Your Search Results

      • Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2020

        Comics of the New Europe

        Reflections and Intersections

        by Martha Kuhlman, José Alaniz (eds)

        A new generation of European cartoonists Bringing together the work of an array of North American and European scholars, this collection highlights a previously unexamined area within global comics studies. It analyses comics from countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain like East Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine, given their shared history of WWII and communism. In addition to situating these graphic narratives in their national and subnational contexts, Comics of the New Europe pays particular attention to transnational connections along the common themes of nostalgia, memoir, and life under communism. The essays offer insights into a new generation of European cartoonists that looks forward, inspired and informed by traditions from Franco-Belgian and American comics, and back, as they use the medium of comics to reexamine and reevaluate not only their national pasts and respective comics traditions but also their own post-1989 identities and experiences. Contributors: Max Bledstein (University of Winnipeg), Dragana Obradović (University of Toronto), Aleksandra Sekulić (University of Arts in Belgrade), Pavel Kořínek (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague), Martin Foret (Palacký University), Michael Scholz (Uppsala University), Sean Eedy (Carleton University), Elizabeth Nijdam (University of British Columbia), Ewa Stańczyk (University of Amsterdam), Eszter Szép (Eötvös Loránd University) This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

      • The Mystery of Right and Wrong

        by Wayne Johnston

        Rachel, a hyper-graphic, hyper-lexic South African expat who is obsessed with The Diary of Anne Frank, is the youngest of four van Hout daughters whose father Hans, a Dutch-South African accounting professor, moved his family to Newfoundland to make a new start.   When Wade, a young writer, meets and falls in love with Rachel, he learns that nothing in the world of the van Houts is what it seems, and that Rachel’s obsessions have deeper and more disturbing roots than he couldever have imagined. Each of the four beautiful, dutiful daughters is, in her distinctive way, a wounded soul. The oldest, Gloria, is a hyper-sexual exhibitionist (or is she?) who, by the age of 28, has been married five times. Carmen is addicted to every drug her Afrikaans drug pusher husband Fritz can lay his hands on. Sardonic and self-deprecating Bethany, aka Deathany, is fighting a losing battle with anorexia. And then there is Rachel, who reads and writes obsessively, diarizing her days in a secret language of her own invention.   Set in Newfoundland, apartheid era South Africa, wartime Amsterdam, and two concentration camps this is an intricately woven and propulsive novel that chronicles the unmasking of a mythomaniacal family and the sisters’ fight for love and their very lives. Informed by real events, it is a real tour de force.

      • Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
        March 2004

        Hungry Generations

        A Novel

        by Daniel C. Melnick

        At the center of “Hungry Generations” is the great European piano virtuoso Alexander Petrov, one of the émigré geniuses who lived in the incredible community of gifted Europeans in Los Angeles during the Second World War. Fleeing from Nazi Germany, the legendary classical pianist – like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, the Werfels, and the Manns – settled in L.A. and attempted to raise a family there on the edge of the Pacific. In September of 1972, Jack Weinstein – a young composer and a distant relation of Petrov – is newly arrived in L.A., living near Venice beach and seeking a job in the movie studios. Jack develops a friendship with the émigré virtuoso, who is nearing seventy and struggling to maintain his psychic and physical health in the midst of intense conflicts with his wife and his adult children. The renowned pianist tells the young man stories of his life from the thirties to the present, and soon Jack is absorbed into the family life of the Petrovs. Jack becomes a catalyst for confrontations among the Petrovs, as he intrudes on the family’s delicate balances. He falls in love with the pianist’s daughter, Sarah, who becomes Jack’s troubled muse, and in one climax, the father erupts in jealousy and desperation, assaulting his daughter’s lover. The son Joseph Petrov is a gifted, cynical, intense pianist himself, who also befriends Jack; resentments – new and old – build between son and father, and these too erupt in destruction and self-destructiveness. Also, Joseph is gay, and after a surreal New Year’s Eve party at the Polo Lounge, he makes a pass at drunk, dismayed Jack. Then there is Petrov’s wife, Helen, and her confession to Jack is one of the final assaults on the young composer. The remarkable expatriates living in Los Angeles during World War II figure both in Petrov’s stories and in Jack’s inner struggle to resurrect himself in the face of his experience of the Petrovs, of music, of sex, of the movie studios, of L.A. itself. During the year 1972-73, Jack composes a piano sonata infused with his love of Petrov’s famed recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata as well as the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg – those composers even begin to enter Jack’s dreams, simultaneously blessing and critiquing him as he works in his Venice apartment. Hungry Generations paints a vivid portrait of the conflicts and struggles which erupt in L.A.’s singular expatriate community. At the center of the novel is finally the confrontation between émigré parents who survived the Holocaust at the peculiar remove of Los Angeles and their grown children. Each “hungry generations” reveals its yearning for meaning, love, and transcendence.

      • Fiction
        June 2011

        Songs of Bliss

        by Clive Gilson

        Songs of Bliss is a Dancing Pig Original publication - showcasing work by author Clive Gilson. Songs was Clive's first published novel. Just how far will a father go to protect his daughter, especially when his 'protection' is so fundamentally flawed?Billy Whitlow, one time "Don of Doo Wop", has survived his days of drink, drugs and groupies, settling now into a more peaceful life centred on his blossoming seventeen year old daughter Bex. Revising for her 'A' Levels, Bex visits Billy one Easter but the longed-for simplicity of father-daughter happiness is shattered one night in a local club.Billy's world becomes one of questions; Why is his daughter in a drug induced coma? Who put her in that state? How in the name of Hell is he going to make them pay?

      • Education

        Landscapes and Learning

        Place Studies for a Global World

        by Somerville, M.

        Places are made after their stories. Just as place names describe complex, and conflicted, place-making aspirations, so with all marks associated with the marking of places: tracks, the symbolic representation of these in song, dance and poetic speech, indeed all the technologies that join up distances into narratives – they all inscribe the earth’s surface with the forms of stories. Of course, these are not the same as the foundational myths of imperial cultures, whose aim is to displace any prior discourse of place-making. They are stories of, and as, journeys: passages in a double sense, constitutionally incomplete because they always await their completion in the act of crossing-over, or meeting, which, of course, is endless Paul Carter ‘Landscapes and Learning’ maps some of these stories and passageways to open up new place making possibilities. The book uses the lens of place to explore how we can respond differently to some of the major questions of our time. Postcolonial global concerns such as increased displacement and migration, the loss of indigenous knowledges, and the imperatives of environmental degradation and climate change, require critical educational responses. Place studies provides new languages and fresh metaphors to open up interdisciplinary conversations in the space between local and global, and indigenous and non-indigenous knowledges. Through its focus on the mutual constitution of bodies, identities, histories, spaces and places, place studies offers a conceptual tool for important cultural and environmental transformations.

      • January 2020

        Scenes of a Reclusive Writer & Reader of Mumbai

        Essays

        by Fiza Pathan

        "I am a recluse and I love books more than I love people." - So begins Fiza Pathan, the self-proclaimed Reclusive Writer and Reader of Mumbai. In this charming collection of personal essays, Fiza recalls important phases of her life, along with the books she was reading at the time and where she read them. Revealed along the way are Fiza's personal struggles, from the father who didn't want a girl child to the years she believed she wanted to be a nun to the college friends who shamed her for gaining weight.Her greatest victories are found here as well, among them the publication of her first story, the request to autograph her most popular book by an author she admired, the start of her own publishing company, and the acquisition of her very own office-cum-writing hut. Within her stories, you'll meet Fiza's beloved Mama, editorial partner (and uncle) Blaise, many other uncles and aunts, the librarians of her youth, and plenty of book salesman. All the people who have helped Fiza along her path to books, books, and more books. You'll also take a taxi with Narayan, Fiza's "Man Friday," to visit her favorite haunts, from libraries to kiosks to boutiques to vendors who pile their offerings on the sides of the road, and you'll learn the plots of her favorite comics, religious writings, medical thrillers, horror stories, activist writings, and so much more.Fiza believes that every one of the books she has read has helped her become the person - and the writer - she was meant to become. Scenes of a Reclusive Writer & Reader of Mumbai is her life in books!

      • Literature & Literary Studies

        The Miniature Library of Queen Mary's Dolls' House

        by Elizabeth Clark Ashby

        Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is one of the most beautiful and famous dolls’ houses in the world. Running the full length of its ground floor is a spellbinding library filled with 300 miniature books and dozens of original paintings. Lining the bookshelves of this miniature Edwardian library are specially produced works by some of the finest authors of the 1920s. From poetry by Thomas Hardy to stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gardening books to atlases, miniature stamp albums to accurate train timetables, these works represent British aristocratic life and the best examples of art and literature of the time. This book presents the fascinating history of the Dolls’ House Library, including correspondence between its architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, and the authors he commissioned, a collection of selected works published for the first time since 1924 and lavish illustrations that capture the charming detail of this delightful little room.

      • ELT resource books for teachers
        May 1999

        Grammar Zappers

        Social and Functional English for Communication!

        by Mark Fletcher

        4 complete, self contained and very special grammar lessons which make the ‘difficult bits’ EASY! Designed for teaching at Council of Europe language level CEF - B1. Where CEF is Common European Framework. No more problems with... Prepositions (Walter) Present Simple/Continuous (Hot Chestnuts) Irregular Past (Fondue Marketing) Present Perfect/Past (Great Escape) The lessons are self contained and all have: A lively dramatised story with many examples of the target language Memory maps Picture games/activations/role plays/exercises Cassette ‘concert reading’ of the text with music Full teaching notes By clear, careful, recycling of the target language as listening exercise in three different forms, (pictures into word exercise, discussion of ‘storyboard form’ and finally a ‘cloze test’), the work is repeated up to 7 times. A long term memory of the grammar is then always available to give confidence in the correct use.

      • Biography & True Stories
        May 2018

        Comics and Columbine

        An outcast look at comics, bigatory and school shootings

        by Tom Campbell

        A book for every teacher, every parent, every teenager Written from the perspective of the classroom avenger, this book explores distorted thinking and reveals the ‘socially acceptable’ evils that provoke such a lethal response. The book is the story of one man, a step by step chronicle of the development of the school shooter’s thinking. It is also the story of everyone who has ever watched, with horror, the terrible aftermath of a school shooting and asked themselves, why? Extensively illustrated with images that reflect the horror of increasing mental isolation, the book offers, not only understanding, but also provides hope for those slipping through society’s cracks.

      • Philosophy

        Anthropology of Christian Vocation

        From Person to Person

        by Juan Manuel Cabiedas

        The question regarding how to guide one’s own life is among the most pressing and serious questions. Both in its sacred understanding, as referring to a trascendent call, and in its lay conception, that connects the feeling of happiness to one’s self-fulfillment, the word vocation expresses the right way that a person follows to succesfully lead his or her own life. This may be the reason why, when talking about vocation, the word echoes all the elements that make up the identity of the human being: corporeity and spirituality, intelligence and sensitivity, conscience and freedom, personal biography and collective history. Without vocation, the personal being is doomed to treat oneself and to be treated with indifference.

      • Children's & YA

        Truly Unruly

        Surprise President #2

        by Sara Cano, Eugenia Ábalos

        After a brief stint as prime minister of Betulia, a tiny country, teenager Martha Chacras is now a (democratically chosen) student representative at her high school. However, her responsibilities don?t end there, because her mother is the new prime minister and that means lots of protocolary stuff to deal with. Martha just wants everyone to let her be a fun-loving thirteen year old girl, but in order to defend that right she?s going to have to start a real revolution... And create an independent new country where adults are not allowed. How will she end this mess?

      • Children's & YA

        Surprise President

        by Sara Cano, Eugenia Ábalos

        Marta is a normal 13-year-old girl. She lives in Betulia, a minuscule country where nothing exciting ever happens. She likes normal things for her age (like the band Euphoria and going out with her friends) and politics has always seemed like a total bore to her until one day, in a fight with her arch rival at school, she decides to run for class president. Hector Ruffian, Jr. is the son of the sinister and corrupt President Ruffian. But the election for class president is at the same time as the national presidential election, and a misunderstanding leads the inhabitants of Betulia, fed up with the same old politicians, to vote in mass for Marta as the country's first president. Girl power!!! Marta is in shock. Her as president?! But Betulia's laws are very clear on this point: No president can step down without having served for at least 100 days. Being president is tough, but Marta has two huge allies: Agatha (best friend and Minister of Science and Sparkly Things) and Jeremy, her friend who loves cooking (even though everyone tells him that cooking is for girls). Even though being president won't get her out of having to wear the school uniform!   A novel that breaks cliches, switches up roles, and keeps you laughing.

      • The Arts

        RADIOHEAD

        Life in a Glasshouse

        by John Aizlewood

        Voted second-best artist of the 2000s by the readers of Rolling Stone, Radiohead is recognised as not only one of the most eminent alternative rock bands, but also one of the most forward-thinking and experimental. After gaining attention with the slow-burning success of their single "Creep", the band have continued to ceaselessly move forward, rejecting the “MTV eye-candy lifestyle” set out for them and choosing to alter and refine their sound with every subsequent release.Three-and-a-half decades later, the band manages to remain one of the most prominent names on the music scene. However, when they formed as On A Friday in 1985, they were considered musical outliers from the detached and indistinguishably instrumented era of shoegaze, with their earlier work earning mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike. It was a long road until the group scored the international attention and acclaim that they can boast today. ​ Author John Aizlewood writes for Mojo, Q and Classic Rock. During a 25-year career, he has written about music for The Guardian, Blender, The Observer, Melody Maker, Sounds, FHM, The Sunday Times and a host of others. His books include Love Is The Drugand Playing At Home; he is a critic on the widely acclaimed Rock Icons series and lives near London.

      • Children's & YA

        La versión de Eric (Eric's version)

        by Nando López

        GRAN ANGULAR PRIZE 2020 -   In this world of images and appearances, keeping silent or hiding are not an option if we are to defend the inalienable right to be who we are and to defend who we want to be. La versión de Eric combines the intrigue of a thriller with the intimate perspective of its narrator protagonist. The action unfolds in a police station, late at night. As Eric waits to talk to the police about the crime that has just occurred, he recalls his past and everything that led up to the events that have brought him here: he was nine years old when his father left home, eleven when the nightmares started, thirteen the first time he was admitted, fourteen when he met Tania. His friendship with Tania will play a key role in his life as, together, they set out on a new path that leads them to discover and accept themselves. It is through Tania that he takes up acting classes, Lorca, the series, success, followers… but also, on that terrible night, full of secrets, there will be a corpse on the tarmac and half-truths in abundance. Eric just wants his version of the story to be told.

      • Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
        March 2020

        Shadows of the past

        by Miguel Ángel Puente

        Son of an Iranian father and a Spanish mother, Fa’iq Shabazz is a child from Cadiz who suddenly sees his pleasant existence shocked by his parents harrowing death. This fact completely transforms his life and conditions his future forever. Forced to leave for Iran, where he will be taken care of by his paternal uncle, the new reality he will have to live shapes a personality completely different from that of the child he once was. His anger dominates his mind and body, and numb to the suffering of others, he quickly throws away every stage of his life in the middle of the Iranian army and ends up being one of the most lethal secret agents the world has known. Fed up of obeying other’s orders and taking a decision as little meditated as rash, which almost costs his life, he decides to become a soldier of fortune to end up being the organizer of the biggest terrorist attack in history: the 11-S attack. Back in Spain and after a severe disease, he’s taken care of by an old Spanish priest and university professor who shapes a person totally different from the former one. However, little after getting married, his past comes back haunting him, revealing little by little a surprising scenario full of spurious plots and hidden interests, which has not much to do with the scenario he believed he had lived. Reality and fiction mixed in this exhilarating thriller that aims to unveil some of the mysteries behind the 11-S terrorist attack.

      • Children's & YA

        How to Succeed on the Internet in 7 Days

        by David Gamero, Valentí Ponsa

        David Gamero used to have a normal 11-year-old-kid life. Normal grades at school, normal friends, and normal looks. His sister Angie, one year older than him, is used to being the star of the house, but all of that changes when the two start competing to make the best video on the Internet... and David becomes a viral sensation, much to his dismay. What happened with the cat really WAS an accident! Seriously!   This isn't just the story of this year's top YouTuber: it's also a step-by-step manual that anyone can follow to become a YouTuber in just 7 days.

      • The Architecture of Love

        by Ika Natassa

        Every person has at least one secret that will break your heart. For some, it might be their past. For some others, it might be their reasons. And for Raia and River in The Architecture of Love, it was both. Raia, an Indonesian bestselling author, could no longer write a single sentence after her muse, her husband, left her. In despair, she fled to New York, hoping that the city often sees as beacon of hope could be the place where she can rebuild herself as writer and as woman.   River, a talented architect, fled to New York for the noise. The chaos of the city was the only thing that would cover up the noise of the last three years that always haunted him. The voices echoing in his head calling him a murderer, the killer of his own wife.   A chance encounter at a New Year's Eve party led to an unusual friendship between them, as they stroll around the city every day, bonded by loneliness, evermore confined by their secrets, until their hearts start wanting for more only to find that the past could never let them go.   Through The Architecture of Love, a tale of two strangers and two broken souls in search for answers, Ika Natassa offers a genuine look into the urban society of Indonesia.

      • Ancient history: to c 500 CE

        The First Evangelization in Earliest Christianity

        New Revised and Expanded Edition

        by Santiago Guijarro

        When during the spring of 50 AD Paul arrived at Corinth in the company of Silvanus and Timothy, he met Prisca and Aquila, expelled from Rome on account of their faith. Since that moment, the Roman couple joined Paul’s group and supported him on his mission. The letters written by the apostle and his collaborators, as well as the book of the Acts of the Apostles, offer much information regarding this missionary group, yet very scarce data about other groups, giving us the impression they were the leading and almost exclusive actors of the first evangelization. We know, nonetheless, there were other groups as well as a series of anonymous individual witnesses who carried out an intense missionary activity during the apostolic era. That first and diverse mission was a singular historical event, part of the collective memory on what Christian churches founded and keep founding their identity and their evangelizing task throughout the ages.

      • Poetry by individual poets
        May 2011

        The Alphabet in the Park

        Selected Poems

        by Adélia Prado

        Poetry that eloquently concentrates on the spiritual and physical lives of women.

      • Biography & True Stories
        October 2020

        JOAN BAEZ

        The Last Leaf

        by Elizabeth Thomson

        Since she stepped onstage unannounced at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, Joan Baez has occupied a singular place in popular music. Within three years, she had recorded three best-selling albums and had embarked on a tour of southern US campuses, playing to integrated audiences in an era of segregation. When Time magazine chronicled the folk revival in November 1962, her portrait was on the cover. Her voice was “as lustrous and rich as old gold.” She has mentored generations of singer-songwriters, most famously Bob Dylan. But Joan Baez has always been much more than simply a singer. Even before she joined Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. on the podium at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, she had used her gift to bring solace and hope to people who had little of either. In words and deeds, Baez has consistently championed social justice, nonviolence the guiding principle of her life, and the causes for which she has campaigned are legion. Whether playing to integrated audiences in the American south during the years of segregation, in Latin America during the years of brutal dictatorships, or Sarajevo under siege, Baez offered “an act of love, sharing, witness and music”. Approaching 80, she has stepped down from the stage following a worldwide farewell tour and a final, Grammy-nominated album. She is now embarked on a new chapter of life—painting.Drawing on interviews with long-time friends and musical associates, and on conversations across four decades with Baez herself, Joan Baez: The Last Leaf is a celebration of a timeless figure whose music and influence will endure long after her voice is silenced. The Discography is by Grammy-nominated music historian Arthur Levy. "I don t think it is an exaggeration to say that this is a book destined to become the definitive word on the life and times of Joan Baez; put it on your list of this year's essential reads."Americana UK Author Elizabeth Thomson has written articles and interviews in newspapers and magazines around the world, including The Times and MOJO. A contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, Thomson is also the editor of Conclusions on the Wall: New Essays on Bob Dylan and the co-editor of The Dylan Companion.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter