John Fowles

Explores the concept of land ownership and how it has shaped history, examining how people fight over, steward, and occasionally share land, and what humanity's proprietary relationship with land means for the future. "Land examines in depth how we determine where the land lies, how we acquire it, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and, finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential questions: who actually owns the world's land, how much of it do we really need, and why does it matter?" -- Inside front jacket flap.

There are redwoods in California that were ancient by the time Columbus first landed, and pines still alive that germinated around the time humans invented writing. There are Douglas firs as tall as skyscrapers, and a banyan tree in Calcutta as big as a football field.From the tallest to the smallest, trees inspire wonder in all of us, and in The Tree, Colin Tudge travels around the world--throughout the United States, the Costa Rican rain forest, Panama and Brazil, India, New Zealand, China, and most of Europe--bringing to life stories and facts about the trees around us: how they grow old, how they eat and reproduce, how they talk to one another (and they do), and why they came to exist in the first place. He considers the pitfalls of being tall; the things that trees produce, from nuts and rubber to wood; and even the complicated debt that we as humans owe them.Tudge takes us to the Amazon in flood, when the water is deep enough to submerge the forest entirely and fish feed on fruit while river dolphins race through the canopy. He explains the "memory" of a tree: how those that have been shaken by wind grow thicker and sturdier, while those attacked by pests grow smaller leaves the following year; and reveals how it is that the same trees found in the United States are also native to China (but not Europe).From tiny saplings to centuries-old redwoods and desert palms, from the backyards of the American heartland to the rain forests of the Amazon and the bamboo forests, Colin Tudge takes the reader on a journey through history and illuminates our ever-present but often ignored companions. A blend of history, science, philosophy, and environmentalism, The Tree is an engaging and elegant look at the life of the tree and what modern research tells us about their future.From the Hardcover edition.

Divided into four sections--Writing and the Self, Culture and Society, Literature and Literary Criticism, and Nature and the Nature of Nature--"Wormholes" contains 30 pieces, dating from 1963 to the present, which reflect on Fowles' views on the art of fiction and on the relationship of literature to life.

The history and meaning of Stonehenge with photographs of the ancient monument as it is today.

The five masterful works of short fiction in The Ebony Tower bring us once again into the company of a great contemporary novelist working his intriguing and dazzling themes, probing the fitful relationships of fantasy and reality, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And they are an enduring testament to John Fowles's reputation as one of the finest storytellers of our time.

Released at the end of 2013 by Pink Flamingo Publications , The Collector explores the grim post-nuclear near-future of Garrett, wealthy entrepreneur-engineer with a penchant for collecting. His deep-dug shelter overlooking the twisted and flash-burned Golden Gate Bridge contains everything the solitary man could ever desire—closed-loop recycling and mountains of vacuum-packed supplies, tools and spare parts for his restless tinkering, his library of old-fashioned printed books, his prized firearms...and a staggeringly wide selection of erotica, along with expensive high-end roboticized love dolls that can cater to his any and every whim. The methodical, introspective Garrett is determined to survive in this poisoned, ruined world. He has always been driven to succeed, after all, in whatever the contest has been. Yet even as he tries to busy himself in puttering in his laboratories and his archives, when his armored, radio-controlled crawler crunches through a litter of bleached bones in his remote exploration of the eerily glowing ruins of hydrogen-bombed San Francisco, it is hard, so hard, to believe that life really means anything anymore. Oh, Garrett has his memories of all the beautiful $10,000-an-hour escorts he once had frequented, his endless terabytes of porno of all possible variety, and his harem of shapely silicone playmates to be pulled out of storage whenever he needs something to use and abuse, to tease and torment and punish...or even simply to talk to. But there has to be more than that, doesn’t there? Yet exactly what, the melancholy man cannot say. One morning, however, Garrett’s long-range crawler tops a rise in the wilds beyond the zone of total destruction, and for the first time he sights other living human beings. And among these ragtag survivors is one particular brunette, an intelligent-seeming black-haired girl of perhaps twenty-eight or thirty whose sly eyes and crooked, red-lipped smile just might make life worth living once again...

A startlingly original novel about a young English graduate who takes a position as a teacher at a private school on a small Greek island. Bored and lonely he spends his free hours wandering alone until he meets a wealthy and mysterious neighbour. Soon he finds himself a victim of this man’s increasingly bizarre psychological games and obsessed with a young woman who may or may not be a willing participant in these games.

This book was first published against the advice of almost everyone who read it. I was told that it would do my ‘image’ no good; and I am sure that my belief that a favourable ‘image’ is conceivably not of any great human – or literary – significance would have counted for very little if I had not had a best-selling novel behind me. I used that ‘success’ to issue this ‘failure’, and so I face a charge of unscrupulous obstinacy. To the obstinacy I must plead guilty, but not to lack of scruple; for I was acting only in accordance with what I had written. My chief concern, in The Aristos is to preserve the freedom of the individual against all those pressures-to-conform that threaten our century; one of those pressures, put upon all of us, but particularly on anyone who comes into public notice, is that of labelling a person by what he gets money and fame for – by what other people most want to use him as. To call a man a plumber is to describe one aspect of him, but it is also to obscure a number of others. I am a writer; I want no more specific prison than that I express myself in printed words. So a prime personal reason for this book was to announce that I did not intend to walk into the cage labelled ‘novelist’. Aristos is taken from the ancient Greek. It is singular and means roughly ‘the best for a given situation’. [From the Author's Preface to the second edition of 1968, as reproduced in the New American Library edition of 1970]