ELT & Literary Studies Books

Book SynopsisThis revision of the popular critical edition of Bram Stoker''s late Victorian gothic novel presents the 1897 first edition text along with critical essays that introduce students to Dracula from contemporary cultural, psychoanalytic, gender, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. An additional essay demonstrates how various critical perspectives can be combined. The text and essays are complemented by contextual documents, introductions (with bibliographies), and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms.New to the second edition are essays that reflect cultural, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, plus an essay that combines several critical perspectives. The cultural documents section features new topics (the lesbian vampire, the new woman), and the updated editorial matter includes a selective bibliography of Dracula films of note.

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Book Synopsis‘The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade…' – Financial Times‘To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley’ – Times Literary Supplement ‘Brilliant and enthralling' – Independent On Sunday'Wonderfully vivid' – SpectatorThe definitive and richly woven biography of Mary Shelley, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein  The creator of the world’s most famous outsider became one herself . . . There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From thaTrade Review‘The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade… Here, for the first time, Shelley steps off the page as a living, thinking, suffering woman, fraught and caught in the web of her own intelligence.’ -- Jackie Wullschlager * Financial Times *‘To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley.’ * Times Literary Supplement *‘Brilliant and enthralling, this portrait illuminates Mary’s life in many unexpected ways.’ * Independent On Sunday *‘A wonderfully vivid, human and learned portrait of the woman who created Frankenstein, married Shelley, and, amazingly, survived.’ * Spectator *'Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour’s affectionate and well-written biography, concisely sketches the background of scientific inquiry that influenced Shelley’s early intellectual development… Seymour keenly brings out how fraught Mary Shelley’s own life was with tragedies of childbirth and infant mortality… In 1818, the Shelleys moved to Italy…where Byron now was. They formed a tense and inbred circle, sharply evoked by Seymour: the women eyeing each other jealously, each serially or simultaneously in love with Shelley or Byron or both… Miranda Seymour is a novelist as well as an experienced biographer… She has vivid narrative gifts and a perceptive understanding of the main personalities.' -- New York Times Notable Books * The New York Times *'Splendid biography.' * The New Yorker *'Miranda Seymour’s lucid biography arrives as the general reader’s guide to Mary Shelley’s ascent to academic cult status… Seymour is persuasive.' * The Guardian *'Gracefully sweeping through the dramatic life of the woman behind history’s most legendary monster, Miranda Seymour unbuttons a world of brilliant literary figures in Mary Shelley and re-creates the imaginative time in which Frankenstein was born… The Mary we meet here, brilliantly brought to life by Seymour from previously unexplored sources, is flawed, brave, generous, and impetuous.' * Goodreads *'I envy any reader of this excellent biography who happens not to be very familiar with the lives of Shelley and the girl who eloped with him when she was sixteen.' -- Diana Athill * The Oldie *'The most thorough account of Shelley’s life…eminently readable.' * Choice *'A harrowing life, wonderfully retold.' -- Washington Post Best Books of the Year * The Washington Post Book World *'Seymour is adept at capturing the cultural climate and social context of the early nineteenth century in the major English and Italian settings of Shelley’s life story. She has done hard and valuable work in finely combining the correspondence of the many players in this story, and reconstructing the likeliest version of events---no mean feat with a circle, such as Shelley’s, that was rife with contention, backbiting and self-promotion.' * The Baltimore Sun *'One of the finest and most significant biographies of recent years.' * Library Journal *'Seymour’s book is a timeless representation of a woman who endured skewed public perceptions about herself and her loved ones.' * Commercial Appeal *'Mary’s tragic life story makes for a biography as intriguing as her masterpiece.' * The Oregonian *'Seymour’s scrupulous, almost anxiously tender portrait peels away the myths like layers of tissue paper shrouding a lost relic. This is a fine biography that gives us the dense background to Mary Shelley’s work while losing none of the searing glamour and pain of her sad, extraordinary life.' * The Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisEvery bookshop has a story.Trade Review...it wonderfully illustrates the love of books that sellers and buyers across the world can have * Image Magazine *...a perfect present for any booklover of your acquaintance -- Harriet Devine

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Book SynopsisThe OCR-endorsed publication from Bloomsbury for the Greek AS and A-Level set text prescriptions for examination in 2017-2019, giving full Greek text, commentary and vocabulary and a detailed introduction for each text that also covers the prescription to be read in English for A Level. The texts covered are:ASThucydides, Histories, Book IV: 1114, 2123, 2628 Plato, Apology, 18a7 to 24b2Homer, Odyssey X: 144399Sophocles, Antigone, lines 199, 497525, 531581, 891928 A-levelThucydides, Histories, Book IV: 2940Plato, Apology, 35eendXenophon, Memorabilia, Book 1.II.12 to 1.II.38Homer, Odyssey IX: 231460Sophocles, Antigone, lines 162222, 248331, 441496, 9981032Aristophanes, Acharnians, 1203, 366392Trade ReviewThis book is every teacher's dream. It is a one-stop shop ... [of] excellent value as it replaces the need to buy several separate volumes — and it does so in spendidly attractive style ... The texts it contains will be reading for anybody who has mastered GCSE and will be useful in university courses for years to come. * Classics for All Reviews *The book is, refreshingly, mainly the offspring of classroom teachers and is all the more welcome for that. * Journal of Classics Teaching *Table of ContentsPreface Then for each text: Introduction Text Commentary Vocabulary

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Book SynopsisEarly Readers presents a number of innovative ways through which we might capture or infer traces of readers in cultures where most evidence has been lost.

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Book SynopsisModern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century.

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Book Synopsis''Witty and geekily eclectic'' The TimesAn erudite and amusing exploration'' Financial Times''Full of jawdropping facts'' Mail on Sunday''Remarkable . . . engrossing'' Sunday Times''A pleasure'' Spectator''An infectiously enthusiastic history'' Times Literary SupplementThe encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Now these huge books sell for almost nothing on eBay while we derive information from our phones. What have we lost in this transition? All the Knowledge in the World tracks the story from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. It exposes how encyclopaedias reflect our changing attitudes towards sexuality, race and technology, uncovers a fascinating part of our shared past and wonders whether the promise of complete knowledge - that most human of ambitions - will forever be beyond our grasp.<Trade ReviewWitty and geekily eclectic . . . celebrates encyclopaedias in all their quirky, leatherbound glory * THE TIMES *Simon Garfield's history of the encyclopaedia is full of jawdropping facts, and he turns what might have been a dry subject into an enjoyable, quirky, highly informative tour . . . fascinating * MAIL ON SUNDAY *A delightful romp through the history of trying to summarise all there is to be known. Simon Garfield displays his inimitable mix of curiosity, learnedness and wit -- TIM HARFORDRemarkable . . . engrossing. It is impossible to give readers an impression of the scope and power of Garfield's knowledge and imagination * SUNDAY TIMES *An erudite and amusing exploration of the human quest for knowledge * FINANCIAL TIMES *Simon Garfield's fascinating story of encyclopaedias is itself brilliantly encyclopaedic -- DAVID CRYSTALAll human life is here - and animal, vegetable and mineral life, too -- HARRY MOUNTA pleasure. Garfield writes fluidly, cheerily and charmingly, even while the breeziness does not detract from the scale of his ambition: to understand nothing less than humans' need for knowledge and how to convey and preserve it * THE SPECTATOR *Illuminating . . . An infectiously enthusiastic history, inspired by genuine affection * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *A gripping story - so much I didn't know here! I loved this book -- SARA WHEELERSuitably encyclopaedic - written with all [Garfield's] usual wit and sharp eye for memorable facts * READER'S DIGEST *A valentine to the monumental significance of encyclopaedias, reminding us how, until the arrival of computers, "they did more than any other single thing to shape our understanding of the world". Illustrates Garfield's capacity to synthesise wide-ranging research and present it in a lucid, vibrant style with his characteristic eye for detail * IRISH EXAMINER *Delightful. Garfield's witty history captures the obsessive, quixotic and sometimes error-filled quests of those . . . who have attempted to corral all the world's information into a single source * NEW YORK TIMES *The life and death of the encyclopedia is recounted in Simon Garfield's excellent new book . . . Garfield is lucid, witty, learned and clearly a bibliomaniac . . . In All the Knowledge in the World, he has produced a lively threnody to the encyclopedic impulse . . . Impressively comprehensive * WALL STREET JOURNAL *A fascinating history . . . Lively and informative * WASHINGTON POST *Simon Garfield is the only author who could ever keep me up at night reading about encyclopedias. A brilliant book about knowledge itself -- DEIRDRE MASKMagnificent . . . The story [Garfield] tells is truly extraordinary . . . A perfectly styled work of literature - at times sad, at times funny, but always full of life . . . One of those few books that I've found impossible to put down -- Vitali Vitaliev * ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY *Anyone fascinated by the origins, evolution and the ultimate mortality of print encyclopedias will love this book. All the Knowledge in the World is excellent at telling the long historical story of all encyclopedias, including those that predated Britannica. The book does a great job of detailing the 20th-century history of Britannica and the full story of Wikipedia's creation, challenges and impact * INSIDE HIGHER ED *

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Book SynopsisCalifornia Dreams and American Contradictions establishes a genealogy of western American women writers publishing between 1870 and 1965 to argue that both white women and women of color regionalized dominant national literary trends to negotiate the contradictions between an American liberal individualism and American equality. Monique McDade analyzes works by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sui Sin Far, and a previously unstudied African American writer, Eva Rutland, to trace an archive of western American women writers who made visible what dominant genres subsumed under images of American progress and westward expansion. Read together these writers provide new entry points into the political debates that have plagued the United States since the nation’s founding and that set the precedent for westward expansion. Their romances, regional sketches, memoirs, and journalism point to the inherently antagonistic relationship between a RoosTrade Review“California Dreams and American Contradictions shows great intellectual agility in its ability to make complex connections using fluent and highly readable language. It is deeply intersectional. . . . It is a book that any scholar on the topic will want to read from cover to cover, and it opens new ground for future scholarship.”—Victoria Lamont, author of Westerns: A Women’s History“Especially in our current moment of reckoning with the legacies of exclusion and racism in the United States and globally, this study performs essential work of historical recovery and intervention. It makes a substantial contribution to feminist critical regionalism in the U.S. West and to feminist and American studies more broadly. It engages a powerful set of theoretical tools to create a sophisticated argument across disciplines and fields of study.”—Audrey Goodman, author of A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s WritingTable of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: A Frontier Ethic and the American Paradox 1. “Autoethnographic” Heroines: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Sentimental Novels, Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don 2. The Liberal Fantasy: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Sentimental Advocacy in Ramona 3. Sui Sin Far’s Genre of Intervention: The Regional Sketch and the “Real” in Realism 4. An Autobiography of Western American Integration: Eva Rutland and Her Alternative Politics of Respectability Conclusion: Joan Didion’s Sacramento and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Deep Story” Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisLooking across the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, its literature, film, television, comic books, and other media, we can see multiple examples of what Shelley S. Rees calls a “changeling western,” what others have called “weird westerns,” and what Michael K. Johnson refers to as “speculative westerns”—that is, hybrid western forms created by merging the western with one or more speculative genres or subgenres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate history.Speculative Wests investigates both speculative westerns and other speculative texts that feature western settings. Just as “western” refers both to a genre and a region, Johnson’s narrative involves a study of both genre and place, a study of the “speculative Wests” that have begun to emerge in contemporary texts such as the zombie-threatened California of Justina Ireland’s Deathless Divide (202Trade Review"This book will be of interest to readers from genre studies and beyond, notably those from ecocriticism, migration studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, and even trauma studies."—Adrianna Michell, H-Environment"Johnson manages to give form, and conceptual cohesion to what most current criticism has only examined in studies with a narrower focus. For this, scholars and readers of westerns, science fiction, and speculative fiction, owe him a debt of gratitude."—Christopher Conway, Journal of Popular Culture"Johnson's book is eye-opening and could be useful for writers or readers who want to be challenged by perspectives on Western fiction that they might not have previously considered."—Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Roundup Magazine“Michael K. Johnson’s Speculative Wests has a unique feel in its cogent analysis of the western motif in recent speculative fiction written by BIPOC authors between 2016 and 2020. He reinvigorates frontier mythology with politically charged genre critiques regarding time travel, alternate history, and future wars linked to the American West and its history.”—Isiah Lavender III, author of Race in American Science Fiction and Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement“A timely and astute study that enlarges our understanding of U.S. ethnic futurisms through conceptualizing ‘speculative westerns’: new hybridized forms suturing the western and speculative genres. Through incisive close readings, Michael K. Johnson charts alternative spatial and temporal trajectories of the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands.”—Cathryn J. Merla-Watson, coeditor of Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture“The deft analysis of race as it intersects with and challenges genre traditions—the western and speculative fiction—makes this an extremely timely and important book.”—Sara L. Spurgeon, author of Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier“By looking at speculative wests that ‘disrupt’ authenticity and truth claims latent in the mythos of the western, this book provides another example of the contemporary relevance of the western as part of a hybrid genre that enables meditations on past, present, and future.”—Rebecca M. Lush, professor of literature and writing studies at California State University–San MarcosTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Race, Time Travel, and the Western 2. Trauma, Time Travel, and Legacies of Violence 3. Alternate Cartographies of the West(ern) in Indigenous Futurist Works 4. Speculative Borderlands I: Mestizaje, Temporality, and History 5. Speculative Borderlands II: Time Travel and Cartographies of Trauma 6. Speculative Slave Narrative Westerns Afterword Notes Index

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Book SynopsisWhen it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak to this interconnection and show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity.Trade Review"A significant work by a major scholar with a well-deserved international reputation, The Implicated Subject develops a new and necessary conceptual vocabulary for the conflicting histories of our world. While drawing on a global range of histories and texts, the book never loses focus on the contemporary moment." -- Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway * University of London *"A pathbreaking meditation on the politics and ethics of remembrance in our time, The Implicated Subject shifts the discussion in a variety of disciplines from the dated notions of guilt and innocence to the complexities of responsibility and accountability. This is imperative reading for our age of muddled categories and retreat from personal and scholarly engagement." -- Amir Eshel * Stanford University *"My students and I have been waiting for this book. Offering a fresh vocabulary to confront our personal and collective responsibility in the face of massive political violence, past and present, The Implicated Subject is sure to advance the conversation. Its stakes are as high as its thinking is subtle, clear, and persuasive." -- Marianne Hirsch * Columbia University *"This is a bold project....as we confront a climate catastrophe of global proportions, we must all face the future as implicated subjects." -- Zoë Waxman * Times Higher Education *"Rothberg's strength lies in his remarkable ability to explain complicated theoretical issues in a few sentences, weaving together the political and the ethical, the historical and the aesthetic....[This is a] brilliant and courageous discussion of contemporary political identity. I have no doubt that this book will become, much like Rothberg's previous work, Multidirectional Memory, a basic reference for students of our interregnum world." -- Nitzan Lebovic * Critical Inquiry *"This is a notable book that will reconfigure debates over memory and power." -- Miguel Cardina * Memoirs *"[The] term 'implicated subject' is a valuable contribution to the vocabulary of human rights and should be immediately adopted for use across a variety of disciplines, from political science and philosophy to history and economics." -- Guy Lancaster * International Journal on World Peace *"[Rothberg] avoids the charged terms guilt and morality in order to attain a fresh perspective onto why people of various historical and cultural contexts participate in wrongdoing, even in spite of knowing better. Such a fresh perspective is urgently needed in order to move beyond a mere naming, blaming, and singling out of culprits, towards any analysis of the complexity of involvements." -- Juliane Prade-Weiss * Journal of Perpetrator Research *"As is often the case with the best academic work, The Implicated Subject takes something that had hitherto sat in a theoretical blind-spot and, through clear description and incisive discussion of examples, makes that concept seem rather obvious in hindsight....[It] will make an immediate impact on, and a valuable supplement to, academic work addressing issues of perpetration and complicity." -- Ivan Stacy * Textual Practice *"After coining the groundbreaking notion of multidirectional memory, Rothberg's The Implicated Subject is another crucial contribution to the scholarship on memory studies....Undoubtedly, the notions of implicated subject and implication provide scholars with precious tools to complicate the study of the roles of a wide range of transnational social actors and groups who, at different levels, directly or indirectly engaged contexts where human atrocities were committed." -- Ana Lucia Araujo * American Historical Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroductionFrom Victims and Perpetrators to Implicated Subjects chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the conceptual framework of the book. Starting from a discussion of responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin and other examples of racist violence, the chapter argues that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present and proposes a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The chapter distinguishes an approach based on implication and implicated subjects from related approaches to complicity, postmemory, and the beneficiary; it lays out the stakes of the book; and provides an account of the chapters to come. 1The Transmission Belt of Domination: Theorizing the Implicated Subject chapter abstractThis chapter discusses thinking on intersectionality, complicity, and responsibility that contributes to an understanding of the implicated subject. It considers reflections on victimhood, perpetration, responsibility, and memory that have emerged in the field of Holocaust studies, and supplements it with approaches to structural injustice and the Black feminist theory of intersectionality. Drawing on these diverse sources, the chapter formulates a theory of implication and the implicated subject that offers an alternative to the usual accounts of human rights violations and their aftermaths. Above all, this theory leaves behind the detached and disinterested spectators who dominate discussions of distant suffering in favor of entangled, impure subjects of historical and political responsibility. The implicated subject, the chapter argues, is a transmission belt of domination. 2On (Not) Being a Descendant: Implicated Subjects and the Legacies of Slavery chapter abstractThis chapter begins by considering what the concept of the "implicated subject" can lend to the debates about historical redress, restitution, and reparations that have accompanied attempts to confront the long-distance legacies of transatlantic slavery. Next, in order to assess those legacies, it reflects on the very word "legacy" along with its conceptual kin. In a third section, the chapter turns to a literary example, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, in order to think further about how the category of the descendant functions in the aftermath of traumatic histories. Kincaid's powerful polemic provides a visceral and affectively charged example of what implication might mean for the beneficiaries of slavery's legacies. Finally, the chapter considers Kincaid's text in dialogue with Catherine Hall and Nicholas Draper's Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project in order to distinguish between two forms of implication: the genealogical and the structural. 3Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge's Implicated Aesthetic chapter abstractThis chapter considers the implicated aesthetic of the Jewish South African artist William Kentridge. Kentridge's work serves as inspiration for thinking about the narrative form embedded in transitional justice—a politico-legal regime that has emerged in response to transformations like the one in South Africa. The chapter provides a brief introduction to the "narratology" of transitional justice. It argues that transitional justice brings with it a fundamental narrative tension involving the negotiation between continuity and discontinuity, on the one hand, and between implicated and disembedded subjects, on the other. This framework helps open up the narrative dimensions of Kentridge's experiments in animated filmmaking, where he first begins to explore the minimally narrative genre of the procession. The two final sections of the chapter illustrate how Kentridge's quasi-autobiographical exploration of "complex implication" opens up a deep, multidirectional history of race that is simultaneously post-slavery and post-Holocaust. 4From Gaza to Warsaw: Multidirectional Memory and the Perpetuator chapter abstractThis chapter reflects on complex implication through the example of Jewish diasporic critique of Israel. It focuses on a controversy that arose when a radical American sociology professor declared that "Gaza is Israel's Warsaw" and forwarded students a photo essay with "parallel images of Nazis and Israelis," several of which depict the Warsaw Ghetto. Through this example, the chapters maps the range of forms that public memory can take in politically charged situations in which complex forms of implication are at play. That mapping includes an extended discussion of artist Alan Schechner. A concluding section turns to two Jewish critics of Israeli policy, Judith Butler and Ariella Azoulay, to argue that thinking through implication—rather than vulnerability or perpetration—represents the most productive avenue for solidarity. The concept of implication, the chapter concludes, offers an opportunity to confront the role of perpetuators of injustice. 5Under the Sign of Suitcases: The Holocaust Internationalism of Marceline Loridan-Ivens chapter abstractThis chapter considers the life of filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens. Loridan-Ivens was a Holocaust survivor who experienced the emancipatory and destructive possibilities of revolutionary struggle when she took up anticolonial causes. The chapter begins by exploring relevant varieties of internationalism: socialist and anti-imperialist internationalism and human rights. It recounts how Loridan-Ivens first entered the public sphere through the testimony she gave in the film Chronicle of a Summer about her deportation to Auschwitz. Later, Loridan-Ivens went on to make films in such political hotspots as Algeria, Vietnam, and China. The chapter focuses especially on the film about the Vietnam War she made with her partner Joris Ivens and argues that it involves a shift on Loridan-Ivens's part from the position of surviving victim to implicated subject offering internationalist solidarity. Yet, the chapter concludes, such solidarity comes with its own pitfalls that also deserve critical exploration. 6"Germany is in Kurdistan": Hito Steyerl's Images of Implication chapter abstractThis chapter addresses project undertaken by the internationally prominent German artist and theorist Hito Steyerl. In the video November, and in subsequent videos, performances, and essays, Steyerl explores the life and death of her childhood friend Andrea Wolf, a radical activist who joined the PKK (Kurdish militants), and was killed in battle by the Turkish state. In Steyerl's hands, Wolf's life becomes an opportunity to reflect on questions of internationalism and political solidarity. While Wolf's comrades have celebrated her as a martyr and internationalist hero and the dominant media have typically labeled Wolf a terrorist, Steyerl comes to a more complex and ambivalent verdict about her friend and her commitments. In refusing binary simplifications and highlighting how the complexities of Wolf's story intersect with her own story, Steyerl's project helps us interrogate the implicated subject as a figure of historical responsibility and internationalist solidarity in a time of globalization. 7Conclusion: Transfiguring Implication chapter abstractThe conclusion considers what it means to call the implicated subject a "figure" and addresses the widespread, but uneven nature of implication along with the possibilities for transfiguring it in the direction of long-distance solidarity. Reflecting back on the preceding chapters, it offers eleven theses that synthesize the argument of the book.

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Book SynopsisHow does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence? In this important new work, Mark Christian Thompson attempts to answer these questions, examining ontology in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philosophy. Specifically, the book reads King through 1920s German academic debates between Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and others on Being, gnosticism, existentialism, political theology, and sovereignty. It further examines King's dissertation about Tillich, as well other key texts from his speculative writings, sermons, and speeches, positing King's understanding of divine love as a form of Heideggerian ontology articulated in beloved community. Tracking the presence of twentieth-century German philosophy and theology in his thought, the book situates King's ontology conceptually and socially in nonviolent protest. In so doing, The Critique of Nonviolence reads King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963) with Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" (1921) to reveal the depth of King's political-theological critique of police violence as the illegitimate appropriation of the racialized state of exception. As Thompson argues, it is in part through its appropriation of German philosophy and theology that King's ontology condemns the perpetual American state of racial exception that permits unlimited police violence against Black lives.Trade Review"Reading King with Heidegger and Benjamin, Thompson's study is a welcome and intellectually engaging contribution to the recent renaissance of scholarship devoted to King's philosophical thought."—Robert J Gooding-Williams, Columbia University"A tour de force! Essential for students of King, Black Power, and twentieth-century Africana and European philosophy. Thompson's King is an important counterweight to the simple, sanitized saint that haunts mainstream politics."—Paul C. Taylor, Vanderbilt University"Thompson invites us to rethink King's nonviolent strategy as a conceptually rigorous moral, philosophical, and racial commitment. Critical for scholars and students interested in King, peace studies, Black studies, history, religious studies, and philosophy."—James Haile III, University of Rhode IslandTable of ContentsIntroduction: Ontology and Nonviolence 1. Being and Nonviolence 2. Nonbeing and Nonviolence 3. Black Power as Nonviolence 4. Gnosticism and Nonviolence 5. Divine Nonviolence Conclusion: Eros as Nonviolence

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Book SynopsisUndertaken at the interface of critical theory and world literature, Moments of Capital sets out to grasp the unity and heterogeneity of global capital in the postcolonial present. Eli Jelly-Schapiro argues that global capital is composed of three synchronous moments: primitive accumulation, expanded reproduction, and the "synthetic dispossession" facilitated by financialization and privatization. These moments correspond to distinct economic and political forms, and distinct strands of theory and fiction. Moments of Capital integrates various intellectual traditions—from multiple trajectories of Marxist thought, to Weberian inquiries into the "spirit" of capitalism, to anticolonial accounts of racial depredation—to reveal the concurrent interrelation of the three moments of capital. The book's literary readings, meanwhile, make vivid the uneven texture and experience of capitalist modernity at large. Analyzing formally and thematically diverse novels—works by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Marlon James, Jennifer Egan, Eugene Lim, Rafael Chirbes, Neel Mukherjee, Rachel Kushner, and others—Jelly-Schapiro evinces the different patterns of feeling and consciousness that register, and hypothesize a way beyond, the contradictions of capital. This book develops a new conceptual key for the mapping of contemporary theory, world literature, and global capital itself. Trade Review"This book offers an exceptionally lucid synthesis of Marxist theory and postcolonial theory. Its informative, careful presentation should be transformative for critics of the contemporary—and make an effective primer for the Marx-curious and world-systems-wary. Wonderfully intelligent."—Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois Chicago"Jelly-Schapiro's thoughtful, rigorous scholarship gives us new ways of thinking about (seemingly) vastly different texts in relation to the global life of capitalism. A formidable achievement."—Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Oxford UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Moments of Capital 1. Primitive Accumulation 2. Expanded Reproduction 3. Synthetic Dispossession 4. Interrelations Conclusion: World Theory, World Literature

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Book Synopsis"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.Non lucet. It’s shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.A Dante clasping Virgil’s hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That’s what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis."—Jacques-Alain MillerTable of ContentsTHE SPIRIT OF THE NODES I. On the logical use of the sinthome, or Freud with Joyce II. On what makes a hole in the real III. On the knot as the subject’s support THE JOYCE TRAIL IV. Joyce and the fox riddle V. Was Joyce mad? VI. Joyce and imposed words THE INVENTION OF THE REAL VII. On a fallace that vouches for the real VIII. On sens, sex and the real IX. From the unconscious to the real BY WAY OF CONCLUSION X. The writing of the Ego Note APPENDICES Joyce the Symptom, by Jacques Lacan Presentation at Lacan’s Seminar, by Jacques Aubert Reading notes, by Jacques Aubert A note threaded stitch by stitch, by Jacques-Alain Miller Translator’s endnotes Index

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Book SynopsisDesigned to introduce the student or general reader to a largely unfamiliar area of Elizabethan theatrical activity, Five Elizabethan progress entertainments focuses on a group of entertainments mounted for the monarch in the closing years of her reign. Richly annotated, and prefaced by a substantial introduction, the texts enable an understanding of the motives underlying not only the progress itself, but the choice of locations the monarch elected to visit and the personal and political preoccupations of those with whom she determined to stay. Selected for their diversity, the entertainments exhibit the tensions underlying some royal visits, the lavish expenditure entailed for the monarch’s hosts and the overlap in terms of both material and authorship between the progress entertainments and the more widely studied products of the sixteenth-century stage.Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION: THE ROYAL PROGRESS THE ENTERTAINMENT AT COWDRAYIntroductionText THE ENTERTAINMENT AT ELVETHAMIntroductionText THE ENTERTAINMENT AT BISHAMIntroductionText THE ENTERTAINMENT AT MITCHAM IntroductionTextAppendixTHE ENTERTAINMENT AT CHISWICKIntroductionTextINDEX

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Book SynopsisThe names Edmund Spenser and John Donne are typically associated with different ages in English poetry, the former with the sixteenth century and the Elizabethan Golden Age, the latter with the ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century. This collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge this dichotomous view and to engage critically with both poets, not only at the sites of direct allusion, imitation, or parody, but also in terms of common preoccupations and continuities of thought, informed by the literary and historical contexts of the politically and intellectually turbulent turn of the century. Juxtaposing these two poets, so apparently unlike one another, for comparison rather than contrast changes our understanding of each poet individually and moves towards a more holistic, relational view of their poetics.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Spenser, Donne, and the trouble of periodization – Yulia Ryzhik1 Caring to turn back: overhearing Spenser in Donne – Richard Danson Brown 2 Comparing figures: figures of comparison and repetition in Spenser and Donne – Christopher D. Johnson 3 Refiguring Donne and Spenser: aspects of Ramist rhetoric – Niranjan Goswami 4 Artes poeticae: Spenser, Donne, and the metaphysical sublime – Patrick Cheney 5 Spenser and Donne look to the Continent – Anne Lake Prescott 6 Ovidian Spenser, Ovidian Donne – Linda Gregerson 7 Cosmic matters: Spenser, Donne, and the philosophic poem – Ayesha Ramachandran 8 ‘Straunge characters’: Spenser’s Busirane and Donne’s ‘Valediction of my name in the window’ – Elizabeth D. Harvey 9 Marriage and sacrifice: the poetics of the Epithalamia – Ramie Targoff 10 Spenser’s and Donne’s devotional poetics of scattering – David Marno 11 Eliot, Yeats, Joyce and the modernist reinvention of Spenser and Donne –Jane Grogan and Anne FogartyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book argues that modern Irish history encompasses a deep-seated fear of betrayal, and that this fear has been especially prevalent since the revolutionary period at the outset of the twentieth century. The author goes on to argue that the novel is the literary form most apt for the exploration of betrayal in its social, political and psychological dimensions. The significance of this thesis comes into focus in terms of a number of recent developments – most notably, the economic downturn (and the political and civic betrayals implicated therein) and revelations of the Catholic Church’s failure in its pastoral mission. As many observers note, such developments have brought the language of betrayal to the forefront of contemporary Irish life. This book offers a powerful analysis of modern Irish history as regarded from the perspective of some of its most incisive minds, including James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, Francis Stuart, Eugene McCabe and Anne Enright.Trade Review'The Judas Kiss charts a surprising path through Irish literature, but on every page its insights compel assent. That is the proof of criticism of a very high order.'David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California'Readers can't fail to be surprised, even astonished, by the mother lode of meaning and implication Gerry Smyth uncovers in The Judas kiss. The inflections of betrayal, treachery and infidelity he finds in modern Irish fiction, and by both implication and explication in Irish society, are shockingly numerous. Betrayal accompanies human nature and Christian culture, but is also potently Irish in its fictional and cultural incidence. The book cuts a broader literary swathe than its six subject novelists would suggest, and its critical imprint may well prove indelible.'John Wilson Foster, author of Irish Novels 1890–1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (2008)‘[…] the greatest compliment that one can pay a book: that it opens the way to further thinking. I certainly hope that this book initiates the kind of wide-scale reconsideration of the role of betrayal in Irish culture (and beyond), the potential richness of which Smyth proves in Judas Kiss.’James Alexander Fraser, Modernism/modernity, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2016‘[…] a thought provoking and astute work of criticism which uncovers a sharp anxiety about loyalty that troubles the roots of Irishness in fiction and in fact.’Edna Duffy, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 41 -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: Betrayal and the Irish NovelPart I 1. A short history of betrayal 2. Déirdre and the Sons of Usnach: a case study in Irish betrayal Part II3. ‘Trust not appearances’ – James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) 4. the landscape of betrayal – Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer (1925)5. a spy in the house of love– Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949)6. Jesus or Judas? – Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H (1971) 7. ‘Cangled both to treachery’ – Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales (1993) 8. ‘A family – a whole fucking country – drowning in shame’ – Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007)Index

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Book SynopsisBeckett and media provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The book analyses the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Beckett and media draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such, the book engages with Beckett as a media artist and examines the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Balazs Rapcsak and Mark NixonPart I Literature and theatre1 In search of times gone by: Stimuli, signals and wireless telegraphy in Beckett's novel WattWolf Kittler2 Beckett's exhausted media Armin Schäfer3 Micro-drama / techno-trauma: Between theatre as cultural form and true media theatreWolfgang Ernst4 Electrifying theatre: Beckett ’ s media mysticism in and beyond Rough for Theatre IIBalazs Rapcsak5 Beckett, the proscenium, mediaMartin HarriesPart II Screens and airwaves6 Beckett ’ s intermedial bodies: Remediating theatre through radio Pim Verhulst7 Angles of immunity: Beckett's Film Philipp Schweighauser8 Beckett's affective telepoeticsUlrika Maude9 Understanding QuadJulian Murphet10 Black screens: Beckett and television technologiesJonathan BignellPart III Digital Beckett11 Directing Play in digital cultureNicholas Johnson12 Editing Beckett in digital media: Towards a digital Complete Works EditionDirk Van HulleIndex

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Book SynopsisSara Paretsky is known for her influential V.I. Warshawski series, which transformed the masculine hard-boiled detective formula into a vehicle for feminist values. But Paretsky does more than this. Her novels also illustrate the extent to which detective fiction acts as a literature of trauma, allowing Paretsky to address the politics of agency in ways that go beyond the personal, for trauma always has a social and a political dimension. Paretsky’s work also exploits the way detective fiction mirrors the writing of history. Here, Paretsky uses the form to expose the partiality of historical accounts – whether they be personal, institutional, or national – that authorise ‘forgetting’ of a particularly insidious kind. Significantly, all these issues are explored within the framework of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel. As a result, Paretsky’s achievement forces us to acknowledge the deeply subversive potential of detective fiction.Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Repositioning the debate2. Sexual politics and agency3. Community and empowerment4. Global capital and marginality5. Destabilising the status quoAfterwordIndex

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Book SynopsisSwoon is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on swooning’s rich history as well as its potential to provide new insights into the contemporary. This study demonstrates that passing-out has had a pivotal place in English literature. Beginning with an introduction to the swoon as a marker of aesthetic sensitivity, it includes chapters on swooning and generic transformation in Chaucer and Shakespeare; morbid, femininised swoons and excessive affect in romantic, gothic, and modernist works; irony, cliché and bathos in the swoons of contemporary romance fiction. This book revisits key texts to show that passing-out has been intimately connected to explorations of emotionality, ecstasy and transformation; to depictions of sickness and dying; and to performances of gender and gendering. Swoon offers an exciting new approach the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.Trade Review'In this absorbing study she [Naomi Booth] argues that being out for the count – eyes closed, ears deaf, pulse thready – functions as telling testimony in a range of narratives from Troilus and Criseyde to Fifty Shades of Grey by way of Dracula.'TLS"Booth’s dizzyingly wide scope enables her to track how contemporary swoons reimagine, develop, or fall back on what has come before and to draw compelling arguments about the cultural, artistic and scientific contexts of each time period she considers; as she explains, ‘a literary history of swooning is also a history of crux points for how we have imagined the body’ (10). .. this work greatly advances our understanding of swoons in literature and their significance ... uncover[ing] new and surprising perspectives on what it means to pass out. As a whole, Swoon might appeal most to researchers working on the medical humanities or the history of the emotions, but individual chapters would also reward those interested in a particular topic, text, or period. A fiction writer as well as an academic, Booth crafts prose which is pleasure to read, demonstrating a deftness with language and syntax which is thoughtful, lucid, and often playful. ... Swoon frequently illuminates ways that bodily and emotional vulnerability is understood differently for men and women; her exploration of falling unconscious thus makes us conscious not only of the perils and pleasures of dizzying aesthetic, affective and erotic experiences, but also of the received narratives that might diagnose us as sentimental, sensitive, or just sick."The Spenser Review 'Naomi Booth’s Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out is a comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the literary history of swooning. ... Booth’s excellent introduction explains why the wide perspective is necessary... the readings of the primary sources build upon each other in expert ways, illuminating similarities and defining differences... The evocative and nuanced readings of the swoon as “creative stimulus to dark imagining” ... lead the reader on a journey from bodily fainting to the soul’s swoon... Booth’s reading of the [Fifty Shades of Grey] trilogy is inspired and convincing, showing us exactly why it is important to include a work that revolves around “received ideas of gender submission” in a scholarly work.'Women's Writing'There are a number of strengths in this book, including the breadth of the texts examined, the depth of the analysis, and the astonishing variety of connections across genres and periods made in each chapter… Swoon is a readable, engaging, and enjoyable book, regardless of one’s area of focus… Booth’s Swoon is one of those monographs that is as enjoyable as it is useful because it is well written, has a thematic focus that allows forthe refraction of that theme across time, and can be read in whole or usefully assigned in single chapters to students, even advanced undergraduates.'Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Heart-stopped transformations: Swooning in late Medieval literature2 Bodily proofs: Shakespearean swoons and unreadable body-texts 3 Feeling too much: The swoon and the (in)sensible woman4 Dead born: Shadow resurrections and artistic transformation5 Vampiric swoons and other dark ecologies6 Lovesick, lesbian swoons and the romantic art of sinking Passing outIndex

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Book SynopsisNietzsche and Irish Modernism deftly traces the circulation of the German philosopher's ideas in Irish culture during the early years of the twentieth century. In doing so, the book demonstrates how Nietzsche's thought inspired new, disruptive modes of writing, which spoke to local historical circumstances and the predicaments of modernity at large -- .

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism ‘Nothing about Jenny Diski is conventional. Diski does not do linear, or normal, or boring ... highly intelligent, furiously funny’ Sunday Times 'Funny, heartbreaking, insightful and wise' Emilia Clarke ‘She expanded notions about what nonfiction, as an art form, could do and could be’ New Yorker Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books – selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude – have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’, and ‘small masterpieces’. From Highgate Cemetery to the interior of a psychiatric hospital, from Tottenham Court Road to the icebergs of Antarctica, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche: original, opinionated – and mordantly funny.Trade ReviewOne of the most electrifying memoirists of her generation ... A superb volume of autobiographical fragments * Daily Telegraph *One of the most inventive writers of her generation * Independent *She is savagely good company * Daily Telegraph *Diski is one of the language's great, if under-appreciated, stylists * Guardian *The appeal of Diski’s essays was the appeal of Diski herself … brilliant, irritable, mordant, and humane * Paris Review *

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Book SynopsisA WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH In this love letter to reading, curated by Pandora Sykes in aid of the National Literacy Trust, bestselling and beloved writers share their favourite books: the ones they hold most dearly, that they return to time and again and that helped make them the writers they are. WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM : NICK HORNBY * RUTH OZEKI * ANN PATCHETT * BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH * MARIAN KEYES * ELIZABETH STROUT * DEBORAH LEVY * TESSA HADLEY * ELIF SHAFAK * GEORGE THE POET * LEILA SLIMANI * ALI SMITH * DEREK OWUSU * DOLLY ALDERTON * PARIS LEES * JOJO MOYES * PAUL MENDEZ * SEBASTIAN FAULKS * DIANA EVANS * MEENA KANDASAMY * LISA TADDEO * NIKESH SHUKLA * TAIYE SELASI * MONICA ALI * NINA STIBBE * CALEB AZUMAH NELSON * ELIZABETH DAY * SARA COLLINS * DAMON GALGUT * NAOISE DOLAN * WILLIAM BOYD * EMMA DABIRI * FATIMA BHUTTO * KIT DE WAALTrade ReviewAll of the essays engage – there isn’t a dud in the bunch – which is perhaps a result of their succinct length . . . but also down to the honesty and thoughtfulness of the contributors . . . Like the best kind of selection box * Irish Times *A treat – one that will propel you on a journey of discovery * Independent *What Writers Read is the perfect stocking filler for the bookish person in your life . . . Gorgeous stuff * Red Magazine *

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Book Synopsis'Outstanding... The best short introduction I have come across' Sunday TimesWhen he died at the age of just twenty-five, few imagined John Keats would one day be considered among the greatest poets of all time.Taking nine of Keats's best-known poems, Lucasta Miller excavates their backstories and, in doing so, resurrects the real Keats: an outsider from a damaged family whose visceral love of language allowed him to change the face of English literature for ever.Combining close-up readings with the story of his brief existence, Miller shows us how Keats crafted his groundbreaking poetry and explains why it continues to speak to us across the centuries.'One never wants Keats's life to end so soon; I didn't want this book to end, either' TLS Books of the Year'Irresistible... [Miller]digs into the backstories of her subject's most famous poems to uncover aspects of his life and work that challenge well-worn romantic myths' Wall Street JournalTrade ReviewIn lucid, graceful prose she [Miller] manages to bring us closer to the life and work of a poet who never seemed that far away... I didn't want this book to end. * Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year* *An enlightening and perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the great Romantic poet's life and work. * Financial Times *Outstanding... [Miller's] knowledge of all things Keatsian is formidable... For newcomers to Keats, Miller's is the best short introduction I have come across. -- John Carey * Sunday Times *Miller disrobes the myth, while helping us to appreciate what she calls Keats's "vertiginous originality". As a wittily perceptive introduction to (or reminder of) the poet and his work, her book is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon. -- Miranda Seymour * Financial Times *Lucasta Miller's task, which she carries out very successfully, is to strip away what we think when we think about Keats... This excellent book... enters an already crowded market of Keats biographies, but earns its place through its firm basis in precise reading. Miller is empathetic, and relishes Keats's best phrases. -- Philip Hensher * Spectator *

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Book SynopsisErich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world’s greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach’s study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante’s work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.CONTENTSI. Historical Introduction; The Idea of Man in LiteratureII. Dante''s Early PoetryIII. The Subject of the 'Comedy'IV. The Structure of the 'Comedy'V. The PresentationVI. The Survival and Transformation of Dante''s Vision of RealityNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn NYRB Classics OriginalShakespeare, Nietzsche wrote, was Montaigne’s best reader—a typically brilliant Nietzschean insight, capturing the intimate relationship between Montaigne’s ever-changing record of the self and Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic register of human character. And there is no doubt that Shakespeare read Montaigne—though how extensively remains a matter of debate—and that the translation he read him in was that of John Florio, a fascinating polymath, man-about-town, and dazzlingly inventive writer himself.Florio’s Montaigne is in fact one of the masterpieces of English prose, with a stylistic range and felicity and passages of deep lingering music that make it comparable to Sir Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. This new edition of this seminal work, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt, features an adroitly modernized text, an essay in which Greenblatt discusses both the resemblances and real tensions between Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s visions of the world, and Platt’s introduction to the life and times of the extraordinary Florio. Altogether, this book provides a remarkable new experience of not just two but three great writers who ushered in the modern world.

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Book SynopsisFrom South Park to Kathy Acker, from Lars Von Trier to Sex and the City, women’s sexual organs are demonized. In The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Emma L.E. Rees investigates the evolution of this demonization: she considers how writers, artists and filmmakers contend with the dilemma of he vagina's puzzling 'covert visibility' and how the ‘c-word’ is an obscenity that both legitimates and perpetuates the fractured identities of women globally. In our postmodern, porn-obsessed culture, vaginas appear to be everywhere, literally or symbolically but, crucially, they are as silenced as they are objectified. Even common slang terms for the vagina can be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the reality of women’s lived sexual experiences: slang offers a convenient distraction from something taboo. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History is an important contribution to the ongoing debate in understanding the feminine identity.Trade ReviewRees’ book is the kind of work we need more of if we are to challenge and reconfigure how we understand women and sexuality in contemporary discourse. -- Shahidha Bari, Queen Mary, University of London, UK * Times Higher Education *For readers disappointed by Naomi Wolf’s treatise on a similar topic last year, this is the book you’ve been waiting for… This may not be the definitive text on the vagina – Rees is clear that she can’t overturn centuries of embarrassment and taboo in a single book – but it’s an excellent place to start. -- Kaite Welsh * The Independent on Sunday *It is my contention that you will know quite instinctively if you are the target reader for a book describing itself as a literary and cultural history of vaginas. (Vaginae? Vaginodes?) How does this description of Judy Chicago’s art make you feel? “Each plate, a vulvar motif at its centre, represents a woman’s yearning for autonomy and recognition away from patriarchy’s eradications and constraints.” If you found that intriguing, rather than snigger-worthy or arcanely academic, you will enjoy what’s on offer here. There is a learned digression on other words for vagina...and a survey of depictions of female genitalia in folk tales, film, literature, art and television... The examples are well chosen and engaging. -- Helen Lewis * New Statesman *The broadest survey yet ....lively, thought-provoking, and richly researched. -- Naomi Wolf, author of Vagina: A New BiographyAt last! A book on the vagina that I feel privileged to endorse. This careful literary and cultural history explores the vagina primarily as a loaded cultural symbol. It critiques the numerous ways in which the female sexual organs have had deleterious meanings projected onto them by patriarchal society. A magnificent achievement, Rees's study is as insightful in its analysis as it is comprehensive in its historical coverage. -- Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality, University of Birmingham, UK.This really wonderful book on the cultural history of the vagina is scholarly and accessible, entertaining and serious. It is stylish and packed with insight; it will be seized upon and devoured by the new feminists. The Vagina bejazzles. I highly recommend it. -- Sally R Munt, Professor of Cultural and Gender Studies, University of SussexWith Vagina, Rees is aiming for something well beyond ‘feminism.’ To get there, she uses humor, numerous examples, and careful explanation as she moves effortlessly through a variety of historical periods and a wide genre of ‘art’ to demonstrate her point. -- Judy A. Hayden, Professor of English and Writing and Director of the Women's Studies Program, University of Tampa, USA.Analyses of representations of the vagina in art and culture couple with feminist politics in this impassioned tract by University of Chester lecturer Rees. * Publisher's Weekly *Rees is especially strong on the rapidly evolving (and more in-your-face) artistic (or would-be artistic) representation of the [vagina] in contemporary (Western, and even here basically American and British) culture, both fringe and more mainstream...Rees offers many interesting examples and the odd tidbit[s] (Courbet's L'origine du monde comes from the collection of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan!), and though she works more by example than evaluation, there's a lot of useful information here. -- M.A. Ortherfer * The Complete Review *Don’t be fooled by the playful pink cover—this book is not for the faint of heart. Ranging from Indian folktales of vagina dentata to the surprising popularity of vaginas in postmodern art, Rees’ book is a whirlwind tour of the literary and cultural history of the treatment (and mistreatment) of female genitalia. -- Rebecca Hayes * Booklist *Table of Contents1. Revealing the Vagina: Introduction 2. Revealing the Vagina: Antecedents 3.Revealing the Vagina in Literature 4. Revealing the Vagina in Visual Art (1): Judy Chicago 5. Revealing the Vagina in Visual Art (2): Birth's Wide Berth 6. Revealing the Vagina on Film and TV 7. Revealing the Vagina in Performance Art 8. Revealing the Vagina: Conclusion Revealing the Vagina: Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis Lyrical poetry offering multilayered examinations of injustices—from mass incarceration to failing schools and right-wing fascism. Richard Hamilton’s second poetry collection, Discordant, is a searing examination of injustice both within the United States and abroad, from criticisms of the US military-industrial complex and failing healthcare system to multilayered observations of marginalization through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Hamilton’s poems look closely at increased austerity measures, commitment to mass incarceration and private prisons, disdain for workers and labor resistance, the expansion of the US military budget, the disappearance of federal subsidies for the working poor, failing schools and teacher shortages, market inflation and price gouging, and the rising tide of right-wing fascism. Hamilton’s lyrical writing brings together free-form essays and personal narratives full of keen-eyed and urgent observations. Told from the perspective of a speaker who is unemployed and pensive, Hamilton shows how history haunts us while keeping the present in the foreground, constantly challenging oppression that has long been commonplace.Discordant won the 2022 CAAPP Book Prize, selected by Evie Shockley. Trade Review"Hamilton’s Discordant at times synthesizes a war correspondent’s urgent observations with a poet’s ability to invent fresh syntax. Always, there is death, whether state-sanctioned or otherwise, that must be reported on and reported to. . . . The forms are varied and interesting while the voice remains emphatic, even rhapsodic at times, in its attempt to find a syntax to understand the systems that aggrieve Black folks in America." * Washington Independent Review of Books *“The poems of Discordant will haunt you—like a tune that orients your ear to what you weren't attuned to, like a cut that slices through the noisy distractions of the day. Hamilton is chopping up language, rewriting the score on poetic forms, and dissecting our racist-capitalist society at the same time, mixing and mingling the discourses of philosophy, culture, politics, healthcare, labor, and love, until we remember they all occupy and describe the same world. I'm grateful for this piercing, necessary voice.” -- Evie Shockley, author of "suddenly we"“Discordant is a clarion call. A genius voyage through the late-twentieth and twenty-first-century American wasteland laid from the fallout of war. A testimony from the forgotten spaces of addiction, poverty, and racism. A dispatch from the shadows of the civil rights movement, where promises that quelled uprisings are daily disintegrating. In the tradition of James Baldwin and Fred Hampton, this poet is fearless in his words. Few understand how to make language unsettle and disrupt as Hamilton does. In so many ways, this book is ‘an essay against forgetting wars, the personal and the political,’ as he writes in his powerful and brilliant long hybrid poem ‘Object.’ The poems are gorgeous. They are also startling, haunting, and gritty. To my mind, this book is a game changer.” -- francine j. harris, author of "Here is the Sweet Hand""In his new, trenchant collection Discordant, Hamilton brings the fire where and when it is needed, writing poems that startle in their originality, playfulness, and sociopolitical depth and gravitas. If the best poetry provides a way to see the with new, engaged eyes, Discordant does so in poem after poem, and reminds us that Hamilton, an invaluable voice in contemporary Black queer poetry, is one of the freshest and most committed poets writing today." -- John Keene, author of "Punks: New and Selected Poems"

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Book Synopsis“If there is one article of faith that dominates the Credo of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence,” Francis Steegmuller writes in the introduction to this selection of Flaubert’s letters, “it is that the function of great art is not to provide ‘answers.’” The Letters of Gustave Flaubert is above all a record of the intransigent questions—personal, political, artistic—with which Flaubert struggled throughout his life.Here we have Flaubert’s youthful, sensual outpourings to his mistress, the poet Louise Colet, and, as he advances, still unknown, into his thirties, the wrestle to write Madame Bovary. We hear, too, of his life-changing trip to Egypt, as described to family and friends, and then there are lively exchanges with Baudelaire, with the influential critic Sainte-Beuve, and with Guy de Maupassant, his young protégé. Flaubert’s letters to George Sand reveal her as the great confidante of his later years.Steegmuller’s book, a classic in its own right, is both a splendid life of Flaubert in his own words and the ars poetica of the master who laid the foundations for modern writers from James Joyce to Lydia Davis. Originally issued in two volumes, the book appears here for the first time under a single cover.

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Book SynopsisThree of the legendary Russian dissident writer''s greatest poems, two autobiographical and one based on a Russian folktale, now in a new, invigorating English translation.The three poems in this collection, Backstreets, Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End, were all written in the few short years spanning the period immediately preceding Tsvetaeva''s move from the Soviet Union to Prague in 1922. Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End are generally considered some of her finest poems and have been translated widely; Backstreets, initially dismissed by Russian readers as nigh unintelligible, is almost unknown in English. Andrew Davis''s translation is a first, and it reveals the poem in all in its emotional intensity and poetic pyrotechnics as among Tsvetaeva''s greatest achievements.Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End both concern the end of an affair. Backsteets, by contrast, is a retelling of the Russian folk-tale of Dobrynya and Marinka.

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Book SynopsisIn America, censorship surges in periods of demographic and political change. Its primary purpose is to silence challenges to an established elite or norm. Today, censorship is part of a larger assault on such American institutions as schools, public libraries, and universities, the better to establish more control over the people--while also pilfering their wallets. On Censorship is a part of the Publisher’s Speakers Corner Books.

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Book SynopsisFrom the brilliantly funny (and rightfully furious) creator of the viral Men Write Women Twitter account, A Tale of Two Titties is a satirical guide to writing women like a bestselling male author.Let's face it, women's representation in literature really sucks. And that's mostly because of the male authors who write female characters like they''re nothing more than playthings in their stories. Whether they have breasts like ripe peaches or curves like a racetrack, the literary ladies gracing the pages of bestselling books rarely serve a purpose beyond supporting a male character (or giving him something to fantasize about).But what are you supposed to do about it if you can't even get a foot (or, I guess, a boob) in the door?You beat them at their own game.In this hilarious yet incisive guide, you'll learn how to write women just like a bestselling male authorstereotypes, tropes, objectification, and allso you can start dismantling the syst

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Book SynopsisWriting tends to make people anxious, and with good reason. The first sentence of a job application letter can consign it to the bin. A speech intended to rouse can put a room to sleep. A mistimed tweet can cost you your job. And a letter to a beloved may aim to convey feelings of tenderness but end up making the recipient laugh rather than melt. In this complete guide to persuasive writing, Sam Leith shows how to express yourself fully across any medium, and how to maximise your chances of getting your way in every situation. From work reports to Valentine cards, and from emails of condolence to tweets of complaint, Leith lays bare the secrets to successful communication, eloquence and off- and online etiquette. How do you write a job application, a thank-you card, or an email to your bank manager, to your children's headteacher, to your clients or your boss? How do you prepare a speech to win the argument, get the vote of confidence, or embarrass the bridegroom? Getting these things right - or wrong - can be life-changing. Succinct treatments of the most general principles of style and composition, as well as examinations of specific modes of address (What is a subtweet? How do I write a moving elegy?) are accompanied by concrete and well-illustrated dos and don'ts and examples of wins and fails. Astute, sprightly and illuminating, Write to the Point will give you the skills and confidence you need to get your message across on every occasion.Trade ReviewAt last, a book on correct writing that is genuinely amusing - and not just for language nerds ... Informative and hugely entertaining, like a Scotch-soaked conversation with an eccentric, brilliant don -- Juanita Coulson * The Lady *Useful, and persuasive -- Ben East * Observer *

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Book SynopsisFor decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life, examining twelve family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught moments, each of which pose questions of their own. She begins with the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led her to become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like no other.Trade ReviewStill Pictures is [an] eclectic but carefully crafted work of montage... What emerges is fascinating... it's a bittersweet reminder of Malcolm's extraordinary talents * Telegraph *Playful, subversive and engrossing... Malcolm belongs to a subtler class of superhero, a ninja perhaps, whose idiosyncratic oeuvre will be knocking delighted readers off their feet for a long time to come * Sunday Times *She writes fascinatingly... Malcolm's charm in Still Pictures comprises, for me... an absolute refusal to pose - and it's this that makes the book worth reading * Observer *Like the bulk of her life's work, at its heart is an inquiry into the elusiveness of truth. Although it may be her in the viewfinder, the real subject is the unreliability of the camera * Financial Times *Funny and true... I have now realised why I recommend her to young writers... because that's what I want to read -- David Aaronovitch * The Times *As a memoirist, Malcolm comes clean about her gaps in memory and her lapses in judgment... The book's most charming moments are when the incisive, unsparing adult can be found in the child * Economist *Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation's great practitioners - one might say agitators - of journalism and biography... Far from a nostalgiafest, it is like a family album annotated to an unusually high intellectual standard * Spectator *[A] witty memoir of her youth... the book's episodic narrative is addictive... this memoir will make you think about your own family's internal myths * Irish Times *Malcolm found a playful and unpretentious way to write about her own life ... shot through with her unerring sense of the absurd * TLS *This slim volume is as satisfying as many a fuller Life * New Statesman *It's a touching memoir which reminds us of the importance of family photography and the role it can play in our loves, memories and recollections throughout our life. * Amateur Photographer Magazine *

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Book SynopsisWhat do Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling have in common that has made both of their stories so successful? What does Pullman listen to while he writes - and who, or what, is Dust?Pullman's award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials has been appreciated by readers of all ages. It is now set to welcome new fans as it is adapted for television by the BBC, and his new trilogy at last sees publication. Nicholas Tucker, a leading authority on children's literature, writes about the man he knows as a friend. Unpacking and examining Pullman's life and the sources he drew on for his masterpiece, he explores the world of science, theology, imagination and adventure that Pullman has created.Including a personal interview with Pullman himself, Darkness Visible offers a unique exploration of the author's work - and its controversies."Enigmas from His Dark Materials are unraveled. Unmissable for all Pullman readers" Sussex ExpressTrade ReviewEnigmas from His Dark Materials are unraveled... Unmissable for all Pullman readers * Sussex Express *

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Book Synopsis'JOYOUS . . . READERS WILL LOVE THIS FASCINATING BOOK' CATHY RENTZENBRINK'A GODSEND WITH THE PRESENT SEASON APPROACHING' IRISH INDEPENDENT'THE PERFECT GIFT FOR A BOOK-OBSESSED FRIEND' STYLIST, 50 UNMISSABLE BOOKS FOR AUTUMN 2017'EXCELLENT . . . SHOULD BE READ BY ANYONE WHO LOVES BOOKS' EVENING STANDARDAbsence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead.So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves.Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner - no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten. And Fowler, as well as remembering their careers, lifts the lid on their lives, and why they often stopped writing or disappeared from the public eye.These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favourites: including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced us to psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world.This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers, and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening and entertaining guide.'A BIBLIOPHILE'S DREAM' FINANCIAL TIMES'WILL HAVE READERS SCURRYING INTO SECONDHAND BOOKSHOPS' GUARDIANTrade ReviewWell researched and wide-ranging . . . The Book of Forgotten Authors is a bibliophile's treat written with verve and passion. It will have readers scurrying into secondhand bookshops in search of yellowing paperbacks. * Guardian *Full of humour and pathos, Christopher Fowler's survey of authors who have fallen into obscurity is a bibliophile's dream. * Financial Times *A real gem, filled with old favourites and new discoveries, and written in a light, snappy, erudite tone, as satisfying as a full English breakfast at your local art-house cafe. -- Joanne HarrisA joyous saunter through the lives and words of yesterday's big names. Readers will love this fascinating book. -- Cathy RentzenbrinkA sure-fire Christmas gift . . . charged with an irresistible passion for the world of the book. * Daily Telegraph *A treasure trove of trivia . . . Excellent . . . This colourful compendium of literary lives should be read by anyone who loves books. * Evening Standard *

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Book Synopsis'Deeply moving... This is a beautiful book.' TLS______________________________Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford University when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death, she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Braiding memoir, literary criticism and biography, Smyth's story explores universal questions about family, loss and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, Smyth guides us towards a new vision of Woolf's most demanding and rewarding novel. All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author.'Beautifully written... a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief' Wall Street JournalTrade ReviewBeautifully written... a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief... you'd be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf's work. * Wall Street Journal *This is a transcendent book, not a simple meditation on one woman's loss, but a reflection on all of our losses, on loss itself, on how to remember and commemorate our dead. * Washington Post *Deeply moving... This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art. -- Joanna Kavenna * TLS *Smyth is an elegant writer and she explores her deep, complicated love for her father in lyrical yet restrained prose. * Literary Review *All the Lives We Ever Lived is both a haunting attempt to come to terms with loss and an honest appraisal of the ways in which a person can become unmoored. Acutely observed and shot through with a furious beauty, it is a book that lingers long after the final page has been turned. * The i *Raw and moving... Smyth is an elegant and powerful writer, her sentences suffused with attention to detail and rich with self-interrogation. * Prospect *This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author's fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer... evocative and incisive. * New Yorker *Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life. * TIME *All the Lives We Ever Lived is both a reflection on To the Lighthouse and a lingeringly beautiful elegy in its own right. * Los Angeles Review of Books *[Smyth's] prose is so fluid and clear throughout that it's not surprising to observe her view of her family, its cracks and fissures, sharpen into unsparing focus... Her exploration of grown-up love, the kind that accounts for who the loved one actually is, not who you want him or her to be, gains power and grace as her story unfolds. I suspect her book could itself become solace for people navigating their way through the complexities of grief for their fallen idols. And they will be lucky to have it. -- Radhika Jones * New York Times Book Review *Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth's book is a memoir that's not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father's vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer....an experiment in 21st-century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh. * Vogue *A critical and reflective delight... elegant and thorough and in several places stunning... All The Lives We Ever Lived reads at least in part as a steadfast refusal to countenance a pessimistic approach to life, insisting that even when the case seems desperate, one might find sufficiency in a moment. * Review 31 *A conceptually ambitious and assured debut... a close reading of that novel from the perspective of an obsessed reader who is both coming-of-age and coming to terms... A work of incisive observation and analysis, [with] exquisite writing. * Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) *Brilliant... All the Lives is a memoir, yes, but also part biography, part lit crit, part adulation - the story of the emotional turmoil of her father's alcoholism, cancer diagnosis, and eventual death, organized as a paean to a British novel written in the 1920s... Smyth reaffirms the value of novels as existential guideposts.... beautiful. * Vulture *This gorgeous, moving book gracefully moves between memoir and literary criticism... Smyth's writing possesses a unique ability to wend its way into your head, traveling into all the darkest corners of your mind, triggering thoughts on love and loss and family and memory you hadn't known were lurking; it's a profound experience, reading this book - one not to be missed. * Nylon *I loved All the Lives We Ever Lived: its structural inventiveness, its fluid and lyrically beautiful writing - some lines made me gasp - and its often astonishing wisdom. But above all, this is a smart, moving portrait of a family in crisis; Smyth weaves literary criticism and biography into nearly every page, but she never strays from the deepest concerns of the human heart. -- Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon and I Want to Show You MoreAll the Lives We Ever Lived is a work of vivid intelligence-a sharp love letter to the reading and relationships that shape us, and an ingenious reply to the questions Woolf asked her readers to answer for themselves. -- Nell Stevens, author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell and MeIn her brilliant debut, Katharine Smyth has done the impossible - invented a new form for the overworked genre of memoir, weaving Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse into her personal story as she absorbs the meaning of her beloved father's long illness and early death. Her prose is luxuriant and supple, but never sentimental, and her piercing insights into the dynamics of the nuclear family often profound. -- Michael Scammell, author of Koestler and Solzhenitsyn

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Book SynopsisA wonderfully stimulating collection of quizzes and puzzles based on the richly imaginative world of Thomas Hardy's six best-loved novels.

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Book SynopsisChloe Marr is young, beautiful and so irresistible that countless people fall in love with her, and friends are hypnotized by her charm and warmth. Her origins are a mystery and, in London society, such mystique carries both allure and suspicion. But when an untimely exodus pulls Chloe from the people around her, they soon realise nobody really knows the truth about anybody else… A. A. Milne’s ability to portray interwar society is second to none, and this classic novel of an elusive Mayfair delivers his signature humour and lightness of touch.Trade Review'He is sensitive. He can write charmingly… and his prose is at once facile and precise' * New York Post *'There is an astringent realism about Milne’s mind and work… and an unassuming sureness of balance lightened with so serene and deft a wit' * New York Times *

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Book SynopsisIlluminating, enriching and wholly delightful, inside you'll find more than 500 stirring quotes to inspire you, enrich you and enchant you.Whether you're hoping to revisit some of cinema's greatest moments, rediscover a much-loved writer or simply to explore new music, this wonderful box set is the perfect treat for any lover of the arts.Sample Quotes: 'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.' - George R.R. Martin 'I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.' - Ludwig Van Beethoven 'If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.' - Louis Armstrong 'Cinema is a matter of what is in the frame and what's out.' - Martin ScorseseContents: Book 1: Books - A celebration of writing, reading and the power of the written word to educate, enlighten and entertain us. Inside there are beautifully crafted lines from some of the world's finest authors, quotes that express the joy of reading and writing, as well as wonderful passages from some of the greatest books ever written.Book 2: Music - From the classical era to modern day, you'll discover a curation of lines from composers, musicians and writers. Find out what music means to those who love it most, the classical musicians, composers and the music devotees. Covering the sheer breadth of musical tastes, it inspires you to play, listen and explore new music from all around the world.Book 3: Movies - Explore the power of cinema to challenge, inspire and change our moods from movies made by the world's best filmmakers and actors. Unearth rousing quotes from skilful filmmakers, find fresh viewing inspiration and enjoy lines from some of the best movies ever made, covering all decades and genres and revisiting some of cinema's greatest moments.

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Book SynopsisOne morning as they parted, Victor Menza’s daughter handed him a bunny postcard. This gift made him wonder why rabbits had been their symbol of visitation: “How did this kind of creature become such a powerful way of feeling your presence?” Through philosophy, history, education, art, and personal musing on everyday uncanny experiences, Menza reveals why people have long found rabbits our special kin and emblems of love. Menza considers human nature and how we are undone by separation—both from each other and from our childhood selves. Surprising allies in these non-traditional philosophical wanderings include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Bowen, Albert Murray, Beatrix Potter, Donald Winnicott, Sterling Stuckey, and Lev Vygotsky. Menza examines what symbols are and how they work, the value of dialect, and the subversive lesson of animal fables, alongside his thoughts on language learning, memory, and slavery. Only now did he see that he’d taken to Brer Rabbit early on. Just as the Uncle Remus tales displayed the small hero’s virtues in warm dialogues, The Rabbit Between Us shows we abound in talents and moves when we “lean like Socrates did to the Aesop in us.” Gentle and political at once, this unique book will appeal to any intellectually curious reader. Trade Review“Menza ... was a guru, a giant. He was a supernova. He was the only brilliant person I have ever met. I took his course by accident, and it changed my life. He had all these acolytes who would hang on his every word, and he knew it, so one day he came into class and he started in on something, and we were taking down everything, and he stopped and said: ‘Put your pens down. What I am saying is important.’” -- Peter Mose in "I Remember My Teacher" by David ShribmanTable of Contents1. Psychic Bolt-Holes2. Visitation3. I Never Saw Harvey4. What Is a Symbol 5. Down the Philosophical Rabbit-Hole; or, “GAVAGAI!”6. The Rabbit Evangels: Joel Chandler Harris and Beatrix Potter7. Obliterature8. How Children Get Cheated Out of Their Humanity9. The Rabbit between Us Came from Slavery10. Aubade with Brer Rabbit11. The Rabbit Dances

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