Charlie Williams – författare

Journals and letters, translated from the original French, bring Michaux's work to modern readers and scientists.Known to today's biologists primarily as the 'Michx,' at the end of more than 700 plant names, AndrÉ Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chÊnes de l'AmÉrique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.  Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, AndrÉ Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785-1797 is the first complete English edition of Michaux's American journals. This copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger scientific context of the day.  To carry out his mission, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships - debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild animals, even shipwreck - that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of Madagascar.

In this darkly comedic follow-up to Charlie Williams’ breakthrough novel Deadfolk, Hoppers head doorman Royston Blake is once again up to his eyeballs in trouble of the worst kind. Since his face-off with the Munton brothers, Blake has been enjoying life as a “pillar” of the Mangel community. Sure, it’s a bleak and rather dodgy town, but it’s his town all the same. At least, until enigmatic outsider Nick Nopoly waltzes in and starts collecting friends faster than can possibly be legal. Blake doesn’t think much of him until he notices a change in the behavior of Hoppers’ younger clientele: less beery violence, more nonsensical blathering. But when Doug the shopkeeper comes to Blake for help “sorting out” the newcomer (who just happens to be dating Doug’s teenage daughter), the bruiser figures helping out Doug will be good for business…never mind the 400 cigarettes and 400 cans of lager the shopkeeper has offered as payment. Of course, Mangel is Mangel, and it wouldn’t be a normal day if Blake didn’t soon find himself in an unholy mess. Raunchy, violent, and hysterical, Booze and Burn is an addictive trip into the dark underbelly of small-town England.