Search results for ""Author Sly"

Timeless in their wisdom, thought-provoking in their message, surprising in their truth and memorable in their originality, the right words can give direction, inspiration, and sometimes a tangible boost onto the right path. For example, Steve Jobs once read "Stay hungry Stay foolish" on the back cover of The Whole Earth Catalog, and those four words came to guide his life.Created by Kathryn and Ross Petras, connoisseurs of quotes, whose books and calendars have over 56 million copies in print, "Dance First. Think Later." is a collection of the greatest life wisdom from an unexpected group of speakers, doers, and thinkers. There are 618 rules to live by-funny, sly, declarative, thoughtful, offhanded, clever, and always profound:"Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places." -Roald Dahl"If everything is under control, you are going too slow." -Mario Andretti"Never make a credit decision on a beach."-Victor J. Boschini"Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order."-Samuel Beckett"The only time to eat diet food is while waiting for the steak to cook." -Julia Child"What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight; build it anyway." -Mother TeresaAnd: "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken."-Oscar Wilde

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2024 A WALL STREET JOURNAL BOOK OF THE YEAR NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER 'Beautiful, sober and affecting - a testament to remembrance and friendship' - DALIA SOFER 'A momentous historic retrieval and work of literary art' - PHILLIP LOPATE Nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never shared the full details of her past with anyone. That is until she met Michael Frank, and asked him to help her polish a talk she was to give about life in the Juderia of Rhodes. Neither of them could know that this was the first of one hundred Saturdays that they would spend in each other's company. Courageous and sharp, elegant and sly, Stella is a formidable modern Scheherazade whose Saturday instalments give a window into the vibrant, vanished world of the Jews of Rhodes. She unspools for the first time the long threads of her history - from the sun-soaked shores of her childhood, to the fifteen harrowing months she spent in camps scattered throughout Europe, and finally to the United States and New York as one of only 150 Jews from Rhodes to survive. Featuring colour illustrations based on Stella's family photographs, One Hundred Saturdays is an unusual and extraordinary memoir. It is a testament to the soul-saving power of relationships; to memories revisited; to resilience. It's not only a vital slice of history that has largely been ignored, but a story of the possibility of an ever-evolving self, even after confronting Hell.

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A collection of macabre and magical folklore from the “godfather” of the Norwegian troll Across the stillness of the sprawling mountain heath, the shadow of the mighty forest falls, its wildness calling to the child in all of us. Here the Hidden Folk assemble: the stalwart little nisse, farmyard spirit and irrepressible prankster; the seductive hulder, with her crown of flowers and cow’s tail; the fiddling fossegrim, summoning the music of wind and water; and most fearsome and enchanting of all, the one-eyed troll, head high above the treetops. A veritable bestiary of Nordic folk creatures was conjured by artist Theodor Kittelsen, whose late nineteenth-century paintings and illustrations gave these macabre and magical figures their enduring forms.In this book, first published as Troldskab in 1892, Kittelsen spins tales of wonder around creatures rumored to haunt the fields, forests, and waterfalls of Norway. Striding, gamboling, and slithering across these pages are witches and gnomes and sea monsters, fiery dragons waking from their stiff-winged slumber, mermaids rising from the deep, and the sly, shapeshifting nøkk. But first and foremost are the trolls, hapless, horrible, or just plain silly, working their spells and making their mischief to the terror and delight of the presumably human reader.Tailoring his whimsical artistic style to each tale, Kittelsen’s stories, in Tiina Nunnally’s nimble translation, reveal a Nordic world of wonder, myth, and magic as real as the imagination allows.

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Denis Donoghue turns his attention to the practice of metaphor and to its lesser cousins, simile, metonym, and synecdoche. Metaphor (“a carrying or bearing across”) supposes that an ordinary word could have been used in a statement but hasn’t been. Instead, something else, something unexpected, appears. The point of a metaphor is to enrich the reader’s experience by bringing different associations to mind. The force of a good metaphor is to give something a different life, a new life. The essential character of metaphor, Donoghue says, is prophetic. Metaphors intend to change the world by changing our sense of it.At the center of Donoghue’s study is the idea that metaphor permits the greatest freedom in the use of language because it exempts language from the local duties of reference and denotation. Metaphors conspire with the mind in its enjoyment of freedom. Metaphor celebrates imaginative life par excellence, from Donoghue’s musings on Aquinas’ Latin hymns, interspersed with autobiographical reflection, to his agile and perceptive readings of Wallace Stevens.When Donoghue surveys the history of metaphor and resistance to it, going back to Aristotle and forward to George Lakoff, he is a sly, cogent, and persuasive companion. He also addresses the question of whether or not metaphors can ever truly die. Reflected on every page of Metaphor are the accumulated wisdom of decades of reading and a sheer love of language and life.

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WINNER OF THE CWA HISTORICAL DAGGER AWARD 2014.Longlisted for the John Creasey Dagger Award for best debut crime novel of 2014.London, 1727 - and Tom Hawkins is about to fall from his heaven of card games, brothels and coffee-houses into the hell of a debtors' prison.The Marshalsea is a savage world of its own, with simple rules: those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor and disease. And those who try to escape will suffer a gruesome fate at the hands of the gaol's rutheless governor and his cronies.The trouble is, Tom Hawkins has never been good at following rules - even simple ones. And the recent grisly murder of a debtor, Captain Roberts, has brought further terror to the gaol. While the Captain's beautiful widow cries for justice, the finger of suspicion points only one way: to the sly, enigmatic figure of Samuel Fleet.Some call Fleet a devil, a man to avoid at all costs. But Tom Hawkins is sharing his cell. Soon, Tom's choice is clear: get to the truth of the murder - or be the next to die.A twisting mystery, a dazzling evocation of early 18th Century London, THE DEVIL IN THE MARSHALSEA is a thrilling debut novel full of intrigue and suspense.

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‘Brilliant . . . These stories are sly and prescient, a nuanced reflection of the world we are living in.’ – Roxane Gay‘Evans is blessed with perfect pitch.’ – Tayari Jones‘Sublime short stories of race, grief, and belonging . . . an extraordinary new collection.’ New YorkerDanielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history.We meet Black and multi-racial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief – all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively. Ultimately, she provokes us to think about the truths of American history – about who gets to tell them, and the cost of setting the record straight.In ‘Boys Go to Jupiter’ a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral. In ‘Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain’ a photojournalist is forced to confront her own losses while attending an old friend’s unexpectedly dramatic wedding. And in the eye-opening title novella, a Black scholar from Washington DC is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, her love life, and her oldest friendship at risk.

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"Um, holy shit...This novel will be the most fun you'll have this summer." -Emily Temple, Literary HubRemy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy's who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen's exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what "self-actualization" looks like?Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.

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"Um, holy shit...This novel will be the most fun you'll have this summer." -Emily Temple, Literary HubRemy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy's who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewellery designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen's exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what "self-actualization" looks like?Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.

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Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. The book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan.It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.***'With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork' Sunday Times 'Unforgettable' Spectator'The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time' Zoë Heller Guardian, Books of the Year 'Magnificent' Sunday Telegraph'A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt your life' Ali Smith TLS, Books of the YearWhen you are finished why not read the companion novel Nora Webster.

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'Taut, tense, and beautifully written' Clare Mackintosh'Addictive' Sunday TimesSometimes a lie feels kinder than the truth . . . but what happens when that lie becomes an avalanche of deceit?When Tess is sent to photograph Greg, a high-profile paediatric surgeon, she sees something complex in him that she instantly connects with. Their relationship quickly deepens, but then Tess - already a single mother to nine-year-old Joe - finds out she's pregnant.Greg, who never wanted to be a father, is then offered the job of a lifetime back in his hometown of Boston, USA. Within just a few months, they have married and moved to the States. But life in an affluent Boston suburb is not as straightforward as Tess had hoped. Strange things keep happening in their rented home - Joe is unsettled, the next-door neighbours are clearly troubled, and Greg's work is all-consuming. As a fierce Boston winter closes in, and her baby's birth looms, Tess remains determined to make this new life work. Then she makes a jaw-dropping discovery . . .PRAISE FOR LUCY ATKINS'Wonderfully skilled' Sarah Perry'Sly, witty and gripping' Naomi Alderman'Wholly beguiling' Mick Herron'Highly intelligent' Sarah Vaughan'Beguiling, brilliantly creepy' Claire Fuller

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'Betrayal is a new departure and a bold one . . . Pinter has found a way of making memory active and dramatic, giving an audience the experience of the mind's accelerating momentum as it pieces together the past with a combination of curiosity and regret. He shows man betrayed not only by man, but by time - a recurring theme which has found its proper scenic correlative . . . Pinter captures the psyche's sly manoeuvres for self-respect with a sardonic forgiveness . . . a master craftsman honouring his talent by setting it new, difficult tasks' New Society'There is hardly a line into which desire, pain, alarm, sorrow, rage or some kind of blend of feelings has not been compressed, like volatile gas in a cylinder less stable than it looks . . . Pinter's narrative method takes "what's next?" out of the spectator's and replaces it with the rather deeper "how?" and "why?" Why did love pass? How did these people cope with the lies, the evasions, the sudden dangers, panic and the contradictory feelings behind their own deftly engineered masks? The play's subject is not sex, not even adultery, but the politics of betrayal and the damage it inflicts on all involved.' The TimesFirst staged at the National Theatre in 1978, Betrayal was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1991. Twenty years after its first showing, it returned to the National in 1998.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021WINNER OF THE SUSHILA DEVI AWARD 2021NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2021A searing debut novel about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal - for fans of Jenny Offill, Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk and Diana Evans'Beautifully written, emotionally wrenching and poignant in equal measure' The Booker Prize Judges 2020'An unsettling, sinewy debut, startling in its venom and disarming in its humour from the very first sentence' Guardian'I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure.'This is a tale of obsession and betrayal. This is a poisoned love story. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Tara and Antara, a woman and her angry shadow. But which one is which?Sharp as a blade and compulsively readable, Burnt Sugar slowly untangles the knot of memory and rumour that binds two women together, revealing the truth that lies beneath.'A work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication' Washington Post'Arresting and fiercely intelligent, disarmingly witty and frank' Sunday Times 'A sly, slippery, often heartbreaking novel about the role memory plays within families' Stylist'Extraordinary... Come for the effortlessly stylish writing, stay for the boiling wrath' Observer

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A sly and playful novel about the many faces we all have. Fifteen-year-old Berta says that beautiful things aren’t made for her, she isn’t destined to have them, the only things she deserves are ugly. It’s why her main activity, when she’s not at school, is playing the ‘prosopagnosia game’ — standing in front of the mirror and holding her breath until she can no longer recognise her own face. Berta’s mother is in her forties. By her own estimation, she is at least twenty kilos overweight, and her husband has just left her. Her whole life, she has felt a keen sense of being very near to the end of things. She used to be a cultural critic for a regional newspaper. Now she feels it is her responsibility to make her and her daughter’s lives as happy as possible. A man who claims to be the famous Mexican artist Vicente Rojo becomes entangled in their lives when he sees Berta faint at school and offers her the gift of a painting. This sets in motion an uncanny game of assumed and ignored identities, where the limits of what one wants and what one can achieve become blurred.

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'Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?' remains the most curious and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated essayist Jim Holt now enters this fascinating debate with his broad, lively and deeply informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. With sly humour and a highly original personal approach Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective. Suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang, he tracks down, among others, an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Nobel Laureate physicist, a French Buddhist monk, and John Updike just before he died, to pursue this cosmic puzzle from every angle. As he pieces together a solution - while offering useful insights into time, consciousness, and eternity - he sheds fascinating new light on the meaning of existence. A New York Times bestseller on first publication, this new paperback edition provides a much-needed new take on history's greatest conundrum, in the vein of previous bestsellers like Michael Brooks' 13 Things that Don't Make Sense.

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A funny and insightful retrospective collection from a celebrated cartoonist. Universally beloved cartoonist Guy Delisle showcases a career-spanning collection of his work with a sly sense of humour and warm characterization. Before Delisle became an international superstar with his globe-hopping travelogues, he was an animator experimenting with the comics form. Always aware of the elasticity of the human form and honing his keen observer s eye, young Delisle created hilarious set pieces. World Record Holders ranges from wistful childhood nostalgia to chagrined post-fame encounters, touching on formally ambitious visual puns and gut-busting what-ifs. Delisle again and again shows how life is both exhilarating and embarrassing. Delisle visits an exhibition of his work in another country and is confronted by an angry spouse who blames him for destroying her marriage. A juvenile game of Bows and Arrows turns menacing as arrows shot straight up in the air turn into barely visible missiles of death. A coded message from space creates different reactions from different people debates, dance festivals, gallery shows. Translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall.

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The classic story - Alice in Wonderland - from Ladybird!A brilliant introduction to the much-loved story of Alice in Wonderland. Find out what happens when Alice goes down a rabbit hole and meets all sorts of crazy characters. Part of the Ladybird First Favourite Tales series - a perfect introduction to fairy tales for preschoolers - it contains amusing pictures and lots of funny rhythm and rhyme to delight young children. Ideal for reading aloud and sharing with 2-4 year olds.Ladybird's First Favourite Tales series is hugely popular and is a great introduction to the most important fairy tales. With a new look and great covers, the books are just as fun to read as ever.Make sure you look out for the other tales in the series, too!Puss in Boots; Hansel and Gretel; The Ugly Duckling; The Elves and the Shoemaker; Goldilocks and the Three Bears; The Gingerbread Man; Little Red Riding Hood; The Three Little Pigs; The Three Billy Goats Gruff; Chicken Licken; The Enormous Turnip; Jack and the Beanstalk; The Little Red Hen; Little Red Riding Hood; The Magic Porridge Pot; The Sly Fox and the Little Red Hen; The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella.

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Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II—and it’s a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one strikingly vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn’t get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers.In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya’s perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her protagonist’s vividly drawn inner and outer lives. Maya’s life story flows as a long monologue, told in unfussy language dense with Khemlin’s magnificently manipulated Soviet clichés and matter-of-fact descriptions of Soviet life. Born in a center of Jewish culture in Ukraine, she spent the war in evacuation in Kazakhstan. She has few friends but has had several husbands, and her relationships with her relatives are strained at best. The war looms over Klotsvog, and the trauma runs deep, as do the ambiguities and ambivalences of Jewish identity. Lisa Hayden’s masterful translation brings this gripping character study full of dark, sly humor and new perspectives on Jewish heritage and survival to an English-speaking audience.

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Traffic signs, sandwich boards and posters: Friedlander’s portrait of words in the world For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s photographs record a kind of found poetry of desire and commerce. Focusing on one of the artist’s key motifs, Lee Friedlander: Signs presents a cacophony of wheat-paste posters, Coca-Cola ads, prices for milk, road signs, stop signs, neon lights, movie marquees and graffiti. The book collects 144 photographs made in New York and other places across the US, and features self-portraits, street photographs and work from series including The American Monument and America by Car, among others. Illegible or plainspoken, crude or whimsical, Friedlander’s signs are an unselfconscious portrait of modern life. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his many monographs are Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work, among others. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Among the most important living photographers, Friedlander is in the collections of museums around the world.

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Wendy is an aspiring contemporary artist whose adventures have taken her to galleries, art openings, and parties in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Toronto. In Wendy, Master of Art, Walter Scott s sly wit and social commentary zero in on MFA culture as our hero hunkers down to complete a master of fine arts at the University of Hell in small-town Ontario. Finally Wendy has space to refine her artistic practice, but in this calm, all of her unresolved insecurities and fears explode at full volume usually while hungover. What is the post-Jungian object as symbol? Will she ever understand her course reading or herself? What if she s just not smart enough? As she develops as an artist and a person, Wendy also finds herself in a teaching position, mentoring a perpetually sobbing grade-grubbing undergrad. Scott s incisively funny take on art school pretensions isn t the only focus. Wendy, Master of Art explores the politics of open relationships and polyamory, performative activism, the precariousness of a life in the arts, as well as the complexities of gender identity, sex work, drug use, and more. At its heart, this is a book about the give and take of community about learning to navigate empathy and boundaries, and to respect herself. It is deeply funny and endlessly relatable as it shows Wendy growing from millennial art party girl to successful artist, friend, teacher and Master of Art.

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Soft Machine are perceived as cold and forbidding. At their peak in the 1970s, they purposefully raised the hackles of pop journalists, the musical establishment, and even their own fans. Their music was designed to exclude all but the most devoted. Their line-up constantly churned, divesting themselves of every player that tried to make a human connection. Instead of the community of live performance, they favoured an abusive blast of ferocious noise that never ceased from the first note to the point you were driven out of the venue in shock. That all this was true only for a short period of their career and is certainly not the case for more recent incarnations is irrelevant if potential listeners are turned away before they've even dared to hear a note of their music. Do so, and an entirely different band emerges: one that is sly, spry, tuneful, trippy, and surprisingly welcoming, merging a glorious melange of prog rock, jazz fusion, and much more and capable of shifting on a unison beat from soul ballad to freeform skronk, from fuzz-driven pounding to aching minimalism. This book guides you through the maze of the band's works, revealing why every album is worthy of re-evaluation, why they're so influential, and why you should rush to assimilate as many of them as you can. It covers the live and studio material released by the parent group, all related projects with a 'Soft' in their name, and the essential extracurricular activities of every member from 1960 to the present day.

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Slotting in beside THE MACHINE GUNNERS and WAR HORSE, A CAKE FOR THE GESTAPO tells the story of a fictional gang of kids in Jersey during the German Occupation in WW2, weaving in very real islanders’ own stories of the Occupation at its core – A history that has never before been told in children’s literature June 1940. Jersey. Joe makes light of his father’s unpredictable anger, and Spinner tries to ignore the school bully, Percy, while dealing with her own mounting fears. As for Ginger, her cousin, he’s nervous of the biggest bully of all, Hitler, while her neighbour, farmer’s son Clem, is apparently just keeping his head down. But on the sly, Clem is learning to box, has hidden a gun and he’s going to deal with Percy – and possibly the Germans – all by himself. All the same, none of them believes the Germans will actually invade. Then the island is bombed, Joe is injured and outrage turns to terror as the Germans arrive and their grip on the peaceful island tightens. Initially, the adults avoid direct confrontation, while the gang is determined to go further, aiming to destroy German morale and trip them up in their every move. At first, they simply play tricks on the soldiers, but as the situation worsens, their defiance escalates, leading them all into terrible, mortal danger. As the Occupation wears on, and deprivation turns to starvation, a distinct plan emerges for the kids - the successful elimination from the island of a Gestapo sergeant, the cruel and repugnant Viktor.

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The modern Italian classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is a marvel of psychological insight, published here in a fine new translation by William Weaver - the first in more than seventy years.Italo Svevo's masterpiece tells the story of a hapless, doubting, guilt-ridden man paralyzed by fits of ecstasy and despair and tickled by his own cleverness. His doctor advises him, as a form of therapy, to write his memoirs; in doing so, Zeno reconstructs and ultimately reshapes the events of his life into a palatable reality for himself - a reality, however, founded on compromise, delusion, and rationalization.With cigarette in hand, Zeno sets out in search of health and happiness, hoping along the way to free himself from countless vices, not least of which is his accursed "last cigarette!" (Zeno's famously ineffectual refrain is inevitably followed by a lapse in resolve.) His amorous wanderings win him the shrill affections of an aspiring coloratura, and his confidence in his financial savoir-faire involves him in a hopeless speculative enterprise. Meanwhile, his trusting wife reliably awaits his return at appointed mealtimes. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, ZENO'S CONSCIENCE is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to he joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.

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'An eerily familiar reflection of our current moment ... It continues to haunt me' NATASHA BROWN, I PAPER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'I will go wherever she takes me. A phenomenal book' DAISY JOHNSON 'A brilliant, scalding novel ... sharp, intricately layered, impossible to forget' MEGAN HUNTER 'Stunning ... beautifully written and deeply unsettling' BOOKSELLER, EDITOR'S CHOICE CHOSEN AS A 2021 BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR BY OBSERVER, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES, EVENING STANDARD, GRAZIA, STYLIST, ELLE THE NATIONAL, FIVE BOOKS AND BURO A couple drive from London to coastal Provence. Anya is preoccupied with what she feels is a relationship on the verge; unequal, precarious. Luke, reserved, stoic, gives away nothing. As the sun sets one evening, he proposes, and they return to London engaged. But planning a wedding does little to settle Anya’s unease. As a child, she escaped from Sarajevo, and the idea of security is as alien now as it was then. When social convention forces Anya to return, she begins to change. The past she sought to contain for as long as she can remember resurfaces, and the hot summer builds to a startling climax. Lean, sly and unsettling, Asylum Road is about the many borders governing our lives: between men and women, assimilation and otherness, nations, families, order and chaos. What happens, and who do we become, when they break down?

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The Night Season'The Night Season is unusual; no politics, no issues, no history - just a bold attempt to grapple with the messy nature of living. It's also delightfully, rudely funny.' Financial Times'Look out for the name Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It's once in a blue moon that a writer gets her second-ever play staged at the National. It's even more remarkable when you wander away at the end, walking on air.... Lenkiewicz is quite extraordinarily talented.' Independent on SundayShoreditch Madonna'A strong absorbing work, full of passion, pathos and sly humour, set in the hip art scene of London's East End... There is a rare combination of pain, wit and originality in Lenkiewicz's writing.' Daily TelegraphHer Naked Skin'It is shocking to think that this is the first full-length work by a woman to be seen on the Olivier stage. But Lenkiewicz makes up for lost time by exploring the hunger for political and personal emancipation that fuelled the suffragette movement in 1913... Her play colonises this daunting space with bravura confidence.. Her power lies in her ability to recapture the triumphs and tribulations of a history movement... Lenkiewicz's play plants a defiant feminist flag on the Olivier stage.' Guardian'This is a big play with a big heart and I recommend it with a matching warmth. Lenkiewicz is making history here and, in so doing, demonstrating that she's got a great future.' Daily TelegraphThe Painter'An intimate portrait of Turner... Understated and quietly superb.' Independent on Sunday

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Richly deserving of wider exposure in the theater and the classroom, these sly, remarkable scripts touch on the forceful and salient issues of the 1990s, including the Gulf War, racial and sexual relations, crises unique to big cities, immigration and multiculturalism, art and censorship, revisionist history, academic freedom, and the transformation of the American presidency. The American Play by Suzan-Lori Parks features an Abraham Lincoln impersonator trapped in an outrageous, Beckett-like world, while Naomi Wallace's In the Heart of America centers on a Palestinian American from Atlanta who is caught up in the Persian Gulf conflict. Kokoro by Velina Hasu Houston chillingly depicts the stark predicament of a Japanese mother caught between two impossible worlds; Marisol by José Rivera reveals the dark fairytale life of a young Latin woman in a wartorn, apocalyptic New York. The Gift by Allan Havis confronts overwhelming moral ambiguity in the farcical realm of university politics, while Nixon's Nixon by Russell Lees offers an adroit treatment of the fascinating, tortured Nixon/Kissinger relationship. The collection closes with Mac Wellman's 7 Blowjobs, a wicked send-up of the compromise politics that determined the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts. Taken together, these seven plays present an eclectic web of social thought and imagination that are uniquely American, offering the reader a splendid, honest study of a rich society in search of itself.

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Go Beyond "Business As Usual" with Your Nonprofit "At last--the 'real truth' about nonprofit management! In Exposing the Elephants, Wilcox reveals the 'pesky pachyderms' that block our way to full effectiveness. How often have we grumbled that 'just because you're a [insert profession here], it doesn't mean you know how to run a nonprofit'? With clarity, passion, and sly humor, Wilcox validates that perspective and many others--but doesn't let us get away with just accepting the presence of the elephant in the room. Wilcox summarizes complex issues using recognizable examples and then offers sensible strategies for resolving them. Ultimately, she gives us permission to do the right thing(s). I love this book--and I can't wait to start implementing the 'elephant solutions'! " --Nancy Perkin Beaumont, CAE, Executive Director, Society of American Archivists "Before I finished reading Exposing the Elephants, I met with my key staff to talk about what we must change. I also shared what I learned from reading the book with a friend who sits on several different types of boards. Wilcox says it like it is--and it needs to be said--in every nonprofit organization." --Julie Donovan, Executive Director, Habitat for Humanity, Lake County, Illinois "A remarkably candid, fresh, and witty analysis of the challenges inherent in managing nonprofits. Insightful and pragmatic solutions to overcoming the 'white elephants' so prevalent in the nonprofit culture. A 'must read' for every nonprofit CEO and board member." --Dick Yingst, President & CEO, Financial Managers Society, Chicago, Illinois "Pam Wilcox is willing to say the things that nonprofit professionals often do not wish to hear. She reveals through clear language and flowing style the significant barriers that nonprofits face and need to remove for not just success but also excellence. Unlike many authors who point out what is wrong with nonprofits, Wilcox shows us the way to tackle our most intractable issues and move to excellence. This book should be read by any and everyone involved in the nonprofit sector." --Katrina S. Rogers, PhD, Associate Dean, Research and Practice Director, Center for Innovation in the Nonprofit Sector, Fielding Graduate University

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'One of those books that straddles fantastic and modernist literature in that it seems to be set in our world, seems to be set maybe 100 years ago . . . And it's as magical as it is political and beautifully crafted' - Neil GaimanHalf fairy tale and half historical account of a revolution that never was, Owen King's The Curator is full of sly humor, sensuality, and strangeness - Holly BlackFrom Sunday Times bestselling author Owen King comes a Dickensian fantasy of illusion and charm where cats are revered as religious figures, thieves are noble, scholars are revolutionaries, and conjurers the most wonderful criminals.At first glance, the world has not changed: the trams on the boulevards, the grand hotels, the cafes abuzz with conversation. The street kids still play on the two great bridges that divide the city, and the smart set still venture down to the Morgue Ship for an evening's entertainment.Yet it only takes a spark to ignite a revolution.For young Dora, a maid at the university, the moment brings liberation. She finds herself walking out with one of the student radicals, Robert, free to investigate what her brother Ambrose may have seen at the Institute for Psykical Research before he died.But it is another establishment that Dora is given to look after, The Museum of the Worker. This strange, forgotten edifice is occupied by waxwork tableaux of miners, nurses, shopkeepers and other disturbingly lifelike figures.As the revolution and counter-revolution outside unleash forces of love, betrayal, magic and terrifying darkness, Dora's search for the truth behind a mystery that she has long concealed will unravel a monstrous conspiracy and bring her to the very edge of worlds.In The Curator, Owen King has created an extraordinary time and place - historical, fantastical, yet compellingly real, and a heroine who is courageous, curious and utterly memorable.'The Curator feels a little like Owen King somehow brought a curiosity cabinet to life. There are terrors here, but also marvels and delights, and a set of the most interesting characters I've met in some time. Put The Curator on the same shelf as other classics of the uncanny and uncategorisable, like Susanna Clarke's Piranesi and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. I loved it' - Kelly Link'Owen King's The Curator is a rich read. Language, characters, and a fascinating world combine to create an intensely satisfying experience' - Charlaine Harris

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Ring Lardner’s influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country’s best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner’s trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner’s journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era—from Jack Dempsey’s fights to the World Series and even an America’s Cup—he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life.The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner reintroduces this journalistic giant and his work and shows Lardner to be the rarest of writers: a spot-on chronicler of his time and place who remains contemporary to subsequent generations.

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The sprawling saga of legendary Australian cop, Bumper Farrell, the most feared and revered policeman in Australia's history.Frank 'Bumper' Farrell was the roughest, toughest street cop and vice-squad leader Australia has ever seen. Strong as a bull, with cauliflowered ears and fists like hams, Bumper's beat from 1938 to 1976 was the most lawless in the land - the mean streets of Kings Cross and inner Sydney. His adversaries were such notorious criminals as Abe Saffron, Lennie McPherson, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh and their gangs as well as the hooligans, sly groggers, SP bookies, pimps and spivs.Criminals knew just where they stood: he would catch them, he would hurt them, and then he would lock them away. He was a legendary Rugby League player for Newtown, and represented Australia against England and New Zealand.Here's Bumper Farrell in brutal, passionate and hilarious action . . . saving Ita Buttrose from a stalker; sparking a national scandal when accused of biting off a rival player's ear; beating Lennie McPherson so severely the hard man cried; single-handedly fighting a mob of gangsters in Kings Cross and winning; terrorising the hoons who harassed the prostitutes in the brothel lanes by driving over the top of them; commandeering the police launch to take him home to his beach home, diving overboard in full uniform and catching a wave to shore; dispensing kindness and charity to the poor.Bumper Farrell: lawman, sportsman, larrikin . . . legend.'fascinating . . . [a] fine biography' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

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Orson Welles called Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) “a giant” whose “talent and originality are stupefying.” Jean Renoir said, “He invented the modern Hollywood.” Celebrated for his distinct style and credited with inventing the classic genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy and helping to create the musical, Lubitsch won the admiration of his fellow directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, whose office featured a sign on the wall asking, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Despite the high esteem in which Lubitsch is held, as well as his unique status as a leading filmmaker in both Germany and the United States, today he seldom receives the critical attention accorded other major directors of his era.How Did Lubitsch Do It? restores Lubitsch to his former stature in the world of cinema. Joseph McBride analyzes Lubitsch’s films in rich detail in the first in-depth critical study to consider the full scope of his work and its evolution in both his native and adopted lands. McBride explains the “Lubitsch Touch” and shows how the director challenged American attitudes toward romance and sex. Expressed obliquely, through sly innuendo, Lubitsch’s risqué, sophisticated, continental humor engaged the viewer’s intelligence while circumventing the strictures of censorship in such masterworks as The Marriage Circle, Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not to Be. McBride’s analysis of these films brings to life Lubitsch’s wit and inventiveness and offers revealing insights into his working methods.

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Jean Echenoz’s sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the "most distinctive voice of his generation" by theWashington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel which, when published in France, stormed the bestseller lists. Special Envoy begins with an old general in his dilapidated office in France’s intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone pretty, female, and easily manipulated. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. She is abducted by Objat’s cronies and spirited away into the bowels of France’s intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for the mission to spearhead the destabilization of Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Will Constance survive her mission in Pyongyang? Will her feckless husband ever write another pop hit? Joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and coincidences, Special Envoy is, in the words of L’Express "a pure gem, a delight at all times, a comedy monument, a celebration of the French language."

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An extra-terrestrial alien, capable of replicating any living form it touches, infiltrates an isolated research base in the Antarctic, and sows suspicion and terror among the men trapped there. Which of them is still human, and which a perfect alien facsimile? John Carpenter’s The Thing, the second adaptation of John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, received overwhelmingly negative reviews on its release in 1982, but has since been acknowledged as a classic fusion of the science fiction and horror genres. Now a regular fixture in lists of the greatest movies of all time, it is acclaimed for its inspired and still shocking practical special effects, its deftly sketched characters brought to life by a superb cast, elegant widescreen cinematography, ominous score, and a uniquely tense narrative packed with appropriately ever-changing metaphors about the human condition. Anne Billson’s elegant and trenchant study, first published in 1997, was one of the first publications to give the film its due as a modern classic, hailing it as a landmark movie that brilliantly redefined horror and science fiction conventions, and combined them with sly humour, Lewis Carroll logic and disturbingly prescient metaphors for many of the sociopolitical, scientific and medical upheavals of the past three decades. In her foreword to this new edition, Anne Billson reflects upon The Thing's changing fortunes in the years since its release, its influence on film-makers including Tarantino and del Toro, and its topicality in an era of melting ice caps and with humanity besieged by a deadly organism.

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SECRETS AND LIES RUIN LIVES'So many twists and thrills I was gripping the sides of the book all the way to the dynamite ending' DAN MALAKIN'A high-paced and relentlessly twisty thriller' L.V. MATTHEWS'An intricately plotted thriller full of deeply flawed yet believable characters. Utterly riveting and clever' CATHERINE COOPER'Fiendishly clever and compulsive - this novel will leave you feeling breathless in the best way' SARAH LAWTON'More twists and turns than a rollercoaster! Superbly plotted, compelling, pacy. Sarah is a tour de force' T ORR MUNROTwo women receive an anonymous note.For one it's a threat.For the other it's an invitation for revenge.Helena is beautiful, successful, and living in married bliss in Exeter. But she's hiding a secret that could tear her perfect life apart. When the notes begin to arrive, she realises someone else must know her secret. But what might her husband and his overbearing family do if they find out the truth?Thea is reeling from her best friend Helena's death. But when she starts digging into the circumstances, she receives a threatening note warning her to stop. She knows her friend's death wasn't an accident. This was murder. And she is determined to get revenge . . .PRAISE FOR SARAH BONNER'S DEBUT HER PERFECT TWIN:'Brilliantly twisty' T. M. Logan'Terrifyingly vivid' Janice Hallett'Made my jaw drop' Samantha Downing'A perfect storm of sly revenge and rivalry' L. V. Matthews

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Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book-when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante-as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome.Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.

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Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II—and it’s a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one strikingly vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn’t get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers.In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya’s perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her protagonist’s vividly drawn inner and outer lives. Maya’s life story flows as a long monologue, told in unfussy language dense with Khemlin’s magnificently manipulated Soviet clichés and matter-of-fact descriptions of Soviet life. Born in a center of Jewish culture in Ukraine, she spent the war in evacuation in Kazakhstan. She has few friends but has had several husbands, and her relationships with her relatives are strained at best. The war looms over Klotsvog, and the trauma runs deep, as do the ambiguities and ambivalences of Jewish identity. Lisa Hayden’s masterful translation brings this gripping character study full of dark, sly humor and new perspectives on Jewish heritage and survival to an English-speaking audience.

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"Even the book's cover sparkles with gold, a brilliant visual cue -- at least for those of us of a certain age -- of what's in store: A traipse through that time in our lives when the sparkly flash of pop-cultural figures served as guides to millions of youngsters desperate to connect to a dim constellation we knew to be out there but couldn't see alone." — East Hampton Star What The Band Wore by Alice Harris is an unprecedented collection of photographs that illustrates four decades of pop, rock, soul, disco, funk, punk, reggae, heavy metal, and hip hop fashion. Sparkling sequins, safety pins, and even suits from outer space are spotlighted in more than 80 images by acclaimed music photographers, including Terry O'Neill, Henry Diltz, Matthew Rolston, Bob Gruen, and Lynn Goldsmith. Featuring exclusive comments from legendary artists, What The Band Wore traces the evolution of stage wear from the 1960s through the 1990s, from the self-made counterculture style of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Sly & The Family Stone to the custom designs that Bob Mackie, Bill Whitten, Larry LeGaspi, Vivienne Westwood, and Issey Miyake created for the most renowned names in music. Whether it's Elvis Presley or Janet Jackson posing in tight leather, Freddie Mercury masquerading as a harlequin, or Run-DMC sporting their iconic footwear, these pages thread together a fabulous celebration of fashion and music.

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Midwest Book Award Winner — Young Adult FictionA disturbing call from her great aunts Astrid and Jeannette sends seventeen-year-old Francie far from her new home in New York into a tangle of mysteries. Ditching an audition in a Manhattan theater, Francie travels to a remote lake in the northwoods where her aunts’ neighbors are “dropping like flies” from strange accidents. But are they accidents? On the shores of Enchantment Lake in the woods of northern Minnesota, something ominous is afoot, and as Francie begins to investigate, the mysteries multiply: a poisoned hotdish, a puzzling confession, eerie noises in the bog, and a legendary treasure said to be under enchantment—or is that under Enchantment, as in under the lake? At the center of everything is a suddenly booming business in cabin sales and a road not everyone wants built. To a somewhat reluctant northwoods Nancy Drew, the intrigue proves irresistible, especially when it draws her closer to the mysteries at the heart of her own life. What happened to her father? Who and where is her mother? Who is she, and where does her heart lie—in the bustle of New York City or the deep woods of Minnesota? With its gripping story, romantic spirit, and a sly dash of modern-day trouble (including evil realtors and other invasive species), Enchantment Lake will fascinate readers, providing precisely the charm that Margi Preus’s fans have come to expect.

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Sharp and subversive, this delightfully messy YA rom-com offers a sly wink to the classic Little Women, as teenage Jo Porter rebels against living in the shadow of her literary namesake.Lit’s about to hit the fan. Jo Porter has had enough Little Women to last a lifetime. As if being named after the sappiest family in literature wasn’t sufficiently humiliating, Jo’s mom, ahem Marmee, leveled up her Alcott obsession by turning their rambling old house into a sad-sack tourist attraction.Now Jo, along with her siblings, Meg and Bethamy (yes, that’s two March sisters in one), spends all summer acting out sentimental moments at Little Women Live!, where she can feel her soul slowly dying.So when a famed photojournalist arrives to document the show, Jo seizes on the glimpse of another life: artsy, worldly, and fast-paced. It doesn’t hurt that the reporter’s teenage son is also eager to get up close and personal with Jo—to the annoyance of her best friend, aka the boy next door (who is definitely not called Laurie). All Jo wants is for someone to see the person behind the prickliness and pinafores.But when she gets a little too real about her frustration with the family biz, Jo will have to make peace with kitsch and kin before their livelihood suffers a fate worse than Beth.

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Text and translation of comic plays sheds light on a fascinating era of theatrical production. `[Opens] up an entirely new corpus of texts for scholars and readers familar with and interested in European dramatic texts from this period, but who have heretofore not had access to them due to the language barrier.' Professor David F. Johnson, Florida State University, Tallahassee During the Middle Ages and early modern period, a dramatic culture of astonishing vitality developed in the Low Countries. Owing to the activities of organisationsknown as rederijkerskamers, or "chambers of rhetoric", drama became a central aspect of public life in the cities of the Netherlands. The comedies produced by these groups are particularly interesting. Drawing their forms and narratives from folklore and popular ritual, and entertaining in their own right, they also bring together a range of important concerns; they respond directly to some of the key developments in the period, reflecting the political and religious turmoil of the Reformation and Dutch Revolt, the emergence of humanism, and the appearance of an early capitalist economy. This collection brings together the original Middle Dutch text of ten of these comic plays, with facing translation into modern English. The selection is divided evenly between formal stage-plays and monologues, and provides a representation of the full range of rederijker drama, from the sophisticatedFarce of the Fisherman, with its sly undermining of audience expectation, to the hearty scatology of A Mock-Sermon on Saint Nobody, and the grim gallows humour of The Farce of the Beggar. An introduction and notes place the plays in their context and elucidate difficulties of interpretation. Ben Parsons is Teaching Fellow at the University of Leicester; Bas Jongenelen is teacher of Dutch Literature at Fontys Lerarenopleidingin Tilburg.

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by local artist John Clark Mayden.Bronze Winner of the Foreword INDIES Award for Photography by FOREWORD ReviewsBaltimore native John Clark Mayden's photographs are distinctive to the city and specific to black life there, lingering on the front stoops and in the postage-stamp backyards of Charm City row houses. But these pictures are far from nostalgic. Informed by the photographer's deep commitment to both social justice and storytelling, they strip Baltimore of pretense and illusion and show the city's veins.Baltimore Lives gathers 101 of Mayden's best photographs in print for the first time. Taken between 1970 and 2012, these photos illuminate the experiences of life throughout the predominantly African American city, capturing the relaxed intimacy of community, family, and the comfort of home in contrast to the harsh sting of social injustice, poverty, and crime. In Mayden's work, we meet people who are not expecting us. We bear witness to their lives—their emotions, gestures, and faces that often reveal more than they conceal. But regardless of the camera's presence, people go on waiting for the bus, catching a breeze on their front steps, slogging through the snow to work and school, and, every so often, returning the photographer's gaze with a sly grin, a backward glance, a curious frown.Including a brief biography of John Clark Mayden written by his sister, Ruth W. Mayden, and an essay by art historian Michael Harris on how Mayden's work fits into larger trends of black photography, Baltimore Lives is a stunning visual history of the spatial and human elements that together make Baltimore's inner city.

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A comprehensive examination of the intertwined mythology, folklore, and literary history of the little people Most people are familiar with the popular image of elves as Santa’s helpers and dwarfs as little bearded men wearing red caps, who are mischievous and playful, helpful and sly, industrious and dexterous. But their roots go far deeper than their appearance in fairy tales and popular stories. Elves and dwarfs are survivors of a much older belief system that predates Christianity and was widespread throughout Western Europe. Sharing his extensive analysis of Germanic and Norse legends, as well as Roman, Celtic, and medieval literature, Claude Lecouteux explores the ancient, intertwined history of dwarfs and elves. He reveals how both were once peoples who lived in wild regions as keepers of the secrets of nature. They were able to change their size at will and had superhuman strength and healing powers. They were excellent smiths, crafting swords that nothing could dull as well as magical jewelry, and often entered into the service of lords or heroes. They were a part of the everyday life of our ancestors before they were transformed by fairy tales and church texts into the mythical creatures we know today. Lecouteux shows how, in earlier folklore, elves and dwarfs were interchangeable, gradually evolving over time to express very different kinds of beings. Revealing the true roots of these helpful and powerful beings, including an in-depth exploration of one of the most famous dwarf/elf/fairy beings of the Middle Ages, Auberon or Oberon, also known as Alberich, Lecouteux shows how the magic of dwarfs and elves can be rekindled if we recognize their signs and invite them back into our world.

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Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are intrinsically ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; and notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. The vast possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in case studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural. These are Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed in these case studies. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking across genres, periods and places.

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Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she's a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by–palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing–are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive. But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she's forced to reconsider her beliefs. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass–a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments run deep. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries. Spurning Dara's warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father's corrupt regime. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences. After all, there is a reason they say to be careful what you wish for . . .

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Winner, 2005 Western Books Exhibition, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2005 Julie Speed's meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail bring to mind the work of painters from the fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance. Unlike those artists, however, Speed is inspired by an almost limitless number of easily available sources and is unencumbered by the sexual and societal restrictions of past centuries, which gives her the freedom to paint what she wants and the way she wants. This places her body of work squarely in the present. Utilizing her keen sense of the absurd, Speed ponders the big questions—the role of religion, isolation and longing, sexuality, sin and guilt—with a sly, sometimes black, sense of humor and a steadfast refusal to offer the viewer any tidy resolutions. It is the emphatically open-ended and omnivorous nature of her work, combining anxiety, erotica, and violence with the subversive power of beauty, that puts Speed in the vanguard of a return to figurative painting in contemporary art. To bring Speed's mysterious and compelling work to a wider audience, this beautifully illustrated volume presents one hundred color plates of her oil paintings, constructions and works on paper. Accompanying the plates are essays by art historians Elizabeth Ferrer and Edmund Pillsbury that discuss Speed's relationship to generations of figurative painters, from the artists of the Renaissance to the present, as well as her affinities with and differences from the surrealists, dadaists, and other historical movements. Rounding out the volume are fascinating excerpts from the "Books of Conversation," a series of public journals initiated by the Austin Museum of Art in connection with a touring survey of Speed's work, in which museum-goers wrote down their ideas, opinions, and questions for the artist, to which she provided written answers.

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***The 7th novel in the Strike series, THE RUNNING GRAVE, is coming in September 2023. Pre-order now and be the first to read it***'Teems with sly humour, witty asides and intelligence ... A pleasure to read' TIMES-----Now a major BBC drama: The Strike seriesWhen novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, she just thinks he has gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realises. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were published it would ruin lives - so there are a lot of people who might want to silence him.And when Quine is found brutally murdered in bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any he has encountered before . . .A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, The Silkworm is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant Robin Ellacott.*** The latest book in the thrilling Strike series, TROUBLED BLOOD, is out now! ***-----PRAISE FOR THE STRIKE SERIES: 'One of the most unique and compelling detectives I've come across in years' MARK BILLINGHAM'The work of a master storyteller' DAILY TELEGRAPH'Unputdownable. . . Irresistible' SUNDAY TIMES'Will keep you up all night' OBSERVER'A thoroughly enjoyable classic' PETER JAMES, SUNDAY EXPRESS

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Jeanne Pitre Soileau, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and the 2018 Opie Prize for Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children’s Folklore and Play, vividly presents children’s voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants, jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it has influenced children’s lives.What the Children Said affirms that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and rhymes, and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part of the family interchange. Among second grade boys and girls at a Catholic school another transcript presents numerous examples in which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression.Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest of the United States.

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A witch struggling to regain what she has lost casts a forbidden spell - only to discover much more than she expected, in this enchanting new rom-com by New York Times bestselling author Lana Harper.Six months after having been hit by a power surge that nearly obliterated her memory, Delilah Harlow is still picking up the pieces. Her once diamond-sharp mind has become shaky and unreliable, and bristly, self-sufficient Delilah is forced to rely on friends, family, and her raven familiar for help. In an effort to reclaim her wits and former independence, she casts a dangerous blood spell meant to harness power with healing capacities.While the spell does restore clarity, it also unexpectedly turns Delilah into an irresistible beacon for the kind of malevolent supernatural creatures that have never before ventured into Thistle Grove. One night - just as things are about to go terribly sideways with a rogue succubus - a mysterious stranger appears in the nick of time to save Delilah's soul.Gorgeous, sultry, and as dangerous as the knives she carries, Catriona Quinn is a hunter of monsters - and half-human, half-fae herself, she is the kind of sly and morally gray creature Delilah would normally find horrifying. Though Delilah balks at the idea of a partnership, she has no choice but to roll the dice on their collaboration. As the two delve deeper into the power that underlies Thistle Grove, they uncover not only the town's hidden history but also a risky attraction that could upend Delilah's entire life.......................................Readers are spellbound by Lana Harper's enchanting rom-coms!'The book I've been waiting for all my life' Emily Henry'Like if Casey McQuiston wrote paranormal' Goodreads'A queer rom com that bewitches from the very first page' Publishers Weekly'John Tucker Must Die but with queer witches' Goodreads'Compulsively fun' Jacqueline Carey'Sexy, charming and completely magical!' Kerry Winfrey'The perfect autumnal witchy romance!' Goodreads'Hilariously funny and glue-you-to-the-page engrossing' Bookpage'I want to go to Thistle Grove' Seanan McGuire'It's basically John Tucker Must Die meets The Craft, with an extra serving of queer relationships' The Lesbrary'Charming, sweet, and magical, the perfect book to enjoy on a cosy autumn night' The Nerd Daily'The kind of book that you just sort of ache to step inside . . . a perfect fall read' Goodreads'The witchy, sapphic, revenge romcom I've been dreaming of' Goodreads......................................Meet the other wonderful Witches of Thistle Grove in Payback's a Witch, From Bad to Cursed, and Back in a Spell - out now!

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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis.WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013.'Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch. Best of all, a new audience will read her now and find her wit, her vigour and rigour, her funniness, her thoughtfulness, and the precision of form, which mark Davis out as unique.Daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic [she] reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words about, what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean. This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust. A two-liner from Davis, or a seemingly throwaway paragraph, will haunt. What looks like a game will open to deep seriousness; what looks like philosophy will reveal playfulness, tragicomedy, ordinariness; what looks like ordinariness will ask you to look again at Davis's writing. In its acuteness, it always asks attentiveness, and it repays this by opening up to its reader like possibility, or like a bush covered in flowerheads.She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro'I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent' William Leith, Evening Standard'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality' Independent on Sunday'A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure and human wisdom' New Yorker'Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind' Colm Toibin, Daily TelegraphLydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris and Marcel Proust.

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