William Gillespie

Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1880. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

Every so often a book comes along offering a fresh perspective from all others. "Cows I Have Known" by the new author William Gillespie is just such a book. As a non-fiction account of the cows that Gillespie raised, this book provides wonderful narratives with a wealth of insights. It opens with a reflective account of the author's favorite cow. From there we the readers are immersed in raising beef cattle, and while most of the chapters focus on events in the pasture, Gillespie also takes us off the farm. The prose interweaves subtle lessons to vivid events that extend far beyond the pasture. Inadvertently the cows affect every bit of his life. The book follows along as the author grows, and accordingly Gillespie's tone shifts. Gillespie avoids the self-deprecating humor that characterizes many animal stories; rather he focuses on the situation and lets the humor shine through. His humor sometimes bites. Be prepared to laugh, cry, and grimace as you read this book. Who knew that cows could be so interesting?

Set in an alternate present that is a slightly, if dangerously, skewed version of our own, Keyhole Factory tracks the interwoven destinies of disparate characters up to and beyond the end of the world-as-we-know-it, brought on by a global super-virus. Beginning with a biting satire of an academic poetry conference, the novel moves on to encompass the stories of a poet-astronaut, a microbiologist contemplating an exit strategy from her high-level job designing biological weapons, a sports-car-driving killer who stages the aesthetic murders of utopian commune-dwellers, and a lone pirate radio disc jockey who may be the last person left alive broadcasting her story to nobody. Allowing form and content to shape each other, William Gillespie pries open the confusion in a moment of total crisis through a narrative web-work technique derived from deranged fiction pioneer Harry Stephen Keeler. Part imaginative free-for-all and part deeply felt examination of isolation and survival, the individual lives in Keyhole Factory shine through the chaos in all their beauty and tragedy. With his signature wit and originality, Gillespie spins a glittering fever-dream that questions our assumptions about the way we interpret events and our relation to the planet, without ever losing sight of the underlying experience of what it feels like to be a human being in the world we live in today.