Picador Shorts

An intimate, quirky, and soulful portrait of the many lives that swirl and teem in that microcosm of the universe, the ocean rock pool. In this standalone extract from Adam Nicolson's Life Between the Tides, the reader gets a close-up view of some of the ocean's most intriguing characters. The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello. In this distilled version of the powerful, revelatory Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson takes the reader on a wonder-filled tour of some of the animal residents of the rock pools that are the stage for so much of the life and poetry of the ocean. We visit with the sandhopper, prawn, winkle, crab, and anemone, and each episode reenacts the book's idea of the inner drama of life in this cloistered and vibrant space. Nicolson writes "with scientific rigor and a poet's sense of wonder" (The American Scholar). He animates the world of the rock pool and provides an essential perspective on a marine world as intricate and infinite as our own and not much further off than the tips of our noses. The Living Will Say Hello is part of the Picador Shorts series "Oceans, Rivers, and Streams," in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small. Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, landscape, and great literature. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters. He lives on a farm in Sussex.

A quirky, intimate, and eye-opening look into the ways of thinking like a fish. An extract from the much-loved modern classic on the subject of fish consciousness, What a Fish Knows. Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? Jonathan Balcombe dives in among our marine cousins to explore the essential questions of how fish perceive and process the world. With his ethologist's gift for showing us the hidden depths of questions we've routinely preferred to think of as simple, and his raconteur's flair for the surprising and the curious, Balcombe takes us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian―in other words, much like us. Using humor and a repertoire of some of the most surprising fish facts you've ever heard, Balcombe shakes up what you think you know about what's going on inside the mind of these denizens of the deep. Fish Sense is part of the Picador Shorts series "Oceans, Rivers, and Streams" in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small. Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behavior. His books include Pleasurable Kingdom, Second Nature, The Exultant Ark, What a Fish Knows-a New York Times bestseller now available in fifteen languages-and Super Fly. He has published more than sixty scholarly papers and book chapters, as well as essays, opinions, and letters in popular magazines and newspapers. He lives in Belleville, Ontario, where in his spare time he enjoys biking, baking, birding, Bach, and trying to understand the neighborhood squirrels.

A captivating tour through some of our most cherished marine food traditions, and the danger of extinction that they increasingly face in today's world. In this standalone extract from Eating to Extinction, the distinguished BBC food journalist Dan Saladino travels the world to experience and document our most at-risk foods from the sea before it's too late. From exploring the curious case of the wild Scottish salmon and its tumultuous history; to observing the elaborate and highly ritualized process of making Japanese shio-katsu, that prized form of dried skipjack tuna; to learning about the artisanal production of dried mullet roe by the Imraguen in Mauritania; the ocean foodways Saladino profiles here are essential guides to treasured foods the rest of us have forgotten or didn't know existed. Throughout these original and grippingly written chapters, Saladino shows us that when foods become endangered, we risk the loss of not only traditional foodways, but also flavors, smells, and textures that may never be experienced again. And he also shows how endangering stocks of at-risk fish comes with the added loss of the human cultures that are tied together with them, and the greater dangers that overfishing poses to marine ecosystems at large. From the Sea is part of the Picador Shorts series "Oceans, Rivers, and Streams" in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small. Dan Saladino is a renowned food journalist who has worked at the BBC for over twenty-five years. For more than a decade he has traveled the world, recording stories of foods at risk of extinction-from cheeses made in the foothills of a remote Balkan mountain range to unique varieties of rice grown in southern China. His work has been recognized by the James Beard Foundation, the Guild of Food Writers, and the Fortnum and Mason Food and Drink Awards.