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Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are widely distributed throughout the world, and cover approximately 12% of the terrestrial surface. Biocrusts are composed of cyanobacteria, algae, lichens, mosses, and a great diversity of other microorganisms, which bind soil particles together to form a layer of biological-soil matrix on the soil surface typically of several millimetres thickness. They are important sites of regional and global microbial diversity and perform multiple ecological functions (multifunctionality). During the evolution of terrestrial life on earth, biocrusts are regarded as the main colonising photosynthetic organisms before the advent of vascular vegetation. They not only r...
This volume summarizes our current understanding of biological soil crusts (biocrusts), which are omnipresent in dryland regions. Since they cover the soil surface, they influence, or even control, all surface exchange processes. Being one of the oldest terrestrial communities, biocrusts comprise a high diversity of cyanobacteria, algae, lichens and bryophytes together with uncounted bacteria, and fungi. The authors show that biocrusts are an integral part of dryland ecosystems, stabilizing soils, influencing plant germination and growth, and playing a key role in carbon, nitrogen and water cycling. Initial attempts have been made to use biocrusts as models in ecological theory. On the other hand, biocrusts are endangered by local disruptions and global change, highlighting the need for enhanced recovery methods. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the fascinating field of biocrust research, making it indispensable not only for scientists in this area, but also for land managers, policy makers, and anyone interested in the environment.
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Originally published in 2011, The Mosquito Bite Author is the seventh novel by the acclaimed Turkish author Barış Bıçakçı. It follows the daily life of an aspiring novelist, Cemil, in the months after he submits his manuscript to a publisher in Istanbul. Living in an unremarkable apartment complex in the outskirts of Ankara, Cemil spends his days going on walks, cooking for his wife, repairing leaks in his neighbor’s bathroom, and having elaborate imaginary conversations in his head with his potential editor about the meaning of life and art. Uncertain of whether his manuscript will be accepted, Cemil wavers between thoughtful meditations on the origin of the universe and the trajectory of political literature in Turkey, panic over his own worth as a writer, and incredulity toward the objects that make up his quiet world in the Ankara suburbs.
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About Trees considers our relationship with language, landscape, perception, and memory in the Anthropocene. The book includes texts and artwork by a stellar line up of contributors including Jorge Luis Borges, Andrea Bowers, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Lovelace and dozens of others. Holten was artist in residence at Buro BDP. While working on the book she created an alphabet and used it to make a new typeface called Trees. She also made a series of limited edition offset prints based on her Tree Drawings.
"[An] incredibly moving collection of oral histories . . . important enough to be added to the history curriculum" Telegraph "A moving evocation of the 'everyday terror' systematically perpetrated over 41 years of Albanian communism . . . An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state." Clarissa de Waal, author of ALBANIA: PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY IN TRANSITION "Albania, enigmatic, mysterious Albania, was always the untold story of the Cold War, the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mud Sweeter Than Honey goes a very long way indeed towards putting that right" New European After breaking ties with Yugoslavia, the USSR and then China, Enver Hoxha believed ...
The nomadic odyssey of Eduardo Halfon continues as he searches for his roots through tangled childhood memories of a haunting family tragedy International Latino Book Award Winner * Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous wanderer travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory’s strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South. Mourning is a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.
Introducing a major new voice in Brazilian letters. Set among a Lebanese immigrant community in the Brazilian port of Manaus, The Brothers is the story of identical twins, Yaqub and Omar, whose mutual jealousy is offset only by their love for their mother. But it is Omar who is the object of Zana's Jocasta-like passion, while her husband, Halim, feels her slipping away from him, as their beautiful daughter, RGnia, makes a tragic claim on her brothers' affection. Vivid, exotic, and lushly atmospheric, The Brothers is the story of a family's disintegration, of a changing city and the culture clash between the native-born inhabitants and a new immigrant group, and of the future the next generation will make from the ruins.