Parties in New York are like anthropological field trips - you never know whom you'll meet or what you'll find. Recently I was milling around a self-consciously hip event, and, as is typical in this city of high achievers, before being asked my name I was asked what I do. I answered, "I'm a therapist, and I'm writing a book." The handsome young man standing next to me was also working on a book. "What are you writing about?" I asked him. "Physics," he answered. Politely, I mustered the next question, "What kind of physics?" I can't remember what his answer was, because the conversation about physics ended abruptly when someone asked me, "And you? What's your book about?" "Couples and eroticism," I answered.

Obesity and overeating have joined sex as central issues in the lives of many women today. In the United States, 50% of women are estimated to be overweight. Every women's magazine has a diet column. Diet doctors and clinics flourish. The names of diet foods are now part of our general vocabulary. Physical fitness and beauty are every woman's goals. While this preoccupation with fat and food has become so common that we tend to take it for granted, being fat, feeling fat and the compulsion to overeat are, in fact, serious ans painful experiences for the women involved.

L'Asie est une notion géographique qui relève d'un regard extérieur, celui des Occidentaux. La perception d'origine, celle des Grecs, imprègne durablement, depuis le Vème siècle avant notre ère, la représentation que s'en est fait l'Europe. Le récit que donne Hérodote des guerres médiques (une approximation puisque les Grecs confondent ici les Perses et Mèdes) construit l'Asie comme le contrepoint de l'Europe, un au-delà barbare et fabuleux, caractérisée par la démesure de ses dirigeants.

Abbey theatre, Dublin, created in 1904 as a successor to the Irish Literary theatre founded in Dublin 1899 by littérateurs (including *Yeats, Lady *Gregory and Edward Martyn (1859-1923)) and amateur actors wishing to produce an Irish national drama in opposition to commercial theatre.

On her way home she stopped at the house of her best friend, Nancy Byrne, to find that their friend Annette O'Brien was also there. Since the Byrnes had only one room downstairs which served as a kitchen, dining room and sitting room, and it was clear that Nancy had news of some sort to impart, some of which Annette seemed already to know. Nancy used Eilis's arrival as an excuse to go out for a walk so they could talk in confidence.

"You can't come", his older brother said. Georges spole in a low voice, even though the rest of his friends - a neighbourhood group of twelve - and thirteen-year-olds who styled themselves the Rip-Ass Raiders - were up at the end of the block, waiting for him. Not very patiently. "It's too dangerous".

Depuis les années 1970, dans le cadre de la modernisation qui définit la grande Révolution chinoise, la Chine est parvenue à occuper une position dans le monde plus diverse et plus dynamique. "Une seule Chine, une seule culture": voilà qui peut continuer de servir de slogan patriotique aux 1 250 000 Chinois, en écho à l'ancien idéal confucéen d'unité politique de l'élite dirigeante.

I have never been what you'd call a crying man. My ex-wife said that my "nonexistent emotional gradient" was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me for not crying at her father's funeral [...]. I "was unable to feel my feelings" in AA-speak.

At the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. " There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream."

There are places I'll remember all my life - red square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother's bedroom on the wrong side of 8-Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theatre of Death.

Cette histoire, on la connait mal. La Corée a en effet pâti d'un décalage funeste. Elle s'est repliée sur elle-même au moment de la première mondialisation, celle du capitalisme commercial, au tournant du XVIème et du XVIIème siècle.

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.

There was something you wanted to tell me, wasn't there? What was it you were trying to say? I feel like I drifted out of this conversation a long time ago. I stopped concentrating, I was thinking about something else, getting on with things, I wasn't listening, and I lost the thread of it. Well, you've got my attention now. Only I can't help thinking I've missed out on some of the more salient points.

I

Ned Williams came home to Kingsbridge in a snowstorm.
He sailed upstream from Combe Harbour in the cabin of a slow barge loaded with cloth from Antwerp and wine from Bordeaux. When he reckoned the boat was at last nearing Kingsbridge, he wrapped his French cloak more tightly around his shoulders, pulled the hood over his ears, stepped out onto the open deck, and looked ahead...

NEIGHBORS

Linda Mason was loose again.
It was three in the morning, and sleep had fled. Sarah had wandered to the kitchen in her robe, put on the kettle, and rummaged the cupboards until she found a box of Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea bags. She had set out a teacup and a saucer and put the tea bag in ther "tea for one" teapot when she heard someone outside in the dark, shouting her name. "Sarah! Sarah Wilkins! You'd better hurry! It's time to go!"

THE PRINCESS AND THE QUEEN, OR, THE BLACKS AND THE GREENS

The Dance of the Dragons is the flowery name bestowed upon the savage internecine struggle for the Iron Throne of Westeros fought between two rival branches of House Targaryen during the years 129 to 131 AC. To characterize the dark, turbulent, bloody doings of this period as a "dance" strikes us as grotesquely inappropriate. No doubt the phrase originated with some singer. "The Dying of the Dragons" would be altogether more fitting, but tradition and time have burned the more poetic usage into the pages of history, so we must dance along with the rest.

SOME DESPERADO

Shy gave the horse her heels, its forelegs buckled, and, before she had a notion what was happening, she and her saddle had bid each other a sad farewell.
She was given a flailing instant aloft to consider the situation. Not a good one at a brief assay, and the impending earth gave her no time for a longer. She did her best to roll with the fall - as she tried to do with most of her misfortunes - but the ground soon uncurled her, gave her a fair roughing up, and tossed her, flopping, into a patch of sun-shrivelled scrub.
Dust settled.