present a confused and troubled narrator, who, tormented by mysterious gnawings of guilt, becomes involved in some obscure way with an animal or whole group of animals. They invade his soul, drive him to rage or deliver him from his obsession. Often the story hinges on a pun, a distorted folktale, or an illogical association. While not spectacular in itself, each story adds to the preceding to create a growing sense of doom. Thus story by story the reader becomes ensnared in a horrifying, hallucinatory realm of associations; the world he thought was human is transformed into Animal World.

Animal World

In the first English translation of 1847 by Mary Howitt, the tale opens with a beggar woman giving a peasant''s wife a barleycorn in exchange for food. Once planted, a tiny girl, Thumbelina (Tommelise), emerges from its flower. One night, Thumbelina, asleep in her walnut-shell cradle, is carried off by a toad who wants the miniature maiden as a bride for her son. With the help of friendly fish and a butterfly, Thumbelina escapes the toad and her son, and drifts on a lily pad until captured by a stag beetle. The insect discards her when his friends reject her company. Thumbelina tries to protect herself from the elements, but when winter comes, she is in desperate straits. She is finally given shelter by an old field mouse and tends her dwelling in gratitude. The mouse suggests Thumbelina marry her neighbor, a mole, but Thumbelina finds repulsive the prospect of being married to such a creature. She escapes the situation by fleeing to a far land with a swallow she nursed back to health during the winter. In a sunny field of flowers, Thumbelina meets a tiny flower-fairy prince just her size and to her liking, and they wed. She receives a pair of wings to accompany her husband on his travels from flower to flower, and a new name, Maia. In Hans Christian Andersen''s version of the story, a bluebird had been viewing Thumbelina''s story since the beginning, and had been in love with her since. In the end, the bird is heartbroken once Thumbelina marries the flower prince, and flies off, eventually arriving at a small house. There, he tells Thumbelina''s story to a man who is implied to be Andersen himself, who chronicles the story in a book.

Thumbelina

In a fit of pique Escargot eats a pie that his wife had been withholding to bribe him into attending a revival meeting. Unfortunately Stover, the revivalist, is also the local judge and has designs on Escargot''s wealthy wife; Escargot winds up homeless and indigent. He becomes infatuated with Leta, Stover''s barmaid, and is introduced to a dwarf he believes to be her uncle. Escargot had purchased a bag of odd marbles from a bunjo man (a kind of gypsy/hobo); the dwarf first swindles them from the hapless divorcé, then humiliates and terrifies him for laughs. After obtaining a settlement from his ex-wife, Escargot leaves for the coastal town of Seaside where he hopes to find Leta at the annual Harvest Festival. A series of misadventures leads him to the submarine of a piratical elf; winding up in sole possession of the vessel Escargot travels through an undersea passage into the land of Balumnia, a sort of siamese-twin world. Escargot''s fortunes do not seem to improve as he is rapidly cheated out of money and goods, but he has a surprise encounter with the dwarf and resolves to pursue him. The dwarf attempts to eliminate Escargot but through a combination of persistence and improvisation Escargot survives and learns the dwarf''s evil plan: sacrifice Leta and use the marbles to revive the stone giants, ancient enemies of the elves. With the assistance of an eccentric crew of sky-faring elves, Escargot seeks an opportunity to rescue Leta and redeem his many foibles.

The Stone Giant

The novel is set in various locations around the world, starting in 783 AH by the Islamic calendar (1405 AD by the Gregorian calendar) with the Black Death plague killing nearly 99% of the population of Europe. The story follows a group (jāti) of protagonists who are continually reborn throughout the centuries into various cultural and geographical settings, as well as their meetings in bardo between their lives. The book features Muslim, Chinese (Buddhist, Daoist, Confucianist), American Indian, and Hindu culture, philosophy and everyday life. It mixes sophisticated knowledge about these cultures in the real world with their imagined global development in a world without Western Christendom. The main characters, marked by identical first letters throughout their reincarnations, but changing in gender, culture-nationality and so on, struggle for progress in each life. Each chapter has a narrative style which reflects its setting. Within the novel''s re-imagined world, many places are given unfamiliar names, mostly of Chinese or Arabic origin. For example, Europe becomes Firanja, Great Britain and Ireland become the Keltic Sultanate, and Spain becomes al-Andalus; while the Pacific Ocean and Australia are called by Chinese names Dahai (大海) and Aozhou (澳洲), respectively, and North America becomes Yingzhou (鄞州), a land from Chinese myth. The ten chapters are: * Book One - Awake to Emptiness - A plague in Christendom, Zheng He''s explorations, feudal China. * Book Two - The Haj in the Heart - Mughal India and the colonization of Europe. * Book Three - Ocean Continents - The discovery of the New World by the Chinese military. * Book Four - The Alchemist - An Islamic renaissance in Samarqand. * Book Five - Warp and Weft - Native Americans align with Samurai. * Book Six - Widow Kang - The Qing dynasty meets Islam in western China. * Book Seven - The Age of Great Progress - Beginnings of industrialism in Southern India; Japanese diaspora to North America. * Book Eight - War of the Asuras - A worldwide "Long War", fought for over 60 years in trenches with pre-atomic weapons between the nations of Islam and an alliance of Chinese, Indian, and Native American nations. * Book Nine - Nsara - Science, urban life and feminism in Islamic Europe''s surviving post-war metropolis. * Book Ten - The First Years - Globalization and sustainability, and recovery from the Long War. Several historical figures make appearances in this world, including Tamerlane, Chinese explorer Zheng He, Akbar the Great, and Kampaku Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The first chapter is written in a style reminiscent of the Chinese classic, the Journey to the West. In the last chapters the book becomes increasingly reflexive, citing fictional scientists and philosophers introduced in previous chapters as well as referring to Old Red Ink, who wrote a biography about a reincarnating jati group.

The Years of Rice and Salt

The groundswell is characterized by several tactics that guide companies into using social technologies strategically and effectively. Businesses should listen to their customers to understand what the market is looking for in their products. In order to do this, a company needs to find out if their customers are using social technologies and how they are using them. Instead of advertising to customers, marketing departments should find creative ways to connect with users about their experience with a product and their feelings about the brand. One common method is participation in social networks. Enthusiastic customers are part of the groundswell, and companies can recognize and appreciate these customers by creating online communities and social platforms where they can connect with the brand and provide reviews. Businesses can harness the support of their own employees by creating internal social applications for them to connect with the brand, also known as enterprise social software.

Groundswell

A crew of migrant workers from three continents are forced to flee their English strawberry field for a journey across all of England in pursuit of their various dreams of a better future. The story centres on a group of migrant workers who hail from Eastern Europe, China, Malaysia and Africa and have come to Kent to harvest strawberries for delivery to the supermarkets, and end up living in two small caravans, a men''s caravan and a women''s caravan. They are all seeking a better life (and in their different ways they are also, of course, looking for love) and they''ve come to England, some legally, some illegally, to find it. They are supervised by Farmer Leapish, a red-faced man who treats everyone equally except for the Polish woman named Yola, the boss of the crew, who favors him with her charms in exchange for something a little extra on the side. But the two are discreet, and all is harmonious in this cozy vale – until the evening when Farmer Leaping''s wife comes upon him and Yola and in retaliation she runs him down in her red sports car. By the time the police arrive the migrant workers (and a dog called Dog) have piled into one of the trailer homes and quickly leave their arcadia, thus setting off on a journey across the length and breadth of England.

Two Caravans

It''s New Year''s Day 1975 at the beginning of the novel, and we are introduced to Archie Jones, a 47-year-old man whose disturbed Italian wife has just walked out on him. Archie is attempting to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car, when a chance interruption causes him to change his mind. Filled with a fresh enthusiasm for life, Archie flips a coin and finds his way into the aftermath of a New Year''s Eve party. There he meets the much-younger Clara, a Jamaican woman whose mother is a devout Jehovah''s Witness. They are soon married and have a daughter, Irie, who grows up to be intelligent but with low self-confidence. Samad, who has emigrated to Britain after World War II, has married Alsana. Alsana is also much younger than he is, and their union is the product of a traditional arranged marriage. They have twin boys, Magid and Millat, who are the same age as Irie. The marriage is quite rocky, as their devotion to Islam in an English life is troublesome. Samad is continually tormented by what he sees as the effects of this cultural conflict upon his own moral character and sends 10-year-old Magid to Bangladesh in the hope that he will grow up properly under the teachings of Islam. From then on, the lives of the two boys follow very different paths. Ironically, Magid becomes an atheist and devotes his life to science (a grave disappointment to Samad). Whereas Millat, despite his earlier womanizing and drinking, eventually becomes an angry fundamentalist and part of a Muslim brotherhood known as the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (or KEVIN). The lives of the Jones and Iqbal families intertwine with that of the Chalfens, a Jewish-Catholic family of Cambridge educated intellectuals. The father, Marcus Chalfen, is a brilliant but socially inept geneticist working on a controversial ''FutureMouse'' project. The mother, Joyce Chalfen, is a part-time housewife with an often entirely misguided desire to mother and ''heal'' Millat. Although they wish to be thought of as intellectual liberals, the Chalfens often demonstrate complete cultural ignorance and a blindness to the changes happening in their own family. Later on in the story, Clara''s mother, a strict Jehovah''s Witness, becomes involved along with Clara''s ex-boyfriend when Irie runs away from home. Returned from Bangladesh, Magid works as Marcus'' research assistant, while Millat is befriended by the Chalfens. To some extent the family provides a safe haven as they (believe themselves to) accept and understand the turbulent lives of Magid and Millat. However, this sympathy comes at the expense of their own son, Josh, whose difficulties are ignored by his parents as he, too, begins to rebel against his background. The strands of the narrative grow closer as Millat and KEVIN, Josh and a radical animal rights group (FATE), and Clara''s mother (Hortense) and her religious connections all begin to oppose FutureMouse as an evil interference with their own beliefs and plan to stop it. Irie, who has been working for Marcus, briefly succeeds in her long-hidden attraction to Millat but is rejected under his KEVIN-inspired beliefs. Irie believes that Millat cannot love her, for he has always been ''the second son'' both symbolically and literally; Millat was born two minutes after Magid. After losing her virginity to Millat, she makes Magid the ''second son'' for a change by sleeping with him right after. This causes her to become pregnant, and she is left unsure of the father of her child, as the brothers are identical twins. Extraordinary consequences result as the seemingly divergent stories of the main characters coalesce in a stunning finale—the unveiling of FutureMouse, the revelatory actions of the warring groups, and of a long-kept secret from Samad and Archie''s past.

White Teeth

In Chicago''s West Rogers Park neighborhood in 1979, California Avenue divides the prosperous west side from the struggling east. Langer''s brilliant debut uses that divide as a metaphor for the changes that occur in the lives of three neighborhood families: the Rovners, the Wasserstroms and the Wills. There are two macro-stories-the courtship of Charlie Wasserstrom and Gail Shiffler-Bass, and the alienation of Jill Wasserstrom from her best friend, Muley Wills-but what really counts here is the exuberance of overlapping subplots. One pole of the book is represented by Ellen Rovner, a therapist whose marriage to Michael dissolves over the course of the book (much to Ellen''s relief: she''s so distrustful of Michael that she fakes not having an orgasm when they have sex). If Ellen embodies cool, intelligent disenchantment, her son, Larry, represents the opposite pole of pure self-centeredness. As Larry sees it, his choice is between becoming a rock star with his band, Rovner!, and getting a lot of sex-or going to Brandeis, becoming successful and getting a lot of sex. The east side Wasserstrom girls exist between these poles: Michelle, the eldest, is rather slutty, flighty and egotistical, but somehow raises her schemes (remaining the high school drama club queen, for instance) to a higher level, while Jill, a seventh-grade contrarian who shocks her Hebrew School teachers with defenses of Ayatollah Khomeini and quotes Nkrumah at her bat mitvah, is still emotionally dazed from her mother''s death. Muley, who woos Jill with his little films, wins the heart of the reader, if not of his intended.

Crossing California

The book, which takes place in late 19th century New York City, tells the story of the dispute between a self-made millionaire and a social revolutionary, with a third man futilely attempting to mediate the tense situation. The main character of the novel, Basil March, is a neutral character from whose viewpoint the reader experiences much of the story. He resides in Boston with his wife and children. The March family is persuaded by March''s idealistic friend Fulkerson to move to New York to help him start a new magazine, where the writers benefit in a primitive form of profit sharing. After some deliberation, the Marches move to New York and begin a rather extensive search for a perfect apartment. After many exhausting weeks of searching, Basil finally settles on an apartment full of what he and his wife refer to as "gimcrackery"--trinkets and decorations that do not appeal to their upper-middle-class tastes. Work at the new magazine, entitled Every Other Week begins. The magazine is bankrolled by a millionaire named Dryfoos, who made it rich after discovering natural gas on his farm in the Midwest, and who is now making money on Wall Street. Dryfoos'' son, Conrad, becomes the business manager of the magazine. An illustrator by the name of Angus Beaton, an old friend of Fulkerson''s, is chosen to head the art department. Beaton chooses Alma Leighton, for whom he has feelings, to illustrate the cover of the first issue. Berthold Lindau, an old friend of Basil March''s and a veteran of the American Civil War, becomes the translator. He knows many languages, so he selects and translates Russian, French, and German stories to publish in the magazine. Lindau lost his hand in a Civil War battle, fighting for the north because he was a strong abolitionist and an idealistic American immigrant. Colonel Woodburn, a wealthy Southerner, and his daughter move to New York and become involved with the newspaper when their social circle connects with the magazine''s; they board with Alma Leighton and her mother. Fulkerson decides that he would like to publish some of Colonel Woodburn''s pro-slavery writings in Every Other Week, because he believes it would sell more copies of the new magazine. At a dinner banquet, the personalities of Dryfoos the capitalist, Lindau the socialist, and Colonel Woodburn the pro-slavery advocate clash. Lindau fiercely criticizes Dryfoos, expressing his harshest feelings in German to March, because he does not think anyone else at the table speaks German. Later we learn that Dryfoos speaks German, and he was insulted by Lindau''s comments. In the end of the book, the New York City streetcar drivers strike. The strike, similar to the Hay Market Square Riot, turns into a riot. Conrad Dryfoos, already a humanitarian helping the poor and working class, is charmed by the lovely Margaret Vance, who shares his values of charity. She encourages Conrad to try to end the strike by telling all sides to desist. While attempting to stop a policeman from beating the aged and disabled Lindau, Conrad is fatally shot. March emerges from a streetcar to see the fallen men lying on the street next to each other. Dryfoos grieves the loss of his son. After further amputation of his already disabled arm, Lindau dies with Margaret Vance at his side. Dryfoos, who has always used money to separate himself from pain, sells the magazine to Fulkerson and March for an extremely low price and takes his remaining family to Europe.

A Hazard of New Fortunes

In the previous novel, during the early days of World War I, Tarzan discovered that his wife Jane was not killed in a fire set by German troops, but was in fact alive. In this novel two months have gone by and Tarzan is continuing to search for Jane. He has tracked her to a hidden valley called Pal-ul-don, which means "Land of Men." In Pal-ul-don Tarzan finds a real Jurassic Park filled with dinosaurs, notably the savage Triceratops-like Gryfs, which unlike their prehistoric counterparts are carnivorous. The lost valley is also home to two different races of tailed human-looking creatures, the Ho-don (hairless and white skinned) and the Waz-don (hairy and black-skinned). Tarzan befriends Ta-den, a Ho-don warrior, and Om-at, the Waz-don chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world he becomes a captive but so impresses his captors with his accomplishments and skills that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru (Tarzan the Terrible), which is the name of the novel. Jane is also being held captive in Pal-ul-don, having been brought there by her German captor, who has since become dependent on her due to his own lack of jungle survival skills. She becomes a pawn in a religious power struggle that consumes much of the novel. With the aid of his native allies, Tarzan continues to pursue his beloved to rescue her and set things to right, going through an extended series of fights and escapes to do so. In the end success seems beyond even his ability to achieve, until in the final chapter he and Jane are saved by their son Korak, who has been searching for Tarzan just as Tarzan has been searching for Jane.

Tarzan the Terrible

The Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and the curator of the rare books collection of the Library of Congress both are found dead. The Speaker has been killed by a sniper at a party while the head of the rare books collection dies from "unknown circumstances." Oliver Stone and the Camel Club become suspicious, although initially they indulge what they believe is his overactive imagination. Stone and his cohorts discover that Seagraves had been selling American intelligence secrets to terrorists in the Middle East, compromising intelligence efforts in the region. However, when they are followed and ask the Secret Service for help, the followers disappear, and the Camel Club becomes interested in their activities. Seagraves kidnaps and subsequently tortures Stone for information. Annabelle Conroy is introduced as a con artist, who after pulling off a 40 million heist against an Atlantic City Casino owner (Jerry Bagger) is on the run for her life. Bagger wants to find and kill Annabelle and her con team. Alex Ford from the previous novel reappears, and in the climax Seagraves is killed by a knife thrown at his carotid artery by Stone who turns out to be an ex-CIA killer. Alex Ford and his agents take Seagrave''s remaining collaborators into custody. One of Annabelle Conroy''s collaborators in the heist is tortured for information by the angry casino owner, who finds out the general area in which she is living (Washington, D.C.). The novel ends with a set-up for Stone Cold, the next novel of the Camel Club.

The Collectors

The story begins with the monk Tensing and his disciple, the Prince Dil Bahadur, traveling in a remote part of the Himalaya, on a journey to the Valley of the Yeti, in search of rare plants found only there, for use in medicines and balms. When they arrive they find the valley is beautiful, and they stay the night. In the morning they awake to many Yetis around them with clubs and other weapons, yet the monk and his disciple remain calm but then in the distance they see a slow moving, bigger Yeti, the ancient matriarch of the Yeti, Grr-ympr. She calls off the Warriors, and soon the lamas learn the sad story of the last of the Yeti. Grr-ympr is very old, from a stronger generation of Yetis, but with each generation of Yeti, they grow smaller, weaker and animalistic, in contrast to the great human-like Yeti of the past, whose society was nearly as complex as that of the humans. They believed this was due to the wrath of the gods, and that the lamas were the gods themselves, arriving to save the Yeti. After observing the Yeti, they find that the Yeti breastfeed their young, but as it gives little nourishment, the milk does not strengthen the babies, which is why they are all so sickly and weak, and often die. Further investigation also shows all the Yeti have purple, diseased tongues, which seems to be a sign of something in their environment weakening them. The lamas teach the Yeti to milk the Chegnos, the only domesticated animal the Yeti have, to feed the milk to the babies, who then show improvement from the diet. They also soon discover the water from the thermal springs that the Yeti drink from is contaminated with toxic minerals, and is the cause of the weakness of the Yeti and their purple tongues. After the tribe ceases to drink from the springs, their energy and health rapidly improves, and in return for what the lamas have done, they help them collect the plants and show them a short cut tunnel that cuts the journey back a great deal. The novel then shifts to Kate Cold, a writer for International Geographic, and her grandson Alexander Cold, arriving back in the New York from their adventures in Brazil from the previous novel. Alexander gives his Grandmother three large diamonds that Nadia had found in the Amazon, and tells her to use them to fund an Organization to protect The People of the Mist, and other Indians in South America. Although initially doubtful to the large eggs being diamonds, Kate goes to her jeweler friend Isaac Rosenblat, who immediately tells her that they are the largest diamonds he has ever seen and worth a fortune. The scene shifts six months and in that time the Diamond Foundation has been started, along with the help of Kate''s old nemesis, archaeologist Ludovic Leblanc. Kate has also been assigned by International Geographic to travel to the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon to write an article. A call from Alexander asking to be able to come along and bring Nadia convinces her to have them come as well. The scene shifts to the second richest man in the world, known as the Collector, talking with the Specialist, talking about acquiring the Golden Dragon, an artifact from the Kingdom of the Golden Dragon which allows people to see into the future, as well as instructions on how to use it. The Collector seeks this item to be able to foresee the stock market, and to use it to make himself much richer, and no longer be the second richest man in the world. Once at Kingdom of the Golden Dragon as it''s called, they get involved in a sinister plot to kidnap young girls and force them to be their slaves. Nadia who is mistaken as a girl from the kingdom is kidnapped along with Pema and a few other girls. Now it is up to Alexander and his annoyed grandmother to save the girls along with a little help from the country''s forces, a lama, his disciple, and of course Boroba''s keen senses to find Nadia.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Animal World

By Antonio di Benedetto

Thumbelina

By Hans Christian Andersen

The Stone Giant

By James Blaylock

The Years of Rice and Salt

By Kim Stanley Robinson

Groundswell

No Author Listed

Two Caravans

By Marina Lewycka

White Teeth

By Zadie Smith

Crossing California

No Author Listed

A Hazard of New Fortunes

By William Dean Howells

Tarzan the Terrible

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Collectors

By David Baldacci

Kingdom of the golden dragon

By Isabel Allende