Shifting effortlessly between battles among warp-speed starships and among oar-powered galleys, Weber brings the political maneuvering, past and future technologies, and vigorous protagonists together for a cohesive, engrossing whole.–´´Publishers Weekly.´´

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This new edition of Shakespeare s The Merry Wives of Windsor focuses on a theatrical understanding of the play. While emphasising the liveliness of the play in stage terms, David Crane also claims that this citizen comedy needs to be taken much more seriously than in the past, as an expression of Shakespeare s fundamental understanding of human life, conveyed centrally in the character of Falstaff. In the process he also examines Shakespeare s free and vigorous use of different linguistic worlds within the play. The revision of this edition includes a response to some current arguments about the dating of Merry Wives, and also considers how recent productions bear upon the critical and theatrical account Crane gives of the play.

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In ´the stifling heat of equatorial Newark´, a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth´s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children. At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor´s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground – and on the everyday realities he faces – Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smouldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children´s summer camp high in the Poconos – whose ´mountain air was purified of all contaminants´ – Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor´s passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth´s late short novels, ´´Everyman´´, ´´Indignation´´, ´´The Humbling´´, and now, ´´Nemesis´´: what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?

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Systematically encompassing the major areas of applied linguistics, the editors and contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics provide a panoramic and comprehensive look at this complex and vigorous field.

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