The Gremlins is a children's book, written and published in 1943. It was Dahl's first children's book, optioned for a film that was never made, in part because no one could establish exactly who owned the word "gremlin" and in part because they could not figure out how to make creatures who destroyed Allied aircraft lovable enough for a cartoon. On 25 September 2006, a reprinted edition of the book was released.
We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of gray. What could be more important than to understand the Universe and ourselves as a part of it? To find a window onto our origin and our destiny?
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun
A stabbing in an art gallery, vandalised paintings, a fatal fall - this is not what Jim Qwilleran expects when he turns his reportorial talents to art. But with his partner, Koko the Siamese cat, he sniffs out clues and confounds criminals intent on mayhem and murder.
In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness.
A distinguished Soviet psychologist's study...[of a] young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him.
