Best Selling Books by Michael Bishop

Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent paleontologists. As a result, Joshua is invited to join a most unusual time travel project and is transported millions of years into the past of his dreams. In early Pleistocene Africa, living among the pre-human species Homo habilis, experiencing the same hardships and the same intense pleasures, Joshua finds, for the first time in his troubled life, not only contentment but real love - a love that transcends almost everything. Intelligent, thoughtful and deeply moving, No Enemy but Time brilliantly evokes the remote past and, at the same time, presents a powerful and convincing portrayal of a relationship surmounting even the most daunting barriers. It is a challenging and highly original novel exploring the nature a nd origins of humankind.

I''ll tell you what this book isn''t about. It''s not about self-help and I''m not preaching to you. It''s also not for children. " Funk to Funky" is about my life and some people and events that I encountered along the way. I had some realizations like "you can have all the funk in the world and not be funky enough" or " you can''t make this stuff up." All you can do is try to come out the other side of the experience better than you were before. I also took some photos of myself at this time of my life rather than have someone else take them. I took the photos the same day I wrote the text that corresponds to the photo, so I was "in the moment." Funk to Funky is a metaphor for "in to out," "up to down," or "here to there." We all take a journey in life, this is a little bit of mine.

It seemed like a good idea; even a noble experiment. But the outcome was sheer hell. When the Balduin brothers escaped from the tedium of the human hive of Atlanta, Georgia, they had a mission. They were to voyage to the planet Trope, contact a tribe there known as the Ouemartsee, and transport it to Glaparca for a useful purpose. But suddenly the Balduin brothers discovered that they were in the slave trade, and that the Ouemartsee had made one of them a God . . .

Science fiction-roman.

A private citizen discovers compelling evidence that a decades-old murder in Nashville was not committed by the man who went to prison for the crime but was the result of a conspiracy involving elite members of Nashville society. Nashville 1964. Eighteen-year-old babysitter Paula Herring is murdered in her home while her six-year-old brother apparently sleeps through the grisly event. A few months later a judge''s son is convicted of the crime. Decades after the slaying, Michael Bishop, a private citizen, stumbles upon a secret file related to the case and with the help of some of the world''s top forensic experts--including forensic psychologist Richard Walter (aka "the living Sherlock Holmes")--he uncovers the truth. What really happened is completely different from what the public was led to believe. Now, for the very first time, Bishop reveals the true story. In this true-crime page-turner, the author lays out compelling evidence that a circle of powerful citizens were key participants in the crime and the subsequent cover-up. The ne''er-do-well judge''s son, who was falsely accused and sent to prison, proved to be the perfect setup man. The perpetrators used his checkered history to conceal the real facts for over half a century. Including interviews with the original defense attorney and a murder confession elicited from a nursing-home resident, the information presented here will change Nashville history forever.

This retrospective Michael Bishop collection of fifty short pieces (thirty-four stories, fifteen poems or prose-poems, and one amusing Moon-based play about writing SF, "The Grape Jelly and Mustard Method") spans the author''s entire career, from "Asytages''s Dream," written while Bishop was a college student, to "Yahweh''s Hour," an acerbic but moving work of science-fantasy political satire composed in 2020. The collection''s most distinctive attribute, however, lies in the fact that no contribution is longer than 3,000 words and most are shorter, a kind of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories for lovers of short fiction, heartfelt pieces that afford the reader as much meat as they do flash. "A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals," set on Saturn''s largest moon, Titan, embodies a requiem for the entire human species. "Philip K. Dick is dead, a lass" memorializes in verse science fiction''s preeminent bard of the reality breakdown." "Love''s Heresy" and "The Library of Babble" appear to be channeling the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with surprising jinks all their own. And the list of narrative explorations grows and grows . . . Humor and horror, music and whimsy, primates and pathology, mice and men, religion and rebellion: these stories and poems cover the waterfront of human experience while acknowledging the singularity of each human life.

This CG animated action adventure offers a prequel to Mass Effect 3, telling the story of James Vega, Alliance Marine and leader of an elite military unit sent deep into distant space to combat a strange and largely unknown race of aggressive aliens known as The Collectors. ~ Cammila Collar, Rovi

From the reviews: "Bishop and Schroder (both, Univ. of Nebraska at Omaha) have brought together an impressive group of practitioners in the relatively new application of geographic information science to mountain geomorphology. In doing so, they have produced valuable, first, overall coverage of a high-tech approach to mountain, three-dimensional research. More than 40 contributing authors discuss a wide range of related aspects.... The book is well bound and well produced; each chapter provides an extensive source of references. The numerous line drawings are clearly reproduced, although the mediocre quality of photographic reproduction limits the value of air photographs and satellite images. As is characteristic of many edited collections, there is some variation in chapter quality. Some of the writing is so dense that it requires minute concentration--one chapter, for instance, has 14 pages of references from a total of 43 pages. Nevertheless, this is a vital compendium for a rapidly expanding field of research. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals." (J. D. Ives, Choice, March 2005)

For Mary Stevenson Crye, a beautiful young housewife, life had been wonderful. Loving husband, two delightful children, meaningful existence in a small Southern community. Then it all fell apart: with the sudden, unexpected death of her husband, Stevie must struggle to earn a living as a free-lance writer. When her typewriter - the sole economic support for her surviving family - breaks down, Stevie begins to receive demonic messages through the machine, the prelude to a living nightmare of satanic emissaries, ghouls from beyond the grave, and the revelation of an unrequited curse over the Crye household. For Mary Stevenson Crye, the nightmare is about to begin . . .

This is a story about Brooklyn—about a young man who grew up in a neighborhood called Crown Heights. It is a story of an ordinary kid who fell in love with music; first the music he heard at home, then with the music of the streets. This street music had been bubbling up around the city for nearly 10 years before the kid discovered it at a block party one summer evening. It was loud, infectious, and alive. The crazy thing was this music was really familiar but different at the same time. This crazy new kind of music grabbed the boy’s attention and lit a fire in him that would never be put out. This music didn’t have a name but later became known as Hip Hop.

"Seasonal coastal currents on a continental shelf are modeled for use in Search and Rescue planning. The model considers a balance of Coriolis, pressure gradient, and frictional forces. Input parameters are the climatological wind and density fields. Comparison of results to currents depicted on climatological atlases for the New York Bight indicates the validity of the approach. In this light, one might extend this approach to other geographical regions where analogous oceanographic conditions prevail."--Author''s abstract.

In the domed city of Atlanta, after the breakup of the United States, a young writer named Julian Cawthorn is in trouble. Because he insulted the daughter of a public official, Cawthorn is out of work, and virtually unemployable. He begs a temporary job on the city newspaper and finds himself assigned to cover the first public appearance of the aliens Cygnusians, travelers from outer space who have been living in seclusion in Atlanta while visiting Earth. A Christian revivalist dictatorship rules Atlanta; church services are as much social as they are religious events. When one of the aliens chooses to appear at a church service, Julian watches as the first alien from space stands up and is "saved". The alien''s voluntary salvation is taken as a sign that the state religion is indeed the one true religion, and minority groups, previously tolerated, are attacked by gangs, leaving Atlanta in turmoil. The service is a turning point in Julian''s life. He is hired by Fiona Bitler, hostess to and protector of the aliens; at her invitation he goes to work in the secret alien enclave. In this environment Julian comes to know the fascinating aliens. He is mystified by the aliens'' interest in his personal life and cannot understand how they have acquired so many oddly human characteristics in their brief period on Earth.

Sonny Peacock comes of age in this poignant tale set in the Kansas heartland of the early 1960s. ''Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana'' is set in 1980s Pretoria, South Africa, where a black man''s quest for the ''Theory of Everything'' is juxtaposed against the inhumanity of apartheid. In ''Cri de Coeur'', aboard a 21st century generation wheel ship, agrogeologist and poet Dr Abel Gwiazda and his Down''s-syndrome son Dean travel on course for a new home in Epsilon Eridani. In the final novella, ''Death and Designation Among the Asadi'', reprinted here for the first time in 20 years, ethnologist Egan Chaney''s private journals of his studies of the alien Asadi are the centrepiece of the story.

Between the incessant music of the stars and the spectre of a giant squid caught inside a locket ball, it is difficult for Don Horacio to maintain a restful mind. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In Earth and Mind : Dreaming, Writing, Being Michael Bishop examines the very recent work of nine major contemporary French and Francophone writers : Yves Bonnefoy, Jacqueline Risset, Salah Stétié, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, André Velter, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jean-Claude Pinson and Jacques Dupin. The issue of writing’s complex relation to the experience of the earth is of central pertinence, involving questions of dreaming, voice, figurativity, emotion, desire, revolt, metaphysics, meaning, poiein and being. Discussion entails close reading of works as well as broad contextualisation and a sensitivity to interrelevancies from writer to writer. Bishop’s book is intended as a companion to his 2014 Dystopie et poïein, agnose et reconnaissance. Seize études sur la poésie française et francophone contemporaine.

The Endless Theory of Days: The Art and Poetry of Gérard Titus-Carmel seeks to set forth the case for the special, multiple genius of a man who, despite the experience of a biting melancholy resulting from loss, despite an ‘indefectible feeling of estrangement from the world’, despite, too, the corrosive sense of art’s, of languages’s, deceptiveness, has never lost sight of a curious duty to the shadows that haunt and that, with now a strangeness that smiles, yet beckon toward ‘the very place, finally clarified and recognised, of pure evidence. [The place,] that is, where beauty is named’. This place, Gérard Titus-Carmel may feel, lies no doubt impossibly beyond the strict locus of his art and his writing, but it is a place he has struggled with dignity and unceasingly deployed energy to bring to a semblance of incarnation in a vast plastic and poetical oeuvre that has stirred, and will continue to stir, the minds and hearts of all those – from Derrida and Bonnefoy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Pascal Quignard to Jacques Dupin and Marie-Claire Bancquart, and countless others – who have witnessed its exquisitely solemn unfolding over, today, more than forty years.

SCIENCE FICTION: The evolution of 21st century Atlanta from Utopia to tyranny through the lives of its citizens.

Urban warfare in a post-collapse scenario is cruel to all combatants. But when the fighters are children, their resilience and passions combine to make for a bittersweet tragedy.

Contemporary French Women Poets offers the first full-length study, divided into two volumes, of a wide range of women''s poetry in France written over the past forty years. Volume I provides a broad Introduction, eight chapters devoted to individual critical assessments of the work of Andrée Chedid, Heather Dohollau, Denise Le Dantec, Janine Mitaud, Jacqueline Risset, Anne Teyssiéras, Esther Tellermann and Marie-Claire Bancquart, followed by a provisional Conclusion and Bibliography. Volume II recentres the overall analysis via a brief Introduction, then proceeds to offer eight more individual critical evaluations of the work of Jeanne Hyvrard, Jeannine Baude, Françoise Hàn, Céline Zins, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Denise Borias, Marie Etienne and Anne-Marie Albiach. An overall Conclusion is then developed, followed by a Bibliography.

A wide-ranging study of Prévert’s promethean imagination and creativity in the interwoven realms of theatre, film, poetry, art, photography, and song, Michael Bishop’s Jacques Prévert seeks to demonstrate the originality of a genial fabricator of image and word whose essential focus, unpretentious yet urgently felt, unintellectualised yet buoyantly and wittily intelligent, ever remains the quality of our daily being-in-the-world, the possibility of our self-transformation, the stunning availability – should we truly will it, and despite all that can weigh upon existence, above all ideologically – of joy and love and freedom.

Ben Vautier, Niki De Saint Phalle, François Morellet, Louise Bourgeois, Alexandre Hollan, Claude Viallat, Sophie Calle, Bernard Pagès, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Annette Messager, Gérard Titus-Carmel: eleven major French artists of the last forty years or so, examined in the light of their uniqueness and their rootedness, the specificities of their differing and at times overlapping plastic practices and the swirling and often highly hybridised conceptions entertained in regard to such practices. Thus does analysis range from discussion of the feisty, Fluxus-inspired, free-spirited funkiness of Ben Vautier’s work to the various modes of transcendence of trauma and haunting fear generated by the exceptional gestures of Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois, to the alyrical formalism yet imbued with irony and ludicity of François Morellet, through to the serene intensities of Alexandre Hollan’s vies silencieuses, the infinite a-signatures of Claude Viallat’s adventure in the sheer joy of a poiein of self-reflexive coloration, the powerfully elegant and muscular disarticulations of Bernard Pagès’ sculpture, the great sweep through art’s history implied by Jean-Pierre Pincemin’s chameleon-like gestures, the vast swirling programme of socio-psychological analysis the arts of Annette Messager and Sophie Calle offer in their radically distinctive manners, the obsessively serialised oeuvre of Gérard Titus-Carmel allowing a burrowing deep into the opaque logic of a real though dubious ‘presence to the world’.

The acclaimed author of No Enemy But Time combines humor, tragedy, and suspense to tell a uniqely American story reminiscent of the film Field of Dreams. When 17-year-old Danny Boles joins a Class C farm club in Georgia, he forms some unusual friendships--but his mind is on making it to the big leagues.