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How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the Humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.

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Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics. Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake.Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

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Dear reader,There is nothing to be found in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events' but misery and despair. You still have time to choose another international best-selling series to read. But if you insist on discovering the unpleasant adventures of the Baudelaire orphans, then proceed with cautionViolet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky.In The Vile Village the siblings face such unpleasant matters as migrating crows, an angry mob, a newspaper headline, the arrest of innocent people, the Deluxe cell, and some very strange hats.In the tradition of great storytellers, from Dickens to Dahl, comes an exquisitely dark comedy that is both literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted.Despite their wretched contents, A Series of Unfortunate Events' has sold 60 million copies worldwide and been made into a Hollywood film starring Jim Carrey

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_Daily Life in Victorian Britain_ sheds new light on the most remarkable era in British history. Here is a tapestry of time, unpacked and uncovered from January 1st to December 31st, a rich mosaic of facts, events and tales, exploring the most extraordinary moments of the most extraordinary age. Each day offers a different, vivid and accessible snapshot into our past, intermingling famous or renowned events, with rare, quirky and fun facts. What was the mysterious Sheep panic of 1888? Who was the notorious Spring heeled Jack? Why was William Gladstone run over by a cow? The Victorians transformed British society forever. From the Great Exhibition, to the Industrial Revolution, Dickens and Darwin, Entertainment and Empire, the 19th century was an epoch of momentous political, cultural and social change, charted day by day in this book. With meticulous research and a compelling, gripping narrative, _Daily Life in Victorian Britain_ is essential reading for anyone looking for great st

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'Deliciously romantic. A perfect summer read!' Miranda Dickinson. Discover this feel-good bestseller set by the sea, perfect for fans of Jo Thomas and Cathy Bramley. When Imogen and Anna unexpectedly inherit their grandmother Vivien's ice cream parlour, it turns both their lives upside-down. The Brighton shop is a seafront institution, but while it's big on charm it's critically low on customers. If the sisters don't turn things around quickly, their grandmother's legacy will disappear forever. With summer looming, Imogen and Anna devise a plan to return Vivien's to its former glory. Rather than sell up, they will train up, and make the parlour the newest destination on the South Coast foodie map. While Imogen watches the shop, her sister flies to Italy to attend a gourmet ice cream-making course. But as she works shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the best chefs in the industry, Anna finds that romance can bloom in the most unexpected of places...

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'History writing at its compulsive best' A. N. WilsonThis is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance.Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

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Acclaimed historian Jenny Uglow brings us a fascinating and beautifully illustrated biography of Edward Lear, full of the colour of the age.Edward Lear lived a vivid, fascinating, energetic life, but confessed, 'I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.' He was a man in a hurry, 'running about on railroads' from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India and Palestine. He is still loved for his 'nonsenses', from startling, joyous limericks to great love songs like 'The Owl and the Pussy Cat' and 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose', and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly in the age of Darwin and Dickens - he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters - his genius for the absurd and his dazzling word-play make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today.Le

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Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics.In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugénie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eugénie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Comédie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.M. A. Crawford's lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony and psychological insight of Balzac's characterization, the role of fate in the novel, its setting and historical background.Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comédie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.If you enjoyed Eugenie Grandet you might like Molière's The Miser and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

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The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me is the ultimate reader’s companion to poetry: a selection of 100 classic poems from ?ve centuries with lively “companion” commentaries to go with and illuminate each poem. The heavy bear can be many things which go with the bearer: another self or alter ego, the burden of poetry or art, what weighs us down and makes us do what we don’t really want to do as well as what pulls us back to our selves, the animal side which makes us bearable or human. The editors’ selection ranges from Wyatt, Ralegh and Shakespeare in the 16th century, to Donne, Milton and Marvell in the 17th, to Swift, Pope and Johnson in the 18th. It embraces the Romantic visions of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, as well as the later, darker outlook of Browning, Tennyson and Hardy, and seeks enlightenment in the shadowlands of Emily Dickinson, Wilde and Yeats. As well as journeying with the reader through some of the greatest poems in the English language, The Heavy Bear encounters many modern poets, not least Delmore Schwartz, whose sense of con?ict between self and society gave birth to this anthology’s title-poem, ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’. Others include some of the major figures in Irish poetry Brendan Kennelly knew personally as well as wrote about, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland. The poems keep each other company in this highly original compilation, questioning each other in a continuing thematic, imagistic debate which the editors seek to explore in their responses, trying at all times to de?ne their sense and vision of poetry as disturbing, questioning, enlightening companionship for the reader. Both editors are renowned communicators of poetry: Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021) as one of Ireland’s best-loved poets, as Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and as a popular cultural commentator on Irish television; Neil Astley as founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and editor of the Staying Alive anthology series.

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A comprehensive overview of the field of comparative administrative law that builds on the first edition with many new and revised chapters, additional topics and extended geographical coverage. This research handbook s broad, multi-method approach combines history and social science with more strictly legal analyses. This new edition demonstrates the growth and dynamism of recent efforts - spearheaded by the first edition - to stimulate comparative research in administrative law and public law more generally, reaching across different countries and scholarly disciplines.A particular focus is on administrative independence with its manifold implications for separation of powers, democratic self-government, and the boundary between law, politics, and policy. Several chapters highlight the tensions between impartial expertise and public accountability; others consider administrative litigation and the role of the courts in reviewing both individual decisions and secondary norms. The book concludes by asking how administrative law is shaping and is being shaped by the changing boundaries of the state, especially shifting boundaries between the public and the private, and the national and the supranational domains.This extensive and interdisciplinary appraisal of the field will be a vital resource for scholars and students of administrative and comparative law worldwide, and for public officials and representatives of interest groups engaged with government policy implementation and regulation. Contributors: B. Ackerman, A. Alemanno, M. Asimow, J.-B. Auby, D. Barek-Erez, J. Barnes, P. Cane, P. Craig, D. Custos, M. D'Alberti, L.A. Dickinson, C. Donnelly, Y. Dotan, B. Emerson, T. Ginsburg, D. Halberstam, H.C.H. Hofmann, G.B. Hola, C.-Y. Huang, N. Kadomatsu, K. Kovács, P. Lindseth, M.E. Magill, J. Mashaw, J. Massot, J. Mathews, J. Mendes, G. Napolitano, D.R. Ortiz, T. Perroud, M.M. Prado, A. Psygkas, V.V. Ramraj, D.R. Reiss, S. Rose-Ackerman, M. Ruffert, J. Saurer, K.L. Scheppele, J.-P. Schneider, M. Shapiro, B. Sordi, L. Sossin, P. Strauss, A.K. Thiruvengadam, A. Vosskuhle, J.B. Wiener, T. Wischmeyer, J.-r. Yeh

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Science tells us that babies develop best when they are spoken to, sung to and read to. Introduce your baby to a world of words and pictures with these 30 classic nursery rhymes from the Mother Goose collection and beyond paired with images of Chloe Giordano’s delightful hand-embroidered illustrations on cloth. Even when they’re tiny, the sound of their parents’ voices helps babies make sense of the world and feel comfortable with new people and places. This treasury gives you the opportunity to rediscover just how useful (and calming) these best-loved nursery rhymes are in one, handsome volume. Bond with your baby and help them grow as you recite and sing these timeless rhymes: Hey, Diddle Diddle; Baa, Baa, Black Sheep; This Little Piggy; Hush Little Baby; Hickory, Dickory, Dock; Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star; Little Bo-Peep; Pussy-cat, Pussy-cat; Row, Row, Row Your Boat; The Itsy Bitsy Spider; London Bridge; Mary Had a Little Lamb; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; Humpty Dumpty; Rub-a-dub-dub; Pat-a-Cake; I Saw a Ship A-Sailing; Old MacDonald; Rock-a-Bye Baby; The Wheels on the Bus; I’m a Little Teapot; This Old Man; Jack and Jill; The Muffin Man; Little Miss Muffet; The Owl and the Pussy-cat; Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush; Old Mother Hubbard; Pop! Goes the Weasel; Are you Sleeping? Continue this cherished daily ritual of reading to your child with the follow-up book of folktales, Read to Your Toddler Every Day.

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In Safe Hands: Rangers' Goalkeeping Greats chronicles the careers of the players who have kept goal for Scotland's most successful football club. From as far back as the days of the founding fathers, Rangers have been blessed with some of the finest goalkeepers in the game. The likes of David Reid, Matthew Dickie, Harry Rennie, Willie Robb, Jerry Dawson, Bobby Brown, George Niven, Billy Ritchie, Peter McCloy, Chris Woods, Andy Goram, Stefan Klos and Allan McGregor have all served the club with distinction. But this book isn't just about the leading lights. Meticulously researched, it explores the Rangers careers of every player to have played in goal for the Gers. The stories are brought to life by personal insights and reflections from past and present Rangers keepers such as Peter McCloy, Jim Stewart, Chris Woods, Lionel Charbonnier, Andy Dibble, Neil Alexander and Allan McGregor. There is also a poignant tribute to the late Andy Goram, arguably the greatest Rangers goalkeeper of all time.

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A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, the book examines in depth six of the cultural "battles" that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using contemporaneous reviews in the press as well as other historical material, we can see that these now-canonical works provoked outrage at the time of their release because they addressed critical points of social upheaval and transformation in ways that engaged broad audiences with subversive messages. This framework allows us to understand and navigate the cultural debates that play such an important role in 21st century politics.

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An innovative study of how the Victorians used books, portraits, fairies, microscopes, and dollhouses to imagine miniature worlds beyond perception In 1856, Elizabeth Gaskell discovered a trove of handmade miniature books that were created by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë in their youth and that, as Gaskell later recalled, “contained an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space.” Far from being singular wonders, these two-inch volumes were part of a wide array of miniature marvels that filled the drawers and pockets of middle- and upper-class Victorians. Victorian miniatures pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge, mechanical production, and human perception. To touch a miniature was to imagine what lay beyond these boundaries. In Worlds Beyond, Laura Forsberg reads major works of fiction by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll alongside minor genres like the doll narrative, fairy science tract, and thumb Bible. Forsberg guides readers through microscopic science, art history, children’s culture, and book production to show how Victorian miniatures offered scripts for expansive fantasies of worlds beyond perception.

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Immerse yourself in some truly festive magic with this brand-new collection of the finest Christmas stories, prose, songs and poetry from some of the greatest writers in the English language. Inspired by the approach and style of the British Library's 2018 bestseller A Literary Christmas, this carefully chosen anthology moves its focus to those most deeply involved in the wonders of Christmas, the Christmas girls and Christmas boys. Twenty-four seasonal chapters allow the excitement to build as parents and grandparents can share pages of unforgettable adventures, festive traditions, tales of elves, snowmen and reindeer, fairytales, folklore and family fun. Age-old pleasures from those essential Christmas favourites, including Dickens, Kenneth Grahame, George Mackay Brown, Robert L. May and Ezra Jack Keats, are presented alongside charming, but often more edgy, award-wining contemporary voices. This treasure trove of stories is brought to life by an equally beautiful selection of seasonal illustrations from the collections of the Library and the artwork of some of the great modern book illustrators.

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"Each century," wrote Charles Dickens "[is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before." Victorians in theory explores the startling conceit that nineteenth-century poetry is amazed by twentieth-century literary theory. In a daring and exciting departure from critical convention, Schad re-reads postructuralist theory through Victorian poetry. Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerald Manley Hopkins dreams with Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Hélène Cixous. Reading both across and between these writers, Schad opens up a radically intertextual space; he wanders, in Matthew Arnold's words, "between two worlds." Across this no-man's land appear a host of unlikely specters, among them T. S. Eliot, Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's "angel of history," and the woman taken in adultery.This book will fascinate anyone interested in the Victorians or theory; at once rigorous and readable, it will appeal to both the scholar and the student.

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Graphic tools and visual solutions for team building and development Visual Teams uses visual tools and methods to help teams—both face-to-face and virtual—reach high performance in today's work environment. As teams become more and more global and distributed, visualization provides an important channel of communication—one that opens up the group's mind to improving work systems and processes by understanding relationships, interconnections, and big picture contexts. Visual Teams shares best practices and uses visualization as a power tool for process improvement by providing teams with a common language for high performance. The book: Explores how any kind of team can draw on the principles and practices of creative design teams in the software, architectural, engineering, and information design professions Introduces the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance™ Model and related tools—a system used throughout companies such as Nike, Genentech, Becton Dickinson, Chevron, and others Visual Teams presents a comprehensive framework, best practices, and unique visual tools for becoming an innovative, high-performance team.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Part whodunnit, part coming of age, this is a gripping debut about the secrets behind every door’ RACHEL JOYCE ‘Cannon is so attuned to other people’s stories… a chronicler both of the human condition and the quotidian details which speak to who we are’ GUARDIAN ‘A very special book’ NATHAN FILER‘An utter delight’ SARAH WINMAN‘A delight’ PAULA HAWKINS‘A treasure chest of a novel’ JULIE COHEN‘One of the standout novels of the year’ HANNAH BECKERMAN‘I didn't want the book to end’ CARYS BRAY‘An excellent debut’ JAMES HANNAH‘Grace and Tilly are my new heroes’ KATE HAMER‘A wonderful debut’ JILL MANSELL‘A modern classic in the making’ SARAH HILARY‘A stunning debut’ KATIE FFORDE‘Phenomenal’ MIRANDA DICKINSON England,1976. Mrs Creasy is missing and The Avenue is alive with whispers. As the summer shimmers endlessly on, ten-year-olds Grace and Tilly decide to take matters into their own hands. And as the cul-de-sac starts giving up its secrets, the amateur detectives will find much more than they imagined…

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"Despite the lyric tenderness and subtlety of their voices, the poems in iThe Bob and Weave are simultaneously surreal, spooky, and full of brave love for the world's mysteries, visible and invisible. Like an unpredictable wind, this work finds its way into the cracks between everything you think you know, then overflows them." —Claire Bateman "Jim Peterson's poems are filled with the things of this world--its horses, hands, stones, and baseball players--but are not themselves its inhabitants. Rather, this poet moves in a realm where 'there is / a space between him and the world and he / tunes it like one string of a violin.' Equally committed to nature, to spirit, to dreams, and to the touch of another human body, Peterson constantly expects 'a message / from something that isn't me / or even like me.' The tensions evolving from this anticipation are by turns erotic, mysterious, and instructively frightening." —Steven Corey "With The Bob and Weave, Jim Peterson announces himself as a major American poet. These poems offer insight into both the quotidian and the eternal, and while we hear echoes of his near predecessors--Dickey, Merwin, Hugo, Roethke--the voice in this new collection--assured, resonant, vatic--is entirely Peterson's own." —David Starkey

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In a world where we’re more connected than ever, why is it that we’re also more lonely? Dip into this anthology of classic writing to reclaim the pleasure of your own company.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning pocket size classics. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is edited and introduced by writer and academic, Zachary Seager.The Art of Solitude shows some of the myriad ways in which people throughout history have understood their experiences of solitary life, or have counselled others to benefit from solitude. It contains poetry, essays, autobiographical pieces and short stories from writers such as Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson.These diverse works can teach us how to think in freedom, how to enjoy a profound inner life and how best to cope with the fact that, as the novelist Joseph Conrad put it, we live, as we dream – alone. Above all, they show how we might truly connect with ourselves and, in the process, how we can meaningfully connect with those around us, including the earth itself. Looked at in this way, solitude is always focused both outward and inward, towards the self and towards the world. The cure for loneliness is, in the end, the art of solitude.

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In Dying Modern, one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit. Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry's fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing.

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Life in a workhouse during the Victorian and Edwardian eras has been popularly characterised as a brutal existence. Charles Dickens famously portrayed workhouse inmates as being dirty, neglected, overworked and at the mercy of exploitative masters. While there were undoubtedly establishments that conformed to this stereotype, there is also evidence of a more enlightened approach that has not yet come to public attention. This book establishes a true picture of what life was like in a workhouse, of why inmates entered them and of what they had to endure in their day-to-day routine.A comprehensive overview of the workshouse system gives a real and compelling insight into social and moral reasons behind their growth in the Victorian era, while the kind of distinctions that were drawn between inmates are looked into, which, along with the social stigma of having been a workhouse inmate, tell us much about class attitudes of the time.The book also looks at living conditions and duties of the staff who, in many ways, were prisoners of the workhouse. Michelle Higgs combines thorough research with a fresh outlook on a crucial period in British history, and in doing so paints a vivid portrait of an era and its social standards that continues to fascinate, and tells us much about the society we live in today.

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This is an annotated critical edition of a newly discovered life of Scott by one of his contemporaries. John Macrone, who wrote this life of Scott in 1832-1833, was admirably suited to the task; for, while he had never met Scott, his friends and associates included Cunningham, Galt, and Hogg, who wrote his Anecdotes of Scott for publication in Macrone's book. A quarrel with Lockhart, however, put a stop to the project, and nothing more was heard of it until the recent discovery of an autograph manuscript, here edited and published for the first time. A well-written and carefully-researched narrative, it increases our knowledge of Scott's life and work as perceived by his contemporaries, as well as enabling us to read Hogg's Anecdotes in their original context. The editor's introduction draws extensively on uncollected and unpublished material to illuminate Macrone's career, in the course of which he became the friend and publisher of Dickens, Thackeray, and Moore. It is the first publication of a manuscript which was believed to be lost. It provides a hitherto unknown contemporary perspective on Sir Walter Scott's life and work. It includes an introduction by the editor and a specially commissioned essay by Gillian Hughes giving a detailed account of Macrone's career based largely on uncollected or unpublished material. It establishes a new context for James Hogg's Anecdotes of Scott.

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In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to--and substantially shifts--that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Bront , Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling--more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

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Michael Gove is one of the most recognisable faces in British politics - and one of the most divisive. Whether it's taking on the education `blob', acting as a frontman for the Brexit campaign or orchestrating one of the bloodiest political assassinations in the history of British politics, Gove is a man who makes things happen. But it was almost so different, and his story, from being born into care to standing for the leadership of the Conservative Party, could have come straight from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. A charming man to his friends, and a cold-blooded zealot to his enemies, Gove provokes a reaction from everyone, be it loyalty, anger, respect or fury. Love him or hate him, it's impossible to deny Gove's impact on the UK over the past ten years, and, with Brexit still up in the air, he will continue to play a key role in the future of the country. Political journalist Owen Bennett's groundbreaking biography takes in original research as well as interviews with current and former Cabinet ministers, ex-colleagues from the BBC and The Times, and numerous other key players in Gove's life story. Lively and insightful in equal measure, Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry reveals what turned the adopted son of an Aberdeen fishing family into one of the key political figures of the decade.

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"Five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has even been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." --Samuel Johnson Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts--the fears they provoke, the forms they take--are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times. Organized chronologically, this new cultural history features a dazzling range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.

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Finalist for the Romantic Novelist Association's 'The Romantic Saga Award 2023' for A Mother's WarNorth Yorkshire, 1941.It's been two years since war broke out and the dangers of war are becoming ever more real for the Calvert-Lazenby family. With Raven Hall requisitioned as a maternity hospital, Rosina is rushed off her feet helping to care for the new young mothers and barely has the time to worry about young sergeant Harry who has been posted abroad. Until foreboding news arrives . . .Meanwhile, against Rosina's wishes, eighteen-year-old Connie decides to leave school and move to Scarborough to train as a carpenter's apprentice, sharing a flat with her friend Stella and the mysterious Valentine. Valentine is enigmatic and Connie would love to get to know her better, but little does she know how things will get much worse for them both . . .Nowhere is safe in wartime.Praise for Mollie Walton:'Mollie Walton captures your attention from the very first page and doesn't let go!' Diney Costeloe'A Journey. Compelling. Addictive' Val Wood'Feisty female characters, an atmospheric setting ... A phenomenal read' Cathy Bramley'Evocative, dramatic and hugely compelling. I loved it' Miranda Dickinson

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Arguably America's greatest living poet, Sharon Olds enters her eightieth year with a book for our times: a book of fear, fragility and love of life***NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST******AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***'Sharon Olds is a force of nature... She proves triumphantly evergreen'OBSERVER'At the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror,' writes Olds in this self-scouring, exhilarating collection, which opens with a section of quarantine poems, followed by her 'Amherst Balladz', honouring Emily Dickinson - 'she was our Girl - our Woman - / Man enough - for me' - and leads to celebrations of lost friends and lovers: her childhood, young womanhood, and old age all mixed up together. She examines her white privilege, sees her mother 'flushed and exalted at punishment time', celebrates the human body, even in ageing, and looks with wonder at the natural world and how we've spoiled it.Renowned for her poetry of searing honesty, sexual frankness and brave originality, Sharon Olds' new book emerges 'at the eleventh hour of the end of the world', from the time of plague, this time of loss, where she can look at the world and her life and tell us plainly 'love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.'

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Advent is celebrated when the year is becoming darker and colder, moving into the death and dormancy of winter. Before we can greet the coming of the light, we need to engage with some themes that are challenging and occasionally fearful. Like the Magi who travelled a long distance to search out and adore the infant Jesus, and who took some wrong turns on the way, we too have a journey to undertake before we find that we have 'Walked haphazard by starlight straight Into the kingdom of heaven.' U. A. Fanthorpe, BC:AD Haphazard by Starlight is a companion volume to Janet Morley's bestselling Lent book, The Heart's Time, which delighted readers with its thoughtfully chosen selection of poems and its biblically sensitive commentaries. Here, the reader is given an opportunity to engage in a pilgrimage of the heart, through Advent and Christmas to the feast of the Epiphany. Each day - from 1 December to 6 January - offers a poem (sometimes explicitly Christian, often not) and an accessible commentary that is both critically informed and devotional in intent. The poets represented include Rowan Williams, Elizabeth Jennings, Edwin Muir, Philip Larkin, Jane Kenyon, Gillian Clarke, George Herbert, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Waldo Williams, P. J. Kavanagh, Ruth Fainlight, William Blake and many more.

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Leer en paralelo las tres novelas de las hermanas Brontë es toda una experiencia. De algún modo se percibe el denominador común del genio familiar y algunos de los rasgos de la sociedad de la época, pero también la personalidad de cada una. Las hermanas Brontë edificaron su literatura en medio del silencio opresivo y la rígida austeridad de una rectoral. El clérigo de origen irlandés que era su padre también escribía, por lo menos sermones y un par de volúmenes de poemas campestres; si añadimos las historias de fantasmas, los cuentos de duendes y demonios irlandeses y la poesía, tendremos el sustrato común de las hermanas. En 1847, fecha de la aparición de nuestras tres novelas, Dickens ya había escrito media docena de sus grandes obras. Baste el dato para apreciar la originalidad, el lirismo turbador, el paisaje hostil de páramos y ruinas, los amores devastadores, la borrascosa isla literaria en fin que hicieron emerger las tres hermanas en medio del apacible realismo de la novela ing

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The Top 500 Poems offers a vivid portrait of poetry in English, assembling a host of popular and enduring poems as chosen by critics, editors, poets, and general readers. These works speak across centuries, beginning with Chaucer's resourceful inventions and moving through Shakespeare's masterpieces, John Donne's complex originality, and Alexander Pope's mordant satires. The anthology also features perennial favorites such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats; Emily Dickinson's prisms of profundity; the ironies of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot; and the passion of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. These 500 poems are verses that readers either know already or will want to know, encapsulating the visceral power of truly great literature. William Harmon provides illuminating commentary to each work and a rich introduction that ties the entire collection together.

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Meet the women of American Housewife… They smoke their eyes and paint their lips. They channel Beyoncé while doing household chores. They drown their sorrows with Chanel No. 5 and host book clubs where chardonnay trumps Charles Dickens. They redecorate. And they are quietly capable of kidnapping, breaking and entering, and murder. These women know the rules of a well-lived life: replace your tights every winter, listen to erotic audio books while you scrub the bathroom floor, serve what you want to eat at your dinner parties, and accept it: you’re too old to have more than one drink and sleep through the night.Vicious, fresh and darkly hilarious, American Housewife is a collection of stories for anyone who has ever wondered what really goes on behind the façades of the housewives of America…

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The Best Mum in the World is a glorious collection of more than 300 quotes celebrating mothers and motherhood. Mums have deservedly attracted thousands of amazing quotes, thoughts and observations and this unique anthology features contributions from the deeply philosophical to the wonderfully humorous, and is the perfect present to say thank you for all their hard work on your behalf. With witty and wonderful quotes from the stars of stage, screen and literature, the worlds of music, comedy and politics, The Best Mum in the World makes for a delightful book and gift. 'A mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.' Emily Dickinson. 'All I am I owe to my mother.' George Washington. 'Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.' James Joyce. 'God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.' Ruyard Kipling.

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Interviewing Children is an accessible guidefor forensic interviewers, clinicians, attorneys, and other professionals who rely on children’s testimony. In this second edition, Poole and Dickinson present new thematic chapters on conversation habits, conventional content, and protocols for training.Highlights include: Sample dialogues that help flesh out and illustrate research-based recommendations for practice quick guides that synthesize core ideas and skills 'Principles to Practice' sections that answer questions about child interviewing;and a comprehensive appendix of learning activities readers can use to sharpen their interviewing skills. The primary goal of all conversations with child witnesses is to help children describe events in their lives as completely, accurately, and unambiguously as they can. But common obstacles can make this task difficult, if not impossible

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A comprehensive look at the academic criticism of Jane Austen from her time down to the present. Among the most important English novelists, Jane Austen is unusual because she is esteemed not only by academics but by the reading public. Her novels continue to sell well, and films adapted from her works enjoy strong box-officesuccess. The trajectory of Austen criticism is intriguing, especially when one compares it to that of other nineteenth-century English writers. At least partly because she was a woman in the early nineteenth century, she was longneglected by critics, hardly considered a major figure in English literature until well into the twentieth century, a hundred years after her death. Yet consequently she did not suffer from the reaction against Victorianism thatdid so much to hurt the reputation of Dickens, Tennyson, Arnold, and others. How she rose to prominence among academic critics - and has retained her position through the constant shifting of academic and critical trends - is a story worth telling, as it suggests not only something about Austen's artistry but also about how changes in critical perspective can radically alter a writer's reputation. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

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Literary representations of British convicts exiled to Australia were the most likely way that the typical English reader would learn about the new colonies there. In Transported to Botany Bay, Dorice Williams Elliott examines how writers—from canonical ones such as Dickens and Trollope to others who were themselves convicts—used the figure of the felon exiled to Australia to construct class, race, and national identity as intertwined. Even as England’s supposedly ancient social structure was preserved and venerated as the “true” England, the transportation of some 168,000 convicts facilitated the birth of a new nation with more fluid class relations for those who didn’t fit into the prevailing national image. In analyzing novels, broadsides, and first-person accounts, Elliott demonstrates how Britain linked class, race, and national identity at a key historical moment when it was still negotiating its relationship with its empire. The events and incidents depicted as taking place literally on the other side of the world, she argues, deeply affected people’s sense of their place in their own society, with transnational implications that are still relevant today.

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In this sophisticated application of modern Marxist thought, N. N. Feltes demonstrates the determining influence of nineteenth-century publishing practices on the Victorian novel. His dialectical analysis leads to a comprehensive explanation of the development of capitalist novel production into the twentieth century. Feltes focuses on five English novels: Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Eliot's Middlemarch, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Forster's Howards End. Published at approximately twenty year intervals between 1836 and 1920, they each represent a different first-publication format: part-issue, three-volume, bimonthly, magazine-serial, and single-volume. Drawing on publishing, economic, and literary history, Feltes offers a broad, synthetic explanation of the relationship between the production and format of each novel, and the way in which these determine, in the last instance, the ideology of the text. Modes of Production in Victorian Novels provides a Marxist structuralist analysis of historical events and practices described elsewhere only empirically, and traces their relationship to literary texts which have been analyzed only idealistically, thus setting these familiar works firmly and perhaps permanently into a framework of historic materialism.

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The Los Angeles Review of Books launched as online-only magazine in April 2011 to revive the great American tradition of the long form literary and cultural arts review. Today, we've created a new institution for writers and readers unlike anything else on the web. The LARB Quarterly Journal is our flagship print edition of the magazine, reflecting the best that this institution has to bring to readers all over the world. We've cultivated a stable of regular contributors, both eminent (Jane Smiley, Mike Davis, Jonathan Lethem) and emerging (Jenny Hendrix, Colin Dickey, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah). We've found our way to a certain tone that readers expect and enjoy: looser and more eclectic than other journals, grounded in literature but open to all varieties of cultural experience, far from the New York publishing hothouse atmosphere but not myopically focused on L.A. either. The LARB Quarterly Journal builds on the best aspects of our flagship online magazine. The long form literary and cultural arts review is alive and well, and now, has a new home in Los Angeles.

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Robin Lloyd’s debut novel opens in Lyme, Connecticut, in the early nineteenth century. Elisha Ely Morgan is a young farm boy who has witnessed firsthand the terror of the War of 1812. Troubled by a tumultuous home life ruled by the fists of their tempestuous father, Ely's two older brothers have both left their pastoral boyhoods to seek manhood through sailing. One afternoon, the Morgan family receives a letter with the news that one brother is lost at sea; the other is believed to be dead. Scrimping as much savings as a farm boy can muster, Ely spends nearly every penny he has to become a sailor on a square-rigged ship, on a route from New York to London—a route he hopes will lead to his vanished brother, Abraham. Learning the brutal trade of a sailor, Ely takes quickly to sea-life, but his focus lies with finding Abraham. Following a series of cryptic clues regarding his brother's fate, Ely becomes entrenched in a mystery deeper than he can imagine. As he feels himself drawing closer to an answer, Ely climbs the ranks to become a captain, experiences romance, faces a mutiny, meets Queen Victoria, and befriends historical legends such as Charles Dickens in his raucous quest.

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There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing. This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.

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Visionary furniture design from Vienna In 1938, Vienna lost its best and most creative minds. This rupture was manifested in all of the arts and sciences and its mark is felt to this day – not least in the field of furniture design. With inexhaustible creativity the Jewish furniture designers who were forced to flee Vienna continued to work while in exile. They taught at the best universities and spread their ideas and vision throughout the entire world. Their creations became classics of twentieth-century furniture design, the epitome of mid-century modern style. This book honors the memory of the exiled designers with a thorough overview of their work. It details their life stories and their visionary designs, which remain as relevant and contemporary as ever, and brings to light new aspects of the history of Viennese furniture design. A new history of Viennese furniture design, with 27 detailed biographies Numerous previously unpublished photographs and sketches Including works by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Martin Eisler, Josef Frank, Friedrich Kiesler, Richard Neutra, Bruno Pollak, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Franz Singer, Ernst Schwadron, among others

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Are you confident with poetry, an expert in Dickens, at ease with modern drama, but a bit more unsure when it comes to Shakespeare? Then this is the guide for you.Lots of students find Shakespearean language and content the hardest element of the GCSE English Literature course; this book gives you practical strategies you can use to make sure you can access those very top grades. Are you giving the examiner your own personal opinion on the extract? Have you picked out the most important quotes, and broken them down? Does it link to the play as a whole? This guide gives you a range of ways to make sure you’re doing all this and more, and that you achieve as close to full marks as possible, every time.Broken down into the two most frequently studied Shakespearean plays at GCSE (Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet), you can find the text that you need and become an expert in all things Shakespeare. No more woolly points, no more skirting away from analyzing pentametre, no more generic ‘Shakesperean audiences hated…’ It’s time to focus on the 9s.

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Opened in 1837 and inspired by the Pere Lachaise in Paris, West Norwood became known as the Millionaire's Cemetery. But within its opulent grounds there are twelve buried names whose currency is language: these are the dead poets of West Norwood. In the first instalment of a project to map the Magnificent Seven, Chris McCabe takes us off the main track of London writing and asks why the works of Hopkins, Tennyson and Browning are still read above those buried in this suburban enclave of South London. Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written across a range of forms - prose, Gothic fiction, criticism and poetry - and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche.

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A radical defense of a solitary life What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today. Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration.

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A radical defense of a solitary life What single person hasn't suffered? Everyone, it seems, must be (or must want to be) in a couple. To exist outside of the couple is to assume an antisocial position that is ruthlessly discouraged because being in a couple is the way most people bind themselves to the social. Singles might just be the single most reviled sexual minorities today. Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled offers a polemic account of this supremacy of the couple form, and how that supremacy blocks our understanding of the single. Michael Cobb reads the figurative language surrounding singleness as it traverses an eclectic set of literary, cultural, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and popular culture objects from Plato, Freud, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Barack Obama, Emily Dickinson, Morrissey, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Hannah Arendt to the Bible, Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary, Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” and HBO's Big Love. Within these flights of fancy, poetry, fiction, strange moments in film and video, paintings made in the desert, bits of song, and memoirs of hiking in national parks, Cobb offers an inspired, eloquent rumination on the single, which is guaranteed to spark conversation and consideration.

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Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made— in terms borrowed from the “singing school” of William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.” Robert Pinsky’s headnotes for each of the 80 poems and his brief introductions to each section take a writer’s view of specific works: William Carlos Williams’s “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper” for intense verbal music; Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” for wild imagination in matter-of-fact language; Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” for surrealist aplomb; Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” for subtlety in meter. Included are poems by Aphra Behn, Allen Ginsberg, George Herbert, John Keats, Mina Loy, Thomas Nashe, and many other master poets. This anthology respects poetry’s mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable.

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Mamma Mia meets Bridesmaids in a laugh-out-loud, life affirming comedy ‘An absolute winner’ Celia Anderson ‘No-one depicts family life with more humour and wisdom than Tracy Bloom’ Katie Fforde ‘You will absolutely love Tracy Bloom… Heartfelt and wonderful’ Miranda Dickinson ––––––––––––––––––– One weekend, one bride-to-be, what could possibly go wrong… All Shelley wanted on her hen weekend was to enjoy three days of sun, sea and sangria. But instead of being surrounded by the A-team of her closest friends, she somehow ends up with a Golden Girls-meets-the-Spice Girls B-list that includes her mother, a rebellious teenager, and a best mate ‘on the verge’. The squabbling starts at the airport, and on arrival in Spain, Shelley barely has time to unpack her suitcase before getting an unwanted text ̶ one that throws her wedding into doubt. Shelley has got a BIG decision to make, but her unruly medley of nearest and dearest seem determined to confuse matters with their own problems. Have they got what it takes to get her through the most important weekend of her life? ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ‘A warm-hearted, wise and wickedly funny slice of family life’ Alex Brown

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Tennessee Whiskey is devoted entirely to the quintessential whiskeys of Tennessee.There is no questioning that Tennessee has a rich whiskey history. With a whiskey tradition surviving both the Civil War and prohibition, Tennessee proved early on that it would be a major player in the industry. But how did the Volunteer State become the center of the whiskey renaissance? In Tennessee Whiskey, spirits expert Carlo DeVito investigates the innovative and legendary whiskey pioneers who passed down distilling traditions from generation to generation. With a wealth of distilleries to traverse on the Tennessee Whiskey Trail, DeVito honors the quality ingredients, fine craftsmanship, commitment, and character that make these whiskeys a world-class standard.Inside you’ll find: A collection of over 100 varied distillery profiles Fascinating interviews with master distillers Stunning, full-color original photography Detailed tasting notes for hundreds of expressions From Jack Daniel’s and George Dickel to newer craft distilleries that are still aging their first barrels, this book is your comprehensive guide to the state’s renowned distilleries. Explore the origins and evolution of this craft and learn Tennessee’s spirited history with Tennessee Whiskey.

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