Digital download or access to books, magazines and newspapers remain available. However, due to an Ontario government directive closing non-essential businesses, the production and delivery of DAISY CDs and physical braille is suspended.
Showing 1 - 20 of 118 items
From the moment Pip meets Magwitch in the graveyard this full-cast drama leaps into life, and over the three hours,… examines the themes and historical and social background of the novel. The CD also explores Dicken's work and life and consider the alternative ending presented in the original serialization. The "all-in-one" guide also presents two sample essay questions with suggestion for essay plans and coursework. Junior and Senior High. 2006.
Peel away the layers of Priestley's complex drama to appreciate this powerful warning play, wrapped up in the genre of… a gripping detective story, to truly understand that "We don't live alone. We are members of one body". For senior high readers. 2006, c1945.
Experience the gritty realism of Billy Casper's world, as he fights to escape the confines of life in a 1960's… Yorkshire mining town by training and flying a hawk. Junior and senior high readers. 2006, c1968.
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is its own type of monster mythos that will not die, a corpus whose parts… keep getting harvested to animate new artistic creations. What makes this tale so adaptable and so resilient that, nearly 200 years later, it remains vitally relevant in a culture radically different from the one that spawned its birth? Monstrous Progeny takes readers on a fascinating exploration of the Frankenstein family tree, tracing the literary and intellectual roots of Shelley's novel from the sixteenth century and analyzing the evolution of the book's figures and themes into modern productions that range from children's cartoons to pornography. Along the way, media scholar Lester D. Friedman and historian Allison B. Kavey examine the adaptation and evolution of Victor Frankenstein and his monster across different genres and in different eras. In doing so, they demonstrate how Shelley's tale and its characters continue to provide crucial reference points for current debates about bioethics, artificial intelligence, cyborg lifeforms, and the limits of scientific progress. Blending an extensive historical overview with a detailed analysis of key texts, the authors reveal how the Frankenstein legacy arose from a series of fluid intellectual contexts and continues to pulsate through an extraordinary body of media products. Both thought-provoking and entertaining, Monstrous Progeny offers a lively look at an undying and significant cultural phenomenon.
A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster's classic guide--a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary… basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts--that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes--and the literary codes--of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor.What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower--and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface, and a new epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.
In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be… viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children's books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid's independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children--girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.
In the decades following World War II, many American Jews sought to downplay their difference, as a means of assimilating… into Middle America. Yet a significant minority, including many prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, clung to their ethnic difference, using it to register dissent with the status quo and act as spokespeople for non-white America. In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Rather than simply condemning this racial ventriloquism as a form of cultural appropriation or commending it as an act of empathic imagination, Borrowed Voices offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits. Glaser considers how the practice of racial ventriloquism has changed over time, examining the books of many well-known writers, including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Saul Bellow, and many others. Bringing Jewish studies into conversation with critical race theory, Glaser also opens up a dialogue between Jewish-American literature and other forms of media, including films, magazines, and graphic novels. Moreover, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about ethnic identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.
The tale of 'Cinderella' is told wherever stories are still read aloud and everyone is familiar with 'Rapunzel' and 'The… Golden Goose', but who has heard all the wonderful stories collected by the Brothers Grimm? Well, here's your chance, for within these covers you will find every one of their 210 tales, in all their enchantment and rapture, terror and wisdom, tragedy and beauty.
The world fame of Samuel Beckett is due to a combination of high academic esteem and immense popularity. An innovator… in prose fiction to rival Joyce, his plays have been the most influential in modern theatre history. As an author in both English and French and a writer for the page and the stage, Beckett has been the focus for specialist treatment in each of his many guises, but there have been few attempts to provide a conspectus view. This book provides thirteen introductory essays on every aspect of Beckett's work, some paying particular attention to his most famous plays (e. g. Waiting for Godot and Endgame) and his prose fictions (e. g. the 'trilogy' and Murphy). Other essays tackle his radio and television drama, his theatre directing and his poetry, followed by more general issues such as Beckett's bilingualism and his relationship to the philosophers. Reference material is provided at the front and back of the book.
Here is an amusing collection of ingenious mnemonics devised to help us learn and understand hundreds of important fact as… children and can continue to resonate with us as adults. Featuring all the mnemonics you?ll ever need to know, this fun little book will bring back all the simple, easy-to-remember rhymes from your childhood?once learned, fix the information in the brain forever?such as learning to count by reciting ?One, Two, buckle my shoe, Three, Four, knock at the door.? Packed with clever verses, engaging acronyms, curious?and sometimes hilarious?sayings that can be used to solve a problem or cap an argument. Take a trip back to the classroom, and rediscover the assortment of practical memory aids covering a range of different subjects, including spelling, time, mathematics, history, general trivia, and much more. The information is organized in short snippets by category such as: * Geographically Speaking: Remember North East South West by reciting Never Eat Slimy Worms or Naughty Elephants Squirt Water. * Time and the Calendar: ?Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have 31 excepting February alone; And that has 28 days clear; With 29 in each leap year? * Think of a Number: Know the Roman numerals by remembering ?I Value Xylophones Like Cows Dig Milk? * World History: ?In fourteen hundred, ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, And found this land, land of the Free, beloved by you, beloved by me? The clever verses, engaging acronyms, curious sayings are endless. Guaranteed to amuse and inform, here is a perfect gift for any language lover?complete with a To/From gift plate.
"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Teenagers have been sighing an approximation of these words for centuries, ever since William… Shakespeare had Juliet utter them from her balcony in one of the most popular plays of all time, Romeo and Juliet. Tales of love, loss, rebellion, rivalry--before there was Twilight, Warm Bodies, and The Lion King, there was Shakespeare. The characters, language, imagery, and plot elements of many books and movies that appear on bookshelves and in cinemas today are directly influenced by the plays of the Bard. In Shakespeare: Investigate the Bard’s Influence on Today’s World, readers discover links between the books, movies, and music they listen to today and the words that were written and acted out more than 400 years ago. Readers deconstruct Shakespearean themes, imagery, language, and meaning by finding familiar ground on which to gain literary insight. Through hands-on projects such as coding a video game based on one of Shakespeare’s plays to rewriting a scene in the text language of emoji, readers find compelling avenues into the dramatic, sometimes intimidating language, leaving them well-equipped to tackle any major text in the academic years to come.
A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian Literature The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our… Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful and magnetic but nihilistic young army officer, bored by life and indifferent to his many sexual conquests. Chronicling his unforgettable adventures in the Caucasus involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers, this classic tale of alienation influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov in Lermontov's own century, and finds its modern-day counterparts in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, and the films and plays of Neil LaBute.
Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest of the Great American Novels, yet its length and esoteric subject matter create an aura… of difficulty that too often keeps readers at bay. Fortunately, one unabashed fan wants passionately to give Melville's masterpiece the broad contemporary audience it deserves. In his National Book Award- winning bestseller, In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick captivatingly unpacked the story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex, the real-life incident that inspired Melville to write Moby- Dick. Now, he sets his sights on the fiction itself, offering a cabin master's tour of a spellbinding novel rich with adventure and history. Philbrick skillfully navigates Melville's world and illuminates the book's humor and unforgettable characters-finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. A perfect match between author and subject, Why Read Moby-Dick? gives us a renewed appreciation of both Melville and the proud seaman's town of Nantucket that Philbrick himself calls home. Like Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, this remarkable little book will start conversations, inspire arguments, and, best of all, bring a new wave of readers to a classic tale waiting to be discovered anew.
Brian Evenson delves deeply into the pages of Chester Brown's (Louis Riel, Paying for It) seminal comic book Yummy Fur.… Brian's comics archaeology excavates the discarded fragments of Brown's masterpiece Ed The Happy Clown, examines the never re-printed adaptions of the Gospels, and meditates on the pleasures of reading serialized pamphlet comic books. The book also features a brand new interview with Chester Brown shining a new spotlight on this important work.Brian Evenson is the multiple award winning author of several books of fiction. His work has been translated into many languages. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University's Literary Arts Program.
Chicana/o literature is justly acclaimed for the ways it voices opposition to the dominant Anglo culture, speaking for communities ignored… by mainstream American media. Yet the world depicted in these texts is not solely inhabited by Anglos and Chicanos; as this groundbreaking new book shows, Asian characters are cast in peripheral but nonetheless pivotal roles. Southwest Asia investigates why key Chicana/o writers, including Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, Oscar Acosta, Miguel Méndez, and Virginia Grise, from the 1950s to the present day, have persistently referenced Asian people and places in the course of articulating their political ideas. Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue takes our conception of Chicana/o literature as a transnational movement in a new direction, showing that it is not only interested in North-South migrations within the Americas, but is also deeply engaged with East-West interactions across the Pacific. He also raises serious concerns about how these texts invariably marginalize their Asian characters, suggesting that darker legacies of imperialism and exclusion might lurk beneath their utopian visions of a Chicana/o nation. Southwest Asia provides a fresh take on the Chicana/o literary canon, analyzing how these writers have depicted everything from interracial romances to the wars Americans fought in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. As it examines novels, plays, poems, and short stories, the book makes a compelling case that Chicana/o writers have long been at the forefront of theorizing U.S.-Asian relations.
The Literature Made Easy Series is more than just plot summaries. Each book describes a classic novel and drama by… explaining themes, elaborating on characters, and discussing each author's unique literary style, use of language, and point of view. Extensive illustrations and imaginative, enlightening use of graphics help to make each book in this series livelier, easier, and more fun to use than ordinary literature plot summaries. An unusual feature, "Mind Map" is a diagram that summarizes and interrelates the most important details that students need to understand about a given work. Appropriate for middle and high school students.
In this collection of excerpts from his essays, notebooks, and letters, pre-eminent modern poet Rainer Maria Rilke meditates on subjects… as varied as a dolls, walking among trees, and the great sculptor Rodin. Where Silence Reigns, a sampling from his essays, notebooks, and letters, shows Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the pre-eminent modern poet of solitude and inwardness, seeking to reconcile his personal conflict between the claims of "life" and the claims of art. His subjects are commonplace, seemingly innocuous at times: the encounter between a man and a dog, a collection of dolls, a walk among trees. But always the deceptively simple external phenomenon is seen as the symbol, the catalyst of an intensely felt inner experience. As he confided to his friend Frau Wunderly-Volkart: "Oh, how often one longs to speak a few degrees more deeply! My prose... lies deeper... but one gets only a minimal layer further down; one's left with a mere intimation of the kind of speech that may be possible THERE where silence reigns." In addition to occasional pieces and notebook entries, this volume contains selections from the strange and haunting "Dream-Book," the lyrical "Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke," and the entire "Rodin-Book"--Rilke's appreciation of the great sculptor whom he had served as secretary.
Edited and annotated by leading Proust scholar William Carter, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is the second… volume of one of the twentieth century's great literary triumphs.  It was this volume that won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, affirming Proust as a major literary figure and dramatically increasing his fame. Here the narrator whose childhood was reflected in Swann's Way moves further through childhood and into adolescence, as the author brilliantly examines themes of love and youth, in settings in Paris and by the sea in Normandy. The reader again encounters Swann, now married to his former mistress and largely fallen from high society, and meets for the first time several of Proust's most memorable characters: the handsome, dashing Robert de Saint-Loup, who will become the narrator's best friend; the enigmatic Albertine, leader of the "little band" of adolescent girls; the profoundly artistic Elstir, believed to be Proust's composite of Whistler, Monet, and other leading painters; and, making his unforgettable entrance near the end of the volume, the intense, indelible Baron de Charlus.  Permeated by the "bloom of youth" and its resonances in memories of love and friendship, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower takes readers into the heart of Proust's comic and poetic genius. As with Swann's Way, Carter uses C. K. Scott Moncrieff's beloved translation as the basis for this annotated and fully revised edition. Carter corrects long-standing errors in Scott Moncrieff's otherwise superlative translation, bringing it closer than ever to the spirit and style of Proust's original text--and reaching English readers in a way that the Pléiade annotations cannot. Insightful and accessible, Carter's edition of Marcel Proust's masterwork will be the go-to text for generations of readers seeking to understand Proust's remarkable bygone world.
This romantic drama portrays the travails of a wandering prince and the redemptive powers of a daughter's love. Driven from… one end of the Mediterranean to another by the winds of fate, Pericles endures loss and heartbreak before his odyssey ends in a miraculous reunion. Shipwreck, famine, and other disasters punctuate this wondrous tale, in which a knight in rusty armor fights for his true love and a princess kidnapped by pirates retains her honor by setting a virtuous example for her captors.Prologues delivered in the character of medieval English poet John Gower introduce each act of this unusual play, whose authorship has long been disputed. Written late in Shakespeare's career, Pericles was enormously popular in the seventeenth century and was the first of the playwright's dramas to be staged after the Restoration. The play fell into neglect until recent years, and now its charms are being rediscovered by modern audiences.
CliffsNotes on Collins’ The Hunger Games analyzes the wildly popular first novel in The Hunger Games trilogy, in which the… Capitol forces each of Panem's 12 districts to choose two teenagers to participate in the Hunger Games, a gruesome, televised fight to the death. In the 12th district, Katniss Everdeen steps in for her little sister and enters the Games, where she is torn between her feelings for her hunting partner, Gale Hawthorne, and the district's other tribute, Peeta Mellark, even as she fights to stay alive. The Hunger Games will change Katniss' life forever, but her acts of humanity and defiance might just change the Games, too.