Search results for ""Author Dick"

Those special occasions in life all need to be marked with words bigger and better than those we could compose ourselves. This beautiful collection includes some of the best readings and poems to help you mark anything from a birth to a death, an engagement to a retirement, a wedding to a memorial service. Poems and readings from the best British and American writers and poets are arranged into the chapters: New Life, Childhood, Love, Unions, Getting Older, Solitude and Loss. The works of poets Longfellow, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders with those of William Blake, Wordsworth and W.H. Auden. The readings come from writers ranging from Churchill to Shakespeare. Mixed in are Apache prayers and Irish blessings to make this a rich reference for anyone looking for the right word at the right moment. It is lavishly illustrated with nostalgic images, making this a wonderful gift.

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Get lost in the gardens of Misselthwaite Manor with this stunning illustrated edition of The Secret Garden. Beautiful contemporary artwork fills the pages of this unique collectible classic.The Secret Garden has enchanted readers for over a century with its story of second chances, found family, and the healing power of nature. Rediscover the timeless tale with this lush, illustrated volume featuring the unabridged text by Frances Hodgson Burnett and beautiful paintings by Kate Lewis created especially for this edition. Lewis’s immersive illustrations invite us to join Mary Lennox as she discovers the wonders of the overgrown garden and befriends the kind Dickon and the stubborn Colin. With new art on almost every page, this is a keepsake edition to be handed down through the generations.A COLLECTIBLE CLASSIC FOR ALL AGES: The Secret Garden is a beloved story shared across generations through films, TV shows, and other adaptatio

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This beautifully illustrated Chinese children''s book features classic nursery rhymes in both English and Mandarin Chinese.It is never too early to immerse children in foreign languages and culture, and exploring rhymes and rhythm is a terrific way to start. Chinese and English Nursery Rhymes presents forty vibrantly illustrated verses in both Chinese and English in a side-by-side format that encourages fun Mandarin Chinese language learning. This inspiring collection of favorite rhymes shows how the simple pleasures of childhood are universal across the globe. The rhymes and songs highlighted in the book include: Muffin Man Happy Birthday to You I See the Moon As I Was Going Along Hickory Dickory Dock And much more… Chinese and English Nursery Rhymes also features Do You Know? notes throughout the book that provide even more ways to experience Chinese culture. A concise tut

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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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A rich collection of primary materials, the multivolume Archives of Empire provides a documentary history of nineteenth-century British imperialism from the Indian subcontinent to the Suez Canal to southernmost Africa. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter have carefully selected a diverse range of texts that track the debates over imperialism in the ranks of the military, the corridors of political power, the lobbies of missionary organizations, the halls of royal geographic and ethnographic societies, the boardrooms of trading companies, the editorial offices of major newspapers, and far-flung parts of the empire itself. Focusing on a particular region and historical period, each volume in Archives of Empire is organized into sections preceded by brief introductions. Documents including mercantile company charters, parliamentary records, explorers’ accounts, and political cartoons are complemented by timelines, maps, and bibligraphies. Unique resources for teachers and students, these books reveal the complexities of nineteenth-century colonialism and emphasize its enduring relevance to the “global markets” of the twenty-first century. Tracing the beginnings of the British colonial enterprise in South Asia and the Middle East, From the Company to the Canal brings together key texts from the era of the privately owned British East India Company through the crises that led to the company’s takeover by the Crown in 1858. It ends with the momentous opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Government proclamations, military reports, and newspaper articles are included here alongside pieces by Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli, and many others. A number of documents chronicle arguments between mercantilists and free trade advocates over the competing interests of the nation and the East India Company. Others provide accounts of imperial crises—including the trial of Warren Hastings, the Indian Rebellion (Sepoy Mutiny), and the Arabi Uprising—that highlight the human, political, and economic costs of imperial domination and control.

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Music videos are available on more channels, in more formats, and in more countries than ever before. While MTV—the network that introduced music video to most viewers—is moving away from music video programming, other media developments signal the longevity and dynamism of the form. Among these are the proliferation of niche-based cable and satellite channels, the globalization of music video production and programming, and the availability of videos not just on television but also via cell phones, DVDs, enhanced CDs, PDAs, and the Internet. In the context of this transformed media landscape, Medium Cool showcases a new generation of scholarship on music video. Scholars of film, media, and music revisit and revise existing research as they provide historically and theoretically expansive new perspectives on music video as a cultural form.The essays take on a range of topics, including questions of authenticity, the tension between high-art influences and mass-cultural appeal, the prehistory of music video, and the production and dissemination of music videos outside the United States. Among the thirteen essays are a consideration of how the rapper Jay-Z uses music video as the primary site for performing, solidifying, and discarding his various personas; an examination of the recent emergence of indigenous music video production in Papua New Guinea; and an analysis of the cultural issues being negotiated within Finland’s developing music video industry. Contributors explore precursors to contemporary music videos, including 1950s music television programs such as American Bandstand, Elvis’s internationally broadcast 1973 Aloha from Hawaii concert, and different types of short musical films that could be viewed in “musical jukeboxes” of the 1940s and 1960s. Whether theorizing music video in connection to postmodernism or rethinking the relation between sound and the visual image, the essays in Medium Cool reveal music video as rich terrain for further scholarly investigation.Contributors. Roger Beebe, Norma Coates, Kay Dickinson, Cynthia Fuchs, Philip Hayward, Amy Herzog, Antti-Ville Kärjä, Melissa McCartney, Jason Middleton, Lisa Parks, Kip Pegley, Maureen Turim, Carol Vernallis, Warren Zanes

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For the poet, even the most minute details of the natural world are starting points for flights of the imagination, and the pages of this collection celebrating the four seasons are brimming with an extraordinary range of observation and imagery.  Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson, and Thoreau, from Keats, Blake, and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Amy Clampitt, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost’s tribute to the evanescence of spring in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” to Langston Hughes’s moody “Summer Night” in Harlem, from the “stopped woods” in Marie Ponsot’s “End of October” to the chilling “mind of winter” in Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” the poems in this

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Willowdean Dickson es Will para sus amigos, una chica gorda (y a mucha honra) para sí misma y Dumplin para su madre. Ser hija de una antigua reina de la belleza nunca ha afectado su autoestima... hasta que descubre que el chico que le gusta se siente atraído por ella.Para librarse de la repentina inseguridad que eso le genera, Will hace lo más impulsivo y horrible que podría habérsele ocurrido: presentarse al concurso de belleza local Miss Lupino Juvenil de Clover City con el objetivo de demostrar que una persona es algo más que su peso. Sin embargo, al inscribirse no se imaginaba la reacción en cadena que provocaría entre otras chicas de su instituto.No sé qué pasa con los bañadores que te hacen pensar que debes ganarte el derecho a llevarlos. Y no es así. En realidad, la cuestión es muy simple: no tienes un cuerpo? Pues ponte un bañador.Porque si tienes que hacer algo, hazlo a lo grande o no lo hagas.

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Londres es, sin duda, una de las principales capitales mundiales. Su extensa e intensa historia, con sus más de 2.000 años de antigüedad, hacen de ella una fuente inagotable de relatos, tanto históricos como ficticios. No en vano es la cuna de personajes tan relevantes como Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, John Lennon, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Charles Chaplin o William Shakespeare.Más allá de su historia, es una ciudad en permanente crecimiento donde el consumo responsable cobra especial importancia a fin de convertirla en un proyecto sostenible. Londres parte con una gran ventaja, pues está repleta de parques y zonas verdes abiertas al público gracias a la tradición aristocrática, hoy extinta, de establecer cotos de caza sin necesidad de trasladarse fuera de la ciudad. Además, con el tiempo ha ido creciendo la sensibilización por la preservación del entorno natural o la utilización sostenible de los recursos, tanto a la hora de velar por el entorno existente como por modifi

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A gorgeous anthology to dip into and savour the rich literary heritage of Yorkshire, Britain’s largest county. Yorkshire is renowned for its landscapes: the magical wilderness of the moors and the dales, its cities built on industry and mining, and its varied coastline.All these places, as well as its people, have been portrayed and dramatized in literature through the centuries; by poets from Andrew Marvell to Simon Armitage, by novelists such as Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stoker, and of course the Brontës, all of whom are represented here. Then there are novelists such as David Storey and Barry Hines, who wrote about working-class lives in the mining towns in the 1950s and 60s. And finally some favourite characters to enjoy, such as James Herriot and the Yorkshire Shepherdess.Yorkshire: A Literary Landscape is edited by David Stuart Davies.

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“Arthur’s Dickensian steampunk world is richly imagined and gorgeously described. . . . This story of friendship, hope, and heroics will delight adventure seekers.” — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (starred review)Welcome to Miss Carbunkle’s Home for Wayward and Misbegotten Creatures, an orphanage for young groundlings (part human, part animal) run by a cunning villainess. For lonely Number Thirteen, a shy, one-eared, foxlike creature, it is the only home he has ever known. When he meets a bird groundling named Trinket, Number Thirteen gains two things: a real name (Arthur, like the good king in the old stories) and a best friend. Trinket and Arthur escape over the high walls of the orphanage and embark on an adventure that will take them out into the wider world and to Arthur’s true destiny: to become the Wonderling and save music for everyone. Rife with steampunk inventions, magical plot twists, and finely d

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Imaginary Distance' is the first book to undertake a survey of the literature produced by nineteenth-century settler emigration. It argues that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. The monograph brings printed emigrants' letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and settler fiction into conversation with each other across the first three chapters to explore the generic features of 'emigration literature': textual mobility, a sense of place, and home-making. The last two chapters demonstrate how pervasive the textual cultures of settler emigration were in shaping the nineteenth-century cultural imagination: concerns raised in emigration literature were pervasive and seeped through representations of space and place: the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Ford Madox Brown, amongst others, draw upon emigration to explore the networks of people and texts extending across the settler world.

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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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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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Exam Board: AQA Level: GCSE Grade 9-1 Subject: English Literature Suitable for the 2023 exams Everything you need to revise for your GCSE 9-1 set text in a snap guide Our A Christmas Carol Snap Revision Text Guide has everything you need to score top marks on your GCSE Grade 9-1 English Literature exam right at your fingertips! Revise A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in a snap with this handy guide. Refresh your knowledge of the plot, context, characters and themes Pick up top tips to ace your AQA exam Plenty of practice questions included in every section Packed with every quote and extract you need Examples of how to plan and write your essay responses QR codes link directly to online videos providing further analysis of the text

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Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets 'worn into themselves like grafted skin', corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns. Horrex - whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet's New Poetries series - unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the 'growlery' of Dickens' Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.

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THE CAPTIVATING NEW NOVEL, SET AGAINST CHARLES DICKENS' HOME FOR FALLEN WOMEN'Absorbing . . . Halls weaves together the elements of her story with great skill' Sunday Times'Acutely observed and beautifully written' Daily Mail'Compelling and richly detailed' Good Housekeeping'Captivating' Woman'Meticulously researched and compelling' Red'Keeps the reader enthralled' Prima'Exquisitely written . . . full of heart and hope' FabulousNOT ALL WHO ARE FALLEN WANT TO BE SAVEDLondon, 1847. In a quiet house in the countryside outside London, the finishing touches are being made to welcome a group of young women. The house and its location are top secret, its residents unknown to one another, but the girls have one thing in common: they are fallen. Offering refuge for prostitute

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Starting in the first century with St Paul and ending in the twentieth with St Oscar Romero, Rowan Williams invites you to reflect with him on the lives and legacies of twenty great Christians – saints, martyrs, poets, theologians and social reformers. Their stories and writings have profoundly influenced his own life and thought, and this sequence of short reflections is sure to sharpen your theological vision and cast a fresh light on what it means to live and breathe the gospel. Included among these 'luminaries' are Augustine of Hippo, William Tyndale, Teresa of Avila, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil, Let these brilliant meditations light your way as you follow the footsteps of the faithful who have gone before.

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Mill Power documents the making of a national park that changed the concept of what a national historical park could be. For a time in the 1800s, Lowell was Massachusetts’s cosmopolitan, must-see second city. The city’s industrial model was as high-tech then as Silicon Valley is today. It drew the attention of luminaries like Charles Dickens, Congressmen Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln, feminist sociologist Harriet Martineau, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. This insider’s account of the creative, bold community-driven process to establish the park explains why today Lowell National Historical Park is renowned as “the partnership park.” The park’s establishment was an integral piece of an urban revival strategy that has made Lowell the subject of scores of newspaper articles, magazine profiles, TV and radio reports, scholarly papers, and book chapters. Historic Preservation magazine has hailed the park as “the premier rehabilitation model for gritty cities worldwide.” The Lowell story has much to teach the mid-sized cities of the nation and the world. Mill Power frames the Lowell comeback in its historical context and brings together the people who dreamed, wrote, designed, pushed, and cheered a new national park into existence along with those who came after with the charges of shaping the ideas into material form. The volume features 100 photos, many of them showing the before-and-after story of this revitalization.

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In 1831, an unknown, horrifying and deadly disease from Asia swept across Continental Europe, killing millions in its path and throwing the medical profession into confusion. Cholera is a killer with little respect for class or wealth. When it arrived in Britain, its repercussions rocked Victorian England - from the filthy lanes of the Sunderland quayside and the squalid streets of Soho, to the great centres of power: the Privy Council, Whitehall and the Royal Medical Colleges. One man - alone and unrecognized - uncovered the truth behind the pandemic and laid the foundations for the modern scientific investigation of today's fatal plagues. John Snow was a reclusive doctor, without money or social position, who had the genius to look beyond the conventional wisdom of his day and work out that cholera was spread through drinking water. The book draws extensively on nineteenth-century medical, political and personal records in order to describe what is both an important breakthrough for medical science and also a dramatic story with a cast of colourful characters, from the heroic to the frighteningly incompetent. The book is also full of fascinating diversions into aspects of medical and social history, from Snow's tending of Queen Victoria in childbirth, to the Dutch microbiologist Leeuwenhoek's breeding of lice in his socks, and from Dickensian children's farms to riotous nineteenth-century anaesthesia parties.

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In this ingenious and diverse collection of 366 stories, events and facts about language, David Crystal presents a selection of insights from literary and linguistic writers, poets and global institutions, together with the weird and wonderful creations of language enthusiasts to enliven each day of the year. The day-by-day treatment illustrates the extraordinary breadth of the subject, from ‘Morse Code Day’ to ‘Talk Like William Shatner Day’, from forensic phonetics used to catch serial killers to heroines of speed reading, and covers writers from many different eras and cultures, including William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, R. K. Narayan, Wole Soyinka and many more. Some days focus on pronunciation, orthography, grammar or vocabulary. Others focus on the way language is used in science, religion, politics, broadcasting, publishing, the Internet and the arts. There are days that acknowledge the achievements of language study, such as in language teaching, speech therapy, deaf education and forensic science, as well as technological progress, from the humble pencil to digital software. Several days celebrate individual languages, such as those recognised as ‘official’ by the United Nations, but not forgetting those spoken by small communities, along with their associated cultural identities. A celebration of the remarkable creativity of all who have illuminated our understanding of language, this book is ideal for anyone wanting to add an extra point of interest to their language day.

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An enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.

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An enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.

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With the transformation and expansion of the nineteenth-century American literary canon in the past two decades, the work of the era's American women poets has come to be widely anthologized. But scant scholarship has arisen to make full sense of it. From School to Salon responds to this glaring gap. Mary Loeffelholz presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times. She uses a series of case studies to discuss why the recovery of nineteenth-century women's poetry has been a process of anthologization without succeeding analysis. At the same time, she provides a much-needed account of the changing social contexts through which nineteenth-century American women became poets: initially by reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in school, and later, by doing those same things in literary salons, institutions created by the high-culture movement of the day. Along the way, Loeffelholz provides detailed analyses of the poetry, much of which has received little or no recent critical attention. She focuses on the works of a remarkably diverse array of poets, including Lucretia Maria Davidson, Lydia Sigourney, Maria Lowell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Annie Fields. Impeccably researched and gracefully written, From School to Salon moves the study of nineteenth-century women's poetry to a new and momentous level.

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In The Extravagant Robert Baker explores the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the modern period, engaging a broad range of writers: Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard in a chapter on the sublime; Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille in a chapter on visionary quest; and Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida in a chapter on apocalyptic negativity. His guiding concern is to illuminate adventures of “extravagant” or “wandering” language that, from the romantic period on, both poets and philosophers have undertaken in opposition to the dominant social and discursive frames of a pervasively instrumentalized world. The larger interpretative narrative shaping the book is that a dialectic of instrumental reason and creative negativity has been at work throughout modern culture. Baker argues that adventures of exploratory wandering emerge in the romantic period as displaced articulations of older religious discourses. Given the dominant trends of the modern world, however, these adventures repeatedly lead to severe collisions and crises, in response to which they are later revised or further displaced. Over time, as instrumental structures come to disfigure every realm of modern life, poetries and philosophies at odds with these structures are forced to criticize and surpass earlier voices in their traditions that seem to have lost a transformative power. Thus, Baker argues, these adventures gradually unfold into various discourses of the negative prominent in contemporary culture: discourses of decentering, dispersing, undoing, and erring. It is this dialectic that Baker traces and interprets in this ambitious study.

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The central argument of Edward Said's Orientalism is that the relationship between Britain and its colonies was primarily oppositional, based on contrasts between conquest abroad and domestic order at home. Saree Makdisi directly challenges that premise in Making England Western, identifying the convergence between the British Empire's civilizing mission abroad and a parallel mission within England itself, and pointing to romanticism as one of the key sites of resistance to the imperial culture in Britain after 1815. Makdisi argues that there existed places and populations in both England and the colonies that were thought of in similar terms - for example, there were sites in England that might as well have been Arabia, and English people to whom the idea of the freeborn Englishman did not extend. The boundaries between "us" and "them" began to take form during the romantic period, when England became a desirable Occidental space, connected with but superior to distant lands. Delving into the works of Wordsworth, Austen, Byron, Dickens, and others to trace an arc of celebration, ambivalence, and criticism influenced by these imperial dynamics, Makdisi demonstrates the extent to which romanticism offered both hopes for and warnings against future developments in Occidentalism. Revealing that romanticism provided a way to resist imperial logic about improvement and moral virtue, Making England Western is an exciting contribution to the study of both British literature and colonialism.

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The very first case for Oxford-based sleuth Gervase Fen, one of the last of the great Golden Age detectives. As inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as P.G. Wodehouse, this is the perfect entry point to discover the delightful detective stories of Edmund Crispin - crime fiction at its quirkiest and best. A pretty but spiteful young actress with a talent for destroying men’s lives is found dead in a college room just yards from the office of the unconventional Oxford don Gervase Fen. Anyone who knew the girl would gladly have shot her, but can Fen discover who did shoot her, and why? Published during the Second World War, The Case of the Gilded Fly introduced English professor and would-be detective Gervase Fen, one of crime fiction’s most irrepressible and popular sleuths. A classic locked-room mystery filled with witty literary allusions, it was the debut of ‘a new writer who calls himself Edmund Crispin’ (in reality the choral and film composer Bruce Montgomery), later described by The Times as ‘One of the last exponents of the classical English detective story . . . elegant, literate, and funny.’ This Detective Story Club classic is introduced by Douglas G. Greene, who reveals how Montgomery’s ambition to emulate John Dickson Carr resulted in a string of successful and distinctive Golden Age detective novels and an invitation from Carr himself to join the exclusive Detection Club.

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From spooky stories and real-life ghost hunting, to shows about murder and serial killers, we are fascinated by death - and we owe these modern obsessions to the Victorian age. Death and the Victorians explores a period in history when the search for the truth about what lies beyond our mortal realm was matched only by the imagination and invention used to find it. Walk among London’s festering graveyards, where the dead were literally rising from the grave. Visit the Paris Morgue, where thousands flocked to view the spectacle of death every single day. Lift the veil on how spirits were invited into the home, secret societies taught ways to survive death, and the latest science and technology was applied to provide proof of the afterlife. Find out why the Victorian era is considered the golden age of the ghost story, exemplified by tales from the likes of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde and Henry James. Discover how the birth of the popular press nurtured our taste for murder and that Jack the Ripper was actually a work of pure Gothic horror fiction crafted by cynical Victorian newspapermen. Death and the Victorians exposes the darker side of the nineteenth century, a time when the living were inventing incredible ways to connect with the dead that endure to this day.

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An Ali McNamara novel is the perfect escape.Welcome to Bluebell Wood where the sun shines, the locals are kind and there's something more than a little bit magical about the place.Ava loves city life but when something happens to make her feel unsafe, she retreats to the calm and quiet of Bluebell Wood. The once high-flying Ava now locks herself away in her fairy-tale cottage, only leaving to explore the trails of the nearby woods or to potter in the garden with her dog, Merlin. When Ava begins to feed the wild birds that flock to her bird table, they start leaving her trinkets of appreciation in return. The gifts seem innocent at first, but they soon seem to take on a deeper meaning. It isn't until Ava meets Callum, the handsome parish priest, that she can't help but wonder if the birds might have been trying to get her out of the house all along. But will their curious behaviour help to heal Ava, and transform her and Callum into the lovebirds they clearly long to be?Praise for Ali McNamara:An enchanting escape. Pure magic!' Heidi Swain'A perfect, sparkling, summer read.' Cathy Bramley'Fun and endearing' Katie Fforde'Perfect easy reading' SunAn irresistible, feel-good story infused with infectious humour' Miranda Dickinson'Funny and light-hearted' Heat

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Launched in 2011 as online magazine to revive the great American tradition of the long-form literary and cultural arts review, the Los Angeles Review of Books has established itself as a new institution for writers and readers unlike anything else. A nonprofit, multimedia literary and cultural arts magazine, LARB combines serious book review with the evolving technologies of the web. The LARB Quarterly Journal reflects the best that this institution has to bring to readers all over the world. Cultivating a stable of regular contributors, both eminent (Jane Smiley, Mike Davis, Jonathan Lethem) and emerging (Jenny Hendrix, Colin Dickey, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah), LARB achieves 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 Los Angeles either. The LARB Quarterly Journal builds on the best aspects of the online magazine and proves that long-form literary and cultural arts review is alive and well.

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The Los Angeles Review of Books launched in April of 2011 as a humble Tumblr, with a 2600-word essay by Ben Ehrenreich entitled "The Death of the Book." The gesture was meant to be provocative, and to ask a genuine question: Was the book dying? Was the internet killing it? Or were we simply entering a new era, a new publishing ecosystem, where different media could coexist? The LARB website currently publishes a minimum of two rigorously edited pieces a day, and 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 our namesakes the New York and London Review of Books, 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 new LARB print quarterly 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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An "exquisitely crafted" third collection of poems, this winner of the second-annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry offers a "prismatic portrait of the female body in the act of being touched" (G.C. Waldrep) The 18th-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song, which was once thought to induce insanity, wraps itself in and around the mind, Rebecca Dunham probes the depths of human psyche, inhabiting the voices of historical female "hysterics" and inciting in readers a tranquil unease. These are poems spoken through and for the melancholic, the hysteric, the body dysmorphic -- from Mary Glover to Lavinia Dickinson to Freud's famed patient, Dora. And like expert hands placed gently on the armonica's rotating disks, Dunham offers unsettling depictions of uninvited human contact -- of hands laid upon the female body, of touch at times unwanted, and ultimately unspeakable from behind the hysteric's "locked jaws." Winner of the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Dunham's stunning third collection is "lush yet septic" (G.C. Waldrep), at once beautiful and unnerving.

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