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By S. J. Perelman. 2024
Gathered for the first time: one of America's great humorists revisits the books and movies from his youth—often with some…
embarrassment—in this complete, 22-piece collectionFrom October 1948 to October 1953, The New Yorker published humorist S. J. Perelman&’s &“Cloudland Revisited&” series: 22 reviews of once-popular books and silent films whose expiration dates had passed. All but forgotten even at the time, they were nonetheless part of Perelman&’s youth and made an indelible mark on him.In the comic genius&’s biting satire they live once again:Gertrude Atherton&’s sensationalist fantasy Black OxenSax Rohmer&’s supervillain blockbuster The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchuthe &“underwater&” silent film adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the SeaEdgar Rice Burrough&’s 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apesand George Barr McCutcheon&’s 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark—the Game of Thrones of its era—which launched numerous sequels and film adaptations The complete series is collected here for the first time. With self-deprecating humor and frequent embarrassment, Perelman reflects on how rereading and rewatching brings us in contact with how we, like an old book or film, have both changed and remained the same. This paperback includes a tribute to Perelman&’s art by another beloved New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik.By S. J. Perelman. 2024
A beloved classic returns: S. J. Perelman's own selection of the very best of his hilarious stories and sketchesPulitzer Prize–winning…
author Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus) reintroduces America's zaniest humorist to a new generation of readersWhen asked about himself the writer Sidney Joseph Perelman once quipped, "before they made him, they broke the mold." Nowhere is S. J. Perelman's one-of-a-kind, madcap sensibility—his gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense—on better display than in his classic collection Crazy Like a Fox, here restored to print for the first time in decades.In a playful, loving tribute to the funny man, novelist Joshua Cohen—also an erudite wordsmith and punster—introduces Perelman&’s sui generis comic pieces to a new generation of readers, certain to fall in love with the writer whom The New York Times once noted for his ability &“to transform the common cliché or figure of speech into an exploding cigar.&” Included here are such beloved classics as:the Joycean virtuoso performance &“Scenario&”&“A Farewell to Omsk,&” Perelman's hilarious homage to Dostoevskyand &“Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," his side-splitting send-up of the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond ChandlerHere is Perelman's own selection of the very best of his inimitable humor, restored to print for the first time in decades.This book examines the work of Sindiwe Magona, one of South Africa’s most prolific and groundbreaking writers, widely recognized for…
highlighting the everyday experiences of women and the domestic side of apartheid. A pioneer among black African women writers, she is equally respected as storyteller, advocate for children’s education, activist for HIV/AIDS awareness, and champion of indigenous languages. In this book, Renée Schatteman contends that Magona’s most important contribution comes through her refusal to choose sides in the contentious debates that have polarized public discourse following apartheid. By straddling two (or more) sides of a controversy and challenging any who do harm to others (and to the nation), regardless of their position, she blurs distinctions that are assumed to be absolute, opens new avenues of understanding, and inspires alternative visions for the future. By occupying the space of paradox, she undermines the closed epistemological structures inherited from apartheid and champions the need for interdependence, truth-telling, and dialogue. Covering her creative production over three decades (which includes novels, autobiographies and biographies, short story collections, children’s books, and literature about HIV/AIDS), this book is an essential read for Magona enthusiasts as well as for researchers of African literature and postcolonial South Africa.By Caroline Crampton. 2024
Part cultural history, part literary criticism, and part memoir, A Body Made of Glass is a definitive biography of hypochondria.Caroline Crampton’s life was upended at…
the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn’t mean she felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness had reemerged. Now, in A Body Made of Glass, Crampton has drawn from her own experiences with health anxiety to write a revelatory exploration of hypochondria—a condition that, though often suffered silently, is widespread and rising. She deftly weaves together history, memoir, and literary criticism to make sense of this invisible and underexplored sickness. From the earliest medical case of Hippocrates to the literary accounts of sufferers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust to the modern perils of internet self-diagnosis, Crampton unspools this topic to reveal the far-reaching impact of health anxiety on our physical, mental, and emotional health.At its heart, Crampton explains, hypochondria is a yearning for knowledge. It is a never-ending attempt to replace the edgeless terror of uncertainty with the comforting solidity of a definitive explanation. Through intimate personal stories and compelling cultural perspectives, A Body Made of Glass brings this uniquely ephemeral condition into much-needed focus for the first time.The French philosopher-mystic-activist Simone Weil (1909–1943) has drawn both passionate admiration and scornful dismissal since her early death and the…
posthumous publication of her writings. She has also provoked an extraordinary range of literary writing focused on not only her ideas but also her person: novels, nonfiction, and especially poetry. Given the challenges of Weil’s ethic of self-emptying attention, what accounts for her appeal, especially among women writers?This book tells the story of some of Weil’s most dedicated—and at points surprising—literary conversation partners, exploring why writers with varied political and religious commitments have found her thought and life so resonant. Cynthia R. Wallace considers authors who have devoted decades of attention to Weil, such as Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, and Mary Gordon, and who have written poetic sequences or book-length verse biographies of Weil, including Maggie Helwig, Stephanie Strickland, Kate Daniels, Sarah Klassen, Anne Carson, and Lorri Neilsen Glenn. She illuminates how writing to, of, and in the tradition of Weil has helped these writers grapple with the linked harms and possibilities of religious belief, self-giving attention, and the kind of moral seriousness required by the ethical and political crises of late modernity. The first book to trace Weil’s influence on Anglophone literature, The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil provides new ways to understand Weil’s legacy and why her provocative wisdom continues to challenge and inspire writers and readers.By Christopher T. Fan. 2024
After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan,…
Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers.Christopher T. Fan offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia. In readings of writers including Ted Chiang, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, and Charles Yu, he examines how Asian American fiction maps the immigrant narrative of intergenerational conflict onto the “two cultures” conflict between the arts and sciences. Fan argues that the self-consciousness found in these writers’ works is a legacy of Japanese and American modernization projects that emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization. He considers Asian American writers’ attraction to science fiction, the figure of the engineer and notions of the “postracial,” modernization theory and time travel, and what happens when the dream of a stable professional identity encounters the realities of deprofessionalization and proletarianization. Through a transnational and historical-materialist approach, this groundbreaking book illuminates what makes texts and authors “Asian American.”By Sam C. Tenorio. 2024
Asks how we can better understand a politics of refusalWriting a new story of Black politics, Jump emerges from the…
practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers’ ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates the leaps of the enslaved as merely suicidal symptoms of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sam C. Tenorio demonstrates how bringing these jumps to bear on the foundations of Black politics allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.In a period of increasing political mobilization against police brutality and mass incarceration, Jump attends to the layers of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the antiblack world. Centering radical acts too often relegated to the periphery of Black politics, Tenorio proposes a Black anarchist politics of refusal that helps us to think dissent anew.Tracing iterations of the jump through the carceral wake of the slave ship, Tenorio explores the voyages of the Black Star Line in defiance of the bordered authority of the nation state, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 against the property relation of ghettoization, and Assata Shakur’s abscondence from prison to Cuba. Ultimately, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens and widens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and introduces a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.By Lianke Yan. 2024
Yan Lianke is a world-renowned author of novels, short stories, and essays whose provocative and nuanced writing explores the reality…
of everyday life in contemporary China. In Sound and Silence, Yan compares his literary project to a blind man carrying a flashlight whose role is to help others perceive the darkness that surrounds them. Often described as China’s most censored author, Yan reflects candidly on literary censorship in contemporary China. He outlines the Chinese state’s project of national amnesia that suppresses memories of past crises and social traumas. Although being banned in China is often a selling point in foreign markets, Yan argues that there is no requisite correlation between censorship and literary quality. Among other topics, Yan also examines the impact of American literature on Chinese literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Encapsulating his perspectives on life, writing, and literary history, Sound and Silence includes an introduction by translator Carlos Rojas and an afterword by Yan.'This book should rock Whitehall to its foundations.' - Andy Burnham'This is crusading journalism at its best.' - Lord OwenIn…
the 1970s and 1980s almost 5,000 people in the UK contracted HIV or hepatitis C after being infected by contaminated NHS blood products, including the notorious Factor VIII, yet no organisation or individual has ever been held to account. So far, more than 2,800 are known to have died, while tens of thousands more lives have been destroyed in the families of those affected.Caroline Wheeler has been reporting on this scandal - the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS - for over two decades. She has been integral to the campaign for justice for the victims and their families, and played a pivotal role in persuading Prime Minister Theresa May to agree to the infected blood inquiry in 2019, the findings of which are expected to be published in late 2023.Death in the Blood will be based on thousands of government documents, court and inquiry transcripts, plus interviews with prime ministers, cabinet ministers, Downing Street advisers, senior civil servants, doctors, and above all the victims and their families whose personal testimony forms the beating heart of this book.By Hermann Doetsch, Wolfram Nitsch. 2024
Dieser Band würdigt Simenons lange unterschätztes Romanwerk in vierfacher Hinsicht. In gattungsgeschichtlicher Perspektive arbeitet er die Originalität der Ermittlerfigur Maigret…
sowie die Affinität der „harten Romane“ zum Existentialismus heraus. Unter subjektgeschichtlichem Aspekt legt er dar, wie die Protagonisten gerade dieser Romane mit Prozessen sozialer Modernisierung und biopolitischer Kontrolle in Konflikt geraten. In medientheoretischer Hinsicht wird beleuchtet, wie genau Simenon moderne Techniken der Untersuchung und der Überwachung beobachtet hat. Unter raumtheoretischem Gesichtspunkt schließlich behandelt er seinen ausgeprägten Sinn für Milieus und Atmosphären.By Monica Kulling. 2010
In the second of Tundra's Great Idea series, biographies for children who are just starting to read, Monica Kulling presents…
the life of an extraordinary man.There were few opportunities for the son of slaves, but Elijah McCoy's dreams led him to study mechanical engineering in Scotland. He learned everything there was to know about engines - how to design them and how to build them. But when he returned to the United States to look for work at the Michigan Central Railroad, the only job Elijah could get was shoveling coal into a train's firebox.Undaunted, he went on to invent a means of oiling the engine while the train was running, changing the face of travel around the world.With playful text and lively illustrations, All Aboard! Elijah McCoy's Steam Engine may be the first biography a child discovers, and it will whet the appetite for many more.By Louis Mendoza, S. Shankar. 2003
This outstanding collection captures the diverse voices of the new literature of American immigration. Bringing together beautiful writing from celebrated…
authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Chang-Rae Lee, Crossing into America fills the literary void in public discussion about immigration. Since the immigration reforms of 1965 removed many of the racial barriers in American immigration laws, a new wave of immigrants has visibly transformed a society that has long prided itself on being a nation of immigrants. Crossing into America includes stories and memoirs of writers born in Mexico, Kashmir, the Philippines, South Africa, and Romania, as well as poignant reflections on the immigrant experience by the children of immigrants. This book follows these newest arrivals--from their home countries through their engagement with America--and also includes an accessible history of immigration policy, cartoons, newspaper stories, and a section of conversations with activists, journalists, and scholars working on the front lines of our immigration battles.By Thomas Lynch. 1998
In Still Life in Milford, Lynch casts the cold eye we are told to on life and death, history and…
memory, the local and the larger geographics. Examining the dynamics of faith, remembrance, and intimate conduct, these poems are informed by end times, tribulations and visions that make up the ordinary enterprise of daily life. Colloquy and narrative, soliloquy and tribute, Still Life in Milford engages the full register of the poet's voices as elegist, eulogist, obituarist, straight man and passer-by to achieve a difficult and inimitable harmony.By Kitty Ferguson. 2016
In 1963 Stephen Hawking was given two years to live. Defying all the odds, he died in March 2018 at…
age seventy-six as the most celebrated scientist in the world. This carefully researched and updated biography and tribute gives a rich picture of Hawking's remarkable life - his childhood, the heart-rending beginning of his struggle with motor neurone disease, his ever-increasing international fame, and his long personal battle for survival in pursuit of a scientific understanding of the universe. From more recent years, Kitty Ferguson describes his inspiring leadership at the London Paralympic Games, the release of the film The Theory of Everything, his continuing work on black holes and the origin of the universe, the discovery of 'supertranslations', and the astounding 'Starshot' program. Here also are his intense concern for the future of the Earth and his use of his celebrity to fight for environmental and humanitarian causes, and, finally, a ground-breaking paper he was working on at the time of his death, in which he took issue with some of his own earlier theories. Throughout, Ferguson summarizes and explains the cutting-edge science in which Hawking was engaged and offers vivid first-hand descriptions of his funeral in Cambridge and the interment of his ashes in Westminster Abbey. This is an amazing and revealing tribute, assessing Hawking's legacy in and out of science.By Robert Crawford. 1999
SPIRIT MACHINES, Robert Crawford's fourth collection, attends imaginatively to the fusion of spiritual experience and the insistently material world. In…
several of the poems, emotional and religious insights merge lyrically with modern technologies of information. The title sequence deals with bereavement and memorializes the poet's father, who died in1997, while the serio-comical catechism of 'A Life-Exam' arises from the experience of hospitalisation. The imaginative, 360-line tour de force 'Impossibility' presents a swirling underwater world imaging the heroic struggle of the nineteenth-century writer and mother, Margaret Oliphant. While some of the poems communicate a sense of hurt and loss, others are insuperably comic, giving the collection an ambitious range and vitality. Throughout the book, Robert Crawford's alert sense of Scotland provides a source and sounding-board for poems -lyrics, ballads, verse narratives and prose poems - that are finely nuanced, moving, and excitingly resourceful.By Neil Rollinson. 2011
Continuing where he left off with A Spillage of Mercury, Neil Rollinson's eagerly awaited new collection delves again into the…
dark, moist, unexpected bag of human experience. Taking the themes of love, sex, and life's unpredictable mysteries and excitements, he scrapes away at the veneer of normality to reveal a world that is instantly stranger and more compelling than before.Rollinson revisits the erotic with his usual wit and bravado, in poems that are sometimes playful and sensitive, sometimes visceral and shocking. He explores scientific subjects through bedroom eyes, introducing the idea of entropy to the lovers' lexicon; he makes sport a backdrop for loneliness - his characters playing golf on the moon, taking the final penalty in the shoot-out, or wandering aimlessly and forever through the high grass of the village-cricket boundary. Diverse and provocative, vibrant and accessible, Spanish Fly is an unusually happy combination: a successful stimulant and a wholly satisfying performance.By John Fuller. 2008
The Space of Joy is a sequence of poems that recounts the endless desire for love (and the failures and…
compromises that accompany that desire) in a number of writers and musicians who fatally prioritise their art. It begins with Petrarch, who created great lyric poetry out of an impossible infatuation, and moves through Coleridge's self-induced guilt within domestic happiness, Matthew Arnold's disbelief in mutual love, Brahm's self-delusion and the complexities of Wallace Stevens's marriage. It so happens that both Brahms and Arnold found themselves contemplating their art and their lives in the small Swiss town of Thun, and it is Thun that provides the setting for the wonderful concluding poem of this collection in which Fuller thinks back to his own boyood and his parents' marriage. If there is any resolution in this sequence of magnificently playful and thought-provoking poems, it is the conviction that while 'poetry may be the only heaven we have', it is life itself that must create the 'space of joy' which art wishes to celebrate.Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.By William Shakespeare. 2009
INTRODUCTION BY GERMAINE GREERShakespeare's sonnets are lyrical, haunting, beautiful and often breath-taking, representing one of the finest bodies of poetry…
ever penned. They demonstrate the writer's skill in capturing the full range of human emotions within a carefully prescribed form and creating something unique in every one. Some are familiar - Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? - others unexpected, but together they form an extraordinary meditation on the nature of love, lust, beauty and time.By Ruth Padel. 2004
Beautiful, disturbing and a pleasure to read, Ruth Padel's new poems are her most ambitious yet, adding animal legend and…
zoological science to her glitteringly imaginative canvas. With her gift for bringing together experiences and tones of voice that normally stay far apart, she sweeps us from Dulwich Pizza Hut to ancient Siberia, King's Cross to nineteenth-century Burma. We meet Socrates, urban foxes, Louisiana alligators and the endangered Amur leopard in poems resonating with sensuous delight in nature, but also with history and loss.Finally, a Chinese painter searches for tigers in a forest doomed to the sawmill while the minister who sold it scoffs an aphrodisiac bowl of tiger-penis soup.Hallucinatory and lyrical, passionately musical, seething with life, The Soho Leopard explores our human need for wildness- and also for stories, wherever we find them. A wonderfully ferocious new collection from one of our most exciting poets.By Michael Symmons Roberts. 1993
When Corpus won the Whitbread Poetry Award, the judges described it as 'an outstanding, perfectly weighted collection that inspires meditation…
on the nature of the soul...reading it feels like making an exciting discovery and coming back to an acknowledged classic all at once.' Michael Symmons Roberts' first book, Soft Keys, was the original and most exciting discovery of all. The poems in Soft Keys engage in a search for meaning and order in the everyday and in the extraordinary - a locust officer tracking swarms in an African desert, a hobbyist building a replica of the world out of matchsticks, a chance encounter with the French mystic Simone Weil playing video games in a Torquay arcade... Richly inventive, and written in a wide diversity of poetic forms, Soft Keys looks for those places and moments where the curtain between earth and heaven is thinnest; it was a powerful, arresting debut and the beginning of a remarkable career. As Les Murray said at the time: 'Like Nijinsky, he can leap into the air and stay there. You can reach up and feel the thump of the stage finely persisting in an ankle bone. Roberts is a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned.'