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A witty, intricately-plotted exploration of a sudden fall from grace, the Penguin Classics edition of Wilkie Collins's No Name is edited with an introduction and notes by Mark Ford.Magdalen and her sister Norah, beloved daughters of Mr and Mrs Vanstone, find themselves the victims of a catastrophic oversight. Their father has neglected to change his will, and when the girls are suddenly orphaned, their inheritance goes to their uncle. Now penniless, the conventional Norah takes up a position as a governess, but the defiant and tempestuous Magdalen cannot accept the loss of what is rightfully hers and decides to do whatever she can to win it back. With the help of cunning Captain Wragge, she concocts a scheme that involves disguise, deceit and astonishing self-transformation. In this compelling, labyrinthine story Wilkie Collins brilliantly demonstrates the gap between justice and the law, and in the subversive Magdalen he portrays one of the most exhilarating heroines of Victorian fiction.In his introduction Mark Ford examines themes of identity and illegitimacy within Victorian society and compares No Name to Collins's more 'sensational' fiction. This edition also includes notes and a bibliography.Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846 he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the knowledge that was to give him much of the material for his writing. From the early 1850s he was a friend of Charles Dickens, who produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).If you enjoyed No Name, you might like Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, also available in Penguin Classics.

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For decades Alan Powers has studied bird vocalizations, developing the remarkable ability to imitate birds’ songs and get them to respond and even change tunes. Through his years of study, he has discovered that birds can teach us important lessons about the world and about ourselves. As Powers explains, by communing cross-species we reach out to the timeless interconnected web of all life past and present--what Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno called in Latin the Uni-versus, the “Whole turned into One.” Sharing his journey to learn birdtalk and his profound observations about the poetic, spiritual, and healing influences of birdsong, Powers explores the ancient language of birds and the depth of meaning birds convey. He explains how bird speech sounds like song to us, but birdtalk is urgent and nuanced, whether about predators or the weather. He details how he began learning birdtalk, listening to one bird each summer, learning their many vocalizations and variations. Discussing specific techniques, he shares insights into the birdtalk of many species, including the complex and intelligent speech of Crows, the emotional depths of Loons, the mimicry of Blue Jays, and the beautiful song of the Wood Thrush. Exploring the intertwined metaphysics of bird and human languages, Powers looks at the long-standing tradition of “avitherapy” throughout history, literature, and the arts. He shares insights into birds from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, reveals how birds appear in love songs throughout the world, and examines how famous writers such as Keats, Catullus, St. Francis of Assisi, and the French historian Jules Michelet found that talking to birds improves their state of mind. He also explores how song-talk with birds restores peace, calms anxiety, and enhances health.

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One of the most recurrent and controversial subjects of nineteenth–century discourse was work. Many thinkers associated work with honest pursuit of doing good, not the curse accompanying exile from Eden but rather “a great gift of God.” Sincerely undertaken work comprised a mission entailing a commitment to serve others and promote a better future for all. Satisfaction with what work could do for individuals had its counterbalance in the anger and dismay expressed at the conditions of those whom Robert Owen, in 1817, first called the “working class.” What working–class people confronted both at the labor site and at their lodgings was construed as oppressive, and the misery of their lives became the subject of sentimental poetry, government report, popular fiction, and journalistic expose. Perhaps as heated as the discussion about conditions of lower–class workers was the conversation about separate spheres of work for men and women. This conversation, too, found its way into the literature and public discourse of the day. In The Voice of Toil, the editors have collected the central writings from a pivotal place and time, including poems, stories, essays, and a play that reflect four prominent ways in which the subject of work was addressed: Work as Mission, Work as Opportunity, Work as Oppression, and (Separate) Spheres of Work. The resulting anthology offers a provocative text for students of nineteenth-century British literature and history and a valuable resource for scholars. The text includes readings from John Wesley, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, William Morris, Joanna Baillie, Friedrich Engels, Matthew Arnold, Angela Burdett–Coutts, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bernard Shaw and many others.

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An incisive, thought-provoking, and timely meditation, at once panoramic and synoptic, on American literature for an age of xenophobia, heightened nationalism, and economic disparity. The distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the nation's identity through the prism of its books, from the indigenous past to the early settlers, the colonial period, the age of independence, its ascendance as a global power, and its shallow, fracturing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The central motives that make the United States a flawed experiment--its celebration of do-it-yourself individualism, its purported exceptionalism, and its constitutional government based on checks and balances--are explored through canonical works like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson's poetry, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, and immigrant voices such as those of Américo Paredes, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others. This is literary criticism at its best-informed: broad-ranged yet pungent and uncompromising.

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Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.

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The arc of poetry of the South, from slave songs to Confederate hymns to Civil War ballads, from Reconstruction turmoil to the Agrarian movement to the dazzling poetry of the New South, is richly varied and historically vibrant. No other region of the United States has been as mythologized as the South, nor contained as many fascinating, beguiling, and sometimes infuriating contradictions. Poems of the American South includes poems both by Southerners and by famous observers of the South who hailed from elsewhere. These range from Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Francis Scott Key through Langston Hughes, Robert Penn Warren, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, James Dickey, and Donald Justice, and include a host of living poets as well: Wendell Berry, Rita Dove, Sandra Cisneros, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, C. D. Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and many more. Organized thematically, the anthology places poems from past centuries in fruitful dialogue with a diverse array of modern voices who are redefining the South with a verve that is reinvigorating American poetry as a whole.

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Given the increasing number of old people, the proliferation of books about old age is hardly surprising. Most of these come from cultural historians or social scientists and, when those with a literary background have tackled the subject, they have largely done so through what are known as period studies. In Blasted with Antiquity, David Ellis provides an alternative. Skipping nimbly from Cicero to Shakespeare, and from Wordsworth to Dickens and beyond, he discusses various aspects of old age with the help of writers across European history who have usually been regarded as worth listening to. Eschewing extended literary analyses, Ellis addresses retirement, physical decay, sex in old age, the importance of family, legacy, wills and nostalgia, as well of course as dying itself. While remaining alert to current trends, his approach is consciously that of the old way of teaching English rather than the new. Whether 'blasted with antiquity' like Falstaff in Henry IV Part Two, or with the 'shining morning face' of an unwilling student, his accessible and witty style will appeal to young and old alike.

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Increasingly in the last decade, macropolitics—a consideration of political transformations at the level of the state—has become a focus for cultural inquiry. From the macropolitical perspective afforded by contemporary postcolonial studies, the essays in this collection explore the relationship between politics and culture by examining developments in a wide range of nineteenth-century writing. The dozen essays gathered here span the entire era of colonization and discuss the British Isles, Europe, the United States, India, the Caribbean, and Africa. Addressing the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë, as well as explorers’ reports, Bible translations, popular theater, and folklore, the contributors consider such topics as the political function of aesthetic containment, the redefinitions of nationality under the pressure of imperial ambition, and the coexistence of imperial and revolutionary tendencies. New historical data and new interpretive perspectives alter our conception of established masterpieces and provoke new understandings of the political and cultural context within which these works emerged. This anthology demonstrates that the macropolitical concept of imperialism can provide a new understanding of nineteenth-century cultural production by integrating into a single process the well-established topics of nationalism and exoticism. First published in 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press), Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature is now available in paperback. Offering agenda-setting essays in cultural and Victorian studies, it will be of interest to students and scholars of British and American literature, literary theory, and colonial and postcolonial studies.Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Chris Bongie, Wai-chee Dimock, Bruce Greenfield, Mark Kipperman, James F. Knapp, Loren Kruger, Lisa Lowe, Susan Meyer, Jeff Nunokawa, Harriet Ritvo, Marlon B. Ross, Nancy Vogeley, Sue Zemka

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The one hundred sites in this guide are in all six New England States, dating from the early 17th century to the threshold of our time and the architectural styles reflect those popular over a period of four centuries. The sites are varied and were the homes of leaders and literati, merchants and millionaires, poets and Pilgrims, philosophers and farmers, and seafarers and Shakers. Each chapter lists the museum’s location, web address, and telephone number and provide a description of the historical occupants as well as an in-depth look at the house's place in national and architectural history. Sites include: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford CT Sarah Orne Jewett House, Souther Berwick ME Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst MA Robert Frost Farm, Derry NH The Breakers, Newport RI

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Carlos is the talented heir to a notable family in fin-de-siecle Lisbon. He aspires to serve his fellow man in his chosen profession of medicine, in the arts and in politics. But he enters a society affected by powerful international influences - French intellectual developments, English trading practices - that trouble and frustrate him and in the end he is reduced to a kind of spiritual helplessness. Carlos' good intentions decline, amiably, into dilettantism; his passionate love affair itself begins to suffer a devastating constraint. "The Maias" tells a compelling story of characters whose lives become as real and engrossing as any in Flaubert, Balzac or Dickens. This is his masterpiece, a novel of intellectual depth, historical compassion and great wit. Hailed as a masterpiece in the Paris of Flaubert, Balzac and Zola, this remains Eca's most popular novel.

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Flamboyant Matthew Cannonbridge was touched by genius, the most influential mind of the 19th century, a novelist, playwright, the poet of his generation. The only problem is, he should never have existed, and recently divorced 21st century don Toby Judd is the only person to realise something is wrong with history.Cannonbridge was everywhere: he was by Lake Geneva when talk between Byron, Shelley and Mary Godwin turned to the supernatural; he was friend to the young Dickens as he laboured in the blacking factory; he was the only man of note to visit Wilde in prison. His extraordinary life spanned a century. But as the world prepares to toast the bicentenary of Cannonbridge’s most celebrated work, Judd’s discovery leads him on a breakneck chase across the English canon and countryside, to the realisation that the spectre of Matthew Cannonbridge, planted so seamlessly into the heart of the 19th century, might not be so dead and buried after all...

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In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary non-fiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness.

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Sunday is fun day with these 72 medium-difficulty puzzles, featuring fun facts in the answer section. If you’ve got a sharp pencil and a sharp mind, you’ll love solving these super Sunday-sized crosswords. Originally appearing in the Long Island newspaper Newsday, they were crafted by an all-star lineup of constructors and edited by puzzle expert Stanley Newman. Each puzzle features a fabulous theme—including Dickens, Frosty the Snowman, the Chinese zodiac, and US presidents—and every clue has been vetted for accuracy. Fun facts in the back of the book shed light on select answers.Looking for crossword puzzle books for adults, spiral bound to make completing your morning puzzle without bending the spine a breeze? Look no further! The Sunday Crosswords books series from Puzzlewright Press will keep your mind sharp for many mornings and weekends to come.

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Dear Reader,There is nothing to be found in 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 End, the siblings face a fearsome storm, a suspicious beverage, a herd of wild sheep, an enormous bird cage, and a truly haunting secret about the Baudelaire parents.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 and a Netflix series directed by Nei

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Dear Reader,There is nothing to be found in 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 Grim Grotto, the siblings face mushrooms, a desperate search for something lost, a mechanical monster, a distressing message from a lost friend, and tap dancingIn 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 and a Netflix series starring Neil Patrick

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GCSE Literature Boost: A Christmas Carol uses academic criticism and theory to relight your literary passion for this classic text and put a newfound excitement in your pedagogy. Beginning with a whistlestop tour of literary theory and criticism from 400BC to the late 20th century, Hughes explains how you can introduce your GCSE English students to themes most often reserved for undergraduate courses, improving their understanding of the text and broadening their knowledge of the subject as a whole.Written in easily digestible chunks, each chapter considers a main theme or section of Charles Dickensâ A Christmas Carol through different critical lenses summarising the relevant academic theories, and shows how you can transfer this knowledge to the classroom through practical teaching ideas. Features include: Case studies showing how English teachers have used academic theory in practical ways. Ideas for teaching linked to GCSE assessment objectives

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'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe'So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . . 'Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed' Independent on SundayPeter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London.

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Finalist for the SIBA Book AwardA loamy volume of verse thematically inspired, Working the Dirt celebrates Southerners' connections to the land. The selected poems share themes of gardening, farming, and the rich Southern soil. The approximately one hundred poets, known and lesser-known, living and dead, include: Fred Chappell, Walter McDonald, A. R. Ammons, Robert Morgan, Wendell Berry, Henry Taylor, Tom Dent, Jesse Stuart, Jim Wayne Miller, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Marion Montgomery, James Whitehead, C. D. Wright, George Scarbrough, Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, Thad Stem, Jr., William Sprunt, Donald Justice, Thomas Rabbitt, James Dickey, Rick Lott, John Allison, Edwin Godsey, Richard Jackson, Nikki Giovanni, Alvin Aubert, Margaret Walker, Emily Hiestand, Robert Gibbons, John Stone, Coppie Green, Bonnie Roberts, Coleman Barks, Anne George, Edward Eaton, Margaret Gibson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Butler, R. H. W. Dillard, Jane Gentry, Rodney Jones, Dannye Romine, Miller Williams, George Garrett, Sandra Agricola, Patricia Hooper, Gerald Berrax, Gibbons Ruark, Catherine Savage Brosman, Loretta Cobb, and Pattiann Rogers.

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A History of Zinnias brings forward the fascinating adventure of zinnias and the spirit of civilization. With colorful illustrations, this book is a cultural and horticultural history documenting the development of garden zinnias—one of the top ten garden annuals grown in the United States today.The deep and exciting history of garden zinnias pieces together a tale involving Aztecs, Spanish conquistadors, people of faith, people of medicine, explorers, scientists, writers, botanists, painters, and gardeners. The trail leads from the halls of Moctezuma to a cliff-diving prime minister; from Handel, Mozart, and Rossini to Gilbert and Sullivan; from a little-known confession by Benjamin Franklin to a controversy raised by Charles Darwin; from Emily Dickinson, who writes of death and zinnias, to a twenty-year-old woman who writes of reanimated corpses; and from a scissor-wielding septuagenarian who painted with bits of paper to the "Black Grandma Moses" who painted zinnias and inspired the opera Zinnias.Zinnias are far more than just a flower: They represent the constant exploration of humankind's quest for beauty and innovation.

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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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Welcome to the George Inn near London Bridge; a cosy, wood-pannelled, galleried coaching house a few minutes' walk from the Thames. Grab yourself a pint, listen to the chatter of the locals and lean back, resting your head against the wall. And then consider this: who else has rested their head against that wall, over the last 600 years? Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims almost certainly drank in the George on their way out of London to Canterbury. It's fair to say that Shakespeare will have popped in from the nearby Globe for a pint, and we know that Dickens certainly did. Mail carriers changed their horses here, before heading to all four corners of Britain -- while sailors drank here before visiting all four corners of the world... The pub, as Pete Brown points out, is the 'primordial cell of British life' and in the George he has found the perfect case study. All life is here, from murderers, highwaymen and ladies of the night to gossiping pedlars a

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A critical re-evaluation of the imaginative transformations of Romanticism by major American writers The study traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and Post-Romantic writing Reasserts the significance of Second-Generation Romantic writers for American literary culture Reassessing the indebtedness of major American writers to British Romanticism This book provides innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought. It traverses the traditional critical boundaries of prose and poetry in American and Romantic and post-Romantic writing. Analysing significant works by nineteenth-century writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, as well as the later writings of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Wallace Stevens, the book reasserts the significance of second-generation Romantic writers for American literary culture. Sandy reassesses our understanding of Romantic inheritance and influence on post-Romantic aesthetics, subjectivity and the natural world in the American imagination.

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Critics of American exceptionalism usually view it as a destructive force eroding the radical energies of social movements and aesthetic practices. In A Desire Called America, Christian P. Haines confronts a troubling paradox: Some of the most provocative political projects in the United States are remarkably invested in American exceptionalism. Riding a strange current of U.S. literature that draws on American exceptionalism only to overturn it in the name of utopian desire, Haines reveals a tradition of viewing the United States as a unique and exemplary political model while rejecting exceptionalism’s commitments to nationalism, capitalism, and individualism. Through Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon, Haines brings to light a radically different version of the American dream—one in which political subjects value an organization of social life that includes democratic self-governance, egalitarian cooperation, and communal property. A Desire Called America brings utopian studies and the critical discourse of biopolitics to bear upon each other, suggesting that utopia might be less another place than our best hope for confronting authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and a resurgent exclusionary nationalism.

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Motherhood. Not for the faint hearted or blasé, it’s a state of being that tries one’s patience, purpose and peace. Sequel to 10 Women Who Overcame their Past, Dayspring Macleod’s 10 Women Who were Spiritual Mothers is set to be yet another poignant read. In tackling themes from purity to patience, each focused narrative allows the reader an insight into the lives of women whom they may have heard of but not known well. From Katherine Parr, sixth and final wife of Henry VIII, to Sharon Dickens and Lisa Harper, the ten women represent a spectrum of life delivered via the prism of motherhood. This book isn’t only for mothers. It’s for those who are heartbroken, single, bereft or at peace in later life. Discipleship is a key theme, be it with the children who litter your hallways with Nerf Pellets or friends undergoing the ups and downs of infertility. As a woman who knows the support of women in her own life, Macleod has gracefully painted a canvas of joy in sorrows, peace and panic and Christ’s love triumphant.

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‘Begins as a compelling psychological mystery [and] turns to the supernatural... A well-plotted, original, nightmare blend of madness and monsters.’ Guardian The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of lush glamour, where guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes and obliging waiters are always on hand. Yet behind its glittering façade, you might find monsters lurking in the shadows... On a cold February evening, Nora Dickinson checks in. A psychoanalyst with a dubious past, Nora has battled not to let her own demons overcome her. But when a terrible snowstorm cuts The Regent off from the outside world, the entire hotel’s grip on reality slips – and the nightmares Nora’s worked so hard to control begin to bare their teeth. Kate Mascarenhas’s latest novel offers her readers a horrifying ride through murder, madness and the darkest recesses of the mind. 'A delicious piece of art deco Gothic' Natalie Marlow ‘Dark, complex and beautifully plotted' Rebecca Netley ‘Immersive, unique... with a dark supernatural core’ Essie Fox ‘An atmospheric, claustrophobic novel... mesmerising’ Elizabeth Lee

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A NEW YORK TIMES 2023 SUMMER READ Meet Tony: the first Indian to set foot on American soil. Among the settlers, slaves, and indentured servants that make the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s — for some, an exciting opportunity, for others, a brutal abduction — there is also Tony. As a child, his homeland on the Coromandel Coast of India becomes a trading outpost for the English; as an orphaned teenager, he finds himself kidnapped from the streets of London and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation. But Tony is not giving up on his dreams just yet. Under the rule of a sadistic plantation owner, he forms a tender bond with a young boy who will haunt his nightmares; on an exploration inland alongside a trader and Native Americans, he realises the world is vaster and more mysterious than he could have imagined; and in Jamestown, he finally earns himself a position as a physician’s apprentice, an ambition he has long harboured. The East Indian is a Dickensian-style yarn about family, friendship, and finding oneself in the seeds of a new world.

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Insiders/Outsiders, published to accompany a UK-wide arts festival of the same name in 2019, examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, émigrés arriving from Europe in the 1930s - supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK - introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes. At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, the book serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.Contributions by: Richard Aronowitz, Harriet Atkinson, Michael Berkowitz, Morwenna Blewett, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Charmian Brinson, Andrew Chandler, Hans Christian Hönes, Leyla Daybelge, Rachel Dickson, Keith Holz, Amanda Hopkinson, Shauna Isaac, Swantje Kuhfuss-Wickenheiser, Simon Lake, Sarah MacDougall, Anna Müller-Härlin, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Anna Nyburg, Michael Paraskos, Antony Penrose, Alan Powers and Daniel Snowman

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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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The brand new Railway Girls novel set in Manchester during WWII. Perfect for fans of Nancy Revell, Daisy Styles and Margaret Dickinson.___________________Readers LOVE the Railway Girls: 'Gripping and intriguing''Great story lines''Exceptional story . . . a must-read' 'Poignant''Emotional . . . strong women' ___________________Love is in the air, and together the railway girls can overcome even the hardest of times.Mabel has finally put the past behind her, and her relationship with the dashing Harry is stronger than ever. That is, until an old flame shows up, leaving Mabel questioning her future.Meanwhile Joan has made amends with Bob - if only she could do the same with Gran. And there's still that family mystery she wants answer to, isn't there?As a mother and grandmother, Dot Green has always put her family first. Her job as a parcels porter has brought new purpose to her life, so is it finally time to start following her heart . . .Life as a railway girl is busy but as war rages on and air raids disrupt daily life, the women realise they need each other more than ever, especially when there might be wedding bells on the horizon.

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Brought to you by Penguin.'It is at Christmas time that want is most keenly felt, and abundance rejoices.'Charles Dickens, 'A Christmas Carol' 1843'Yeah, and a partridge up your pear tree, an' all.'Derek Trotter, 'Christmas Crackers', 1981'Think of this memoir as a Christmas special in book form, from someone who has been involved in a few of those and understands a bit about the concept. But a Christmas special very much like Only Fools and Horses, in the sense that the stories will be always heading outwards, ranging far and wide and well beyond the traditional festive gags involving giblets left in turkeys.As I sift through various festive-related episodes in my career, loosening the ribbons, parting the wrapping paper, I'll be doing my best to reach any relevant conclusions about life, work and the meaning of it all that I can usefully pass on to you - baubles of wisdom if you like. Or certainly baubles. You'll learn why I have the perfect face to play Scrooge. And if you're lucky I'll also share what it's like to fly in a helicopter with my old mucker Tom Cruise. Merry Christmas, you plonkers.'© David Jason 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

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Key Stage 2 Comprehension provides a unique collection of stimulating texts that appeal strongly to both boys and girls, together with questions that both build and stretch comprehension skills and widen vocabulary. Comprising four one-per-child activity books and providing more than 72 texts in total, the series encourages children to pay close attention to literal meaning, make inferences and deductions, observe how writing is structured and identify literary devices. A separate Teacher's Guide is also available. Book 4 reflects the broadening interests and word power of young people who will soon move to secondary school, or have now done so. It includes: non-fiction texts covering the discovery in Russia of a long-extinct mammoth, shells and their origins and the life of explorer Robert Scott, the poignant 'last letter' from Scott to his widow, classic poetry from Rudyard Kipling, Edward Thomas, Edward Lear and William Wordsworth, a short extract from the play 'Hamlet' by William Shakespeare, riveting fiction from R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens and absorbing autobiographies and biographical fiction from Roald Dahl and Alison Prince.

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When Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in 1626 he showed his shrewdness by also buying the oyster beds off tiny, nearby Oyster Island, renamed Ellis Island in 1770. From the Minuit purchase until pollution finally destroyed the beds in the 1920s, New York was a city known for its oysters, especially in the late 1800s, when Europe and America enjoyed a decades-long oyster craze. In a dubious endorsement, William Makepeace Thackeray said that eating a New York oyster was like eating a baby. Travellers to New York were also keen to experience the famous New York oyster houses. While some were known for their elegance, due to a longstanding belief in the aphrodisiac quality of oysters, they were often associated with prostitution. In 1842, when the novelist Charles Dickens arrived in New York, he could not conceal his eagerness to find and experience the fabled oyster cellars of New York City's slums. The Big Oyster is the story of a city and of an international trade.Filled with cultural, social and culinary insight - as well as recipes, maps, drawings and photographs - this is history at its most engrossing, entertaining and delicious.

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Lance Butler claims that Victorian language was too immersed in Christianity for the modern reader to deduce a simple story about "loss of faith" in Victorian culture. At the same time, the forces that gave rise to doubt were sufficiently strong to mean that Victorian language also contained elements that disturbed faith. Thus the poets, novelists, and sages of the period were structuring a discourse that simultaneously relied on religion and undermined it. Contents: Introduction; Endemic Doubt in Victorian Literature; Dickens, Carlyle and Hell on Earth; The Discourse of Religion among Victorian Doubters; Disbelieving Religiously: the 1870's and the Need for Compromise; "A Christianity in Harmony with our Whole Nature"; Truth's Holy Sepulchre: George Eliot and the Case of Daniel Deranda; A Possible Messiah: Henry Drummond's Analogy of Religion; Failed Violence in Victorian Fiction; "Unless the World is to Perish": Hardy and Christian Discourse.^R

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A powerful guide for seeking out the best acquisition and merger targets As increasingly more companies look to mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as a source of new growth and revenue, there is an even greater chance that these M&As will go bad. This insightful guide focuses on one of the most often debated and key issues in mergers and acquisitions-why some deals fail miserably and why others prosper. It provides a complete road map for what potential buyers should look for when picking a target and what characteristics of sellers they should steer clear of, as well as pitfalls to avoid during the M&A process. Real-world examples are provided of high-profile failures-Quaker Oats, United Airlines, Sears, and Mattel-and high-profile successes-General Electric and Cisco. Patrick A. Gaughan (New York, NY) is President of Economatrix Research Associates and a professor of Economics and Finance at the College of Business, Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is actively engaged in the practice of business valuations for mergers and acquisitions, as well as other related applications.

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As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging collection. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale; a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's 'Green Holly'; devils, witches, Cossacks and peasants cavort in Gogol's 'The Night Before Christmas'. The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhov's 'Vanka' and Willa Cather's 'The Burglar's Christmas', but takes a boisterously comic turn in Damon Runyon's 'Dancing Dan's Christmas' and John Cheever's 'Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor'. From Nabokov's intensely moving story of a father's grief in 'Christmas' to Truman Capote's hilarious yet heartbreaking 'A Christmas Memory', from Grace Paley's Jewish girl in the Christmas pageant in 'The Loudest Voice' to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford's 'Creche' - each of the stories is imbued with Christmas spirit of one kind or another, and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.

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Poems to celebrate the winter season.A wonderful bedside companion for a frosty winter’s evening, with poems to immerse yourself in the season. From William Shakespeare to John Keats to Katherine Mansfield, the finest poets that ever put pen to paper describe this beautiful and sometimes terrible season.With one entry for every day through winter, from 1st December until 28th or 29th February, this is the ideal book to take you through the darker months and find joy and comfort in nature.In December ‘Gaunt in gloom’ begins James Joyce’s ‘Nightpiece’. In January, there’s a ‘certain slant of light for Emily Dickinson, while ‘the dull dead wind is out of tune’ for Oscar Wilde. And in February, the last month of meteorological winter, William Morris muses ‘From this chill thaw to dream of blossomed May’.This beautiful and collectable anthology of poems derives from the popular A Poem for Every Night of the Year and also features wintry poems by Alice Oswald, Edward Lear, Emily Brontë, William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes and many more.

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With its rich history of prominent families, MassachuSetts is home to some of the most historic residences in the country. In the central and western half of the Commonwealth, these include Edith Wharton's The Mount, the Salisbury Mansion in Worcester, Herman Melville's Arrowhead in Pittsfield, and the Dickinson Homestead and the Evergreens in Amherst.In At Home: Historic Houses of Central and Western MassachuSetts, Beth Luey examines the lives and homes of acclaimed poets and writers, slaves who won their freedom, Civil War ­enlistees, socialites, and leading merchants. Drawing on architectural and genealogical texts, wills, correspondence, and diaries, Luey situates the stories of these notable homes and the people who inhabited them in the context of broader economic, social, and political transformations. Filled with vivid details and fresh perspectives, each chapter is sure to inspire first-time visitors and seasoned travelers alike. All the homes are open to the public.

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The collected work of a poet who turned 102 years old in 2020. These poems, covering sixty years of a free woman's song, are Naomi Replansky's hymns to the struggle for justice and equality and to the enduring beauty of life in our dangerous world.Here at long last is the new and collected work by a writer hailed by George Oppen as one of the most brilliant American poets. Replansky is a poet whose verse combines the compression of Emily Dickinson and the music of W. H. Auden.Naomi Replansky, a Bronx native, began to write poetry in her teens but published her first book when she was 34 in 1952. That collection, Ring Song dazzled critics with its candor and freshness of language. It was nominated for the National Book Award.Since Ring Song, Replansky has since published three additional collections and translated numerous works from German and Yiddish. This collection, Collected Poems is her life's work, won th

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