Stephen Cain – författare

Fictional languages are central to numerous creative works. This book examines such languages in a wide range of literature, films, and television shows. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on particular works. Many of these works are widely taught, such as All's Well That Ends Well, Gulliver's Travels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Utopia, while others are popular books, films, and television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cat's Cradle, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars. Thus the encyclopedia helps students understand texts central to the curriculum and popular culture. Each entry discusses the role of imaginary languages in a particular work. Entries range from antiquity to the present and close with suggestions for further reading. The encyclopedia ends with a selected bibliography and includes various helpful finding aids.Some of the most popular creative works are appealing because of the artificial worlds their authors create. In many of these works, fictional languages are essential to the setting and plot, and often help the author comment on social issues. This encyclopedia examines fictional and fantastic languages in a broad range of literature, films, and television shows.Each entry discusses the features of the invented language central to the work and relates it to the film, literary text, or television program. Entries provide suggestions for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected bibliography. Because many of the works discussed are central to the curriculum, the Encyclopedia will help students understand these texts and the importance of language. At the same time, the volume's coverage of popular books, films, and television series invites students to explore more critically those works that are most likely to interest them.

Eight highly trained but retired SAS members find their skills in demand worldwide. Their team leader Jonnie McBride lives in Thailand where he is contacted by billionaire Vanessa Stock, whose twin sister has been kidnapped by a human slave trader. The high octane story takes its reader on a journey of power, wealth, lust and murder from America to England, Oman to Cyprus and Turkey in order to kill the man that Jonnie McBride thought was already dead.

Having successfully rescued a group of women from the clutchesof a Turkish slave trader, Jonnie McBride returns to Thailandwhere he is contacted by the CIA to carry-out a covert operationto assassinate the leaders of the Philippines terrorist groups AbuSayyaf and the Muslim Islamic Liberation Front. He is informedthat the leaders intend to gather on the island of Siquijor in thePhilippines in order to join forces. McBride and a select numberof his elite team meet in Cebu before traveling to Leyte and thenon to their targets in Siquijor but fi nd the mission is compromisedby a mole within the CIA.

A double-lunged bong hit of mid-Eighties post-punk college rock, Gertrude Stein, art films, and the comedic legacy of Laurel and Hardy (including such great standup teams as HD and Ezra Pound, Jesus and Judas, and Steve McCaffery and bpNichol). Jeff Derksen says: 'If reading is sixty-nining, then dyslexicon satisfies at both ends. Stephen Cain disentangles everyday life into its constituent emotional, intellectual, sexual and cultural parts -- people, the city, books, music - only to recombine them into a new set of relations ...It's a sexy m-f of a book. Put it on your turntables.'

With Canada / US relations in the proverbial toilet (American Standard, of course), Stephen Cain's third book blenderizes 'pop' culture, politics and poetry to befuddle the border. From the Howl-like opening rant about the militarism of the US to the satirical 'History of Canada,' this collection interrogates nationalism and cultural identity on both sides of the 49th parallel and attempts to show that Auden was wrong: poetry can make things happen. American Standard/Canada Dry includes odes to video games, poems culled from Viagra junk mail and CNN reports on the war, ruminations on Canadian poets, travelogues, concrete poems, mistranslations of bird poems, and riffs on peculiar Canadianisms, including homophonic translations of Quebecois lyrics. Deftly oscillating between vitriolic verse and humour, the poems in American Standard/Canada Dry interrogate poetics, nationalism and Tim Hortons as thoroughly as a burly border avant-guard; they're your passport to the land of a new political poetry.