Peter Hobbs

How we come in, and how we go out, sex and death: these are the governing drives, our two greatest themes. In this provocative and haunting collection of short stories, acclaimed writers probe the nature of, and connection between two of the most powerful, exhilarating and terrifying forces that define and shape the human experience: sex and death.

In this provocative and haunting collection of short stories, edited by two masters of the form, a diverse group of contemporary writers probes the nature and connection between two of the most powerful, exhilarating, and terrifying forces that define and shape the human experience." What else is there?"--Alice Munro, on why so much of her work deals with the twin themes of sex and death. The drive for life--for survival and reproduction--and the drive for death--for violence and self-destruction--are the two dominant, instinctive urges of human behavior. These conflicting compulsions, characterized by Freud as Eros and Thanatos, are also the central themes of great literature. In Sex and Death, some of today's most compelling writers from around the globe--Kevin Barry, Lynn Coady, Ceridwen Dovey, Robert Drewe, Damon Galgut, Petina Gappah, Sarah Hall, Peter Hobbs, Yiyun Li, Alexander MacLeod, Ben Marcus, Jon McGregor, Guadalupe Nettel, Courttia Newland, Taiye Selasi, Ali Smith, Wells Tower, Claire Vaye Watkins, Alan Warner, Clare Wigfall--explore these challenging themes with honesty, psychological acuity, brutality, tenderness, and empathy, in stories that are disquieting, illuminating, funny, and utterly dazzling.

In the foothills of a mountain range in northern Pakistan is a beautiful orchard. Swallows wheel and dive silently over the branches, and the scent of jasmine threads through the air. Pomegranates hang heavy, their skins darkening to a deep crimson. Neglected now, the trees are beginning to grow wild, their fruit left to spoil on the branches. Many miles away, a frail young man is flung out of prison gates. Looking up, scanning the horizon for swallows in flight, he stumbles and collapses in the roadside dust. His ravaged body tells the story of fifteen years of brutality. Just one image has held and sustained him through the dark times - the thought of the young girl who had left him dumbstruck with wonder all those years ago, whose eyes were lit up with life. A tale of tenderness in the face of great and corrupt power, In The Orchard, The Swallows is a heartbreaking novel written in prose of exquisite stillness and beauty.

This book is a much-expanded and updated edition of a previous volume, published in 1996 as "No-tillage Seeding: Science and Practice". The base objective remains to describe, in lay terms, a range of international experiments designed to examine the causes of successes and failures in no-tillage. The book summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of no tillage. It highlights the pros and cons of a range of features and options, without promoting any particular product. Topics added or covered in more detail in the second edition include:* soil carbon and how its retention or sequestration interacts with tillage and no-tillage* controlled traffic farming as an adjunct to no-tillage* comparison of the performance of generic no-tillage opener designs* the role of banding fertilizer in no-tillage* the economics of no-tillage* small-scale equipment used by poorer farmers* forage cropping by no-tillage* a method for risk assessment of different levels of machine sophistication

Charles Wenmoth is a blacksmith and Methodist lay-preacher in the wildest reaches of South-West England. It is 1870 and Wenmoth devotes his weekdays to work and the Sabbath to walking great distances to preach to dwindling congregations. Charles burns with faith - but it's a faith balanced by his pleasure in nature and the physical world around him. In his relationship with Harriet French, a blind girl who maintains her belief despite her debilitating condition, Wenmoth finds his fragile faith tested in the most trying of circumstances.

This is the story of four seasons in the life of Charles Wenmoth, a twenty-seven-year-old apprentice blacksmith and Methodist lay preacher in Cornwall in 1870. Life is at its hardest; poverty is everywhere. Charles crosses and recrosses the raw, beautiful landscape, attending to the sick and helping the poor, preaching in chapels with ever-dwindling congregations. He questions his faith along the way but never quite loses it, balancing it with the pleasure he takes in nature, the light in the skies, the colors of the earth, and in his attachment to a girl to whom he is drawn by the piety and patience she maintains despite her long illness. Inspired by the language of his great-great-grandfather's diaries and the Bible, influenced by authors as diverse as Hardy, Blake, and Faulkner, Peter Hobbs has created a first novel of breathtaking ambition and stylistic innovation, and of enormous emotional power.