Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > From 1900
In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' model of intellectual discourse by exploring the cultural interactions between literature and science embodied in late nineteenth-century periodical literature, tracing the emergence of the new genre that would become known as 'science fiction'. He examines a range of fictional and non-fictional fin-de-siecle writing around distinct scientific themes: Martian communication, future prediction, X-rays, and polar exploration. Every chapter explores a major work of H. G. Wells, but also presents a wealth of exciting new material drawn from a variety of late Victorian periodicals. Arguing that the publications in which they appeared, as well as the stories themselves, played a crucial part in the development of science fiction, Tattersdill uses the form of the general interest magazine as a way of understanding the relationship between the arts and the sciences, and the creation of a new literary genre.
"Somewhere in the tangle of the subject's burden and the subject's desire is your story."-Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people-from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon's friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon's rich, empathetic accounts-including "My Family's Slave," the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles-many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times-are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon's pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon's respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.
What takes place when we examine texts close-up? The art of close reading, once the closely guarded province of professional literary critics, now underpins the everyday processes of forensic scrutiny conducted by those brigades of citizen commentators who patrol the realms of social media. This study examines at close quarters a series of key English texts from the last hundred years: the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the plays of Samuel Beckett, the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the tweets of Donald Trump. It digs beneath their surface meanings to discover microcosmic ambiguities, allusions, ironies and contradictions which reveal tensions and conflicts at the heart of the paradox of patriarchal history. It suggests that acts of close reading may offer radical perspectives upon the bigger picture, as well as the means by which to deconstruct it. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to a classical vision of cultural progress characterised by irreconcilable conflicts between genders, genres and generations.
Winner of the Hay Festival Award for Prose Winner of the 2016 IWMF Courage in Journalism Award Shortlisted for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Excellence in Journalism Award Shortlisted for the 2017 Moore Prize for Non-Fiction Literature In May of 2012, Janine di Giovanni travelled to Syria, marking the beginning of a long relationship with the country, as she began reporting from both sides of the conflict, witnessing its descent into one of the most brutal, internecine conflicts in recent history. Drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught up in the fighting, Syria came to consume her every moment, her every emotion. Speaking to those directly involved in the war, di Giovanni relays the personal stories of rebel fighters thrown in jail at the least provocation; of children and families forced to watch loved ones taken and killed by regime forces with dubious justifications; and the stories of the elite, holding pool parties in Damascus hotels, trying to deny the human consequences of the nearby shelling. Delivered with passion, fearlessness and sensitivity, The Morning They Came for Us is an unflinching account of a nation on the brink of disintegration, charting an apocalyptic but at times tender story of life in a jihadist war - and an unforgettable testament to human resilience in the face of devastating, unimaginable horrors.
A.A. Gill was an exceptional writer. Savage and compassionate in equal measure, he was always opinionated, always original, often surprising, and his writing illuminated every page. This second collection of his journalism brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well-travelled and wrote 'abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great'. Far and Away is a book about meeting those neighbours. Wherever he was - with the glitterati in St Tropez or in the ruins of earthquake-stricken Haiti - he had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, and we also join him at tables all around the globe. A.A. Gill had the gift of making his readers see the world in a different way. And, always, of making them laugh. This collection is an opportunity to marvel at a master at work.
In 1991 Andrew Solomon faced down tanks in Moscow with a band of Russian artists protesting the August coup. We find him on the quest for a rare bird in Zambia in 1998, and in Greenland in 2001 researching widespread depression among the Inuit. In 2002 he was in Afghanistan for the fall of the Taliban. He was brought in for questioning in Qaddafi's Libya in 2006. In 2014 he travelled to Myanmar to meet ex-political prisoners as the country fitfully pushed towards freedom. Far and Away tells these and many other stories. With his signature compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities shift when governments change. A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon chronicles a life's travels to the nexus of hope, courage, and the uncertainty of lived experience and tracks seismic shifts - cultural, political and spiritual. He takes us on a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences via intimate, deeply moving stories that reveal and revel in our common humanity.
The Times on Cinema opens The Times' and the Sunday Times' vast archives of reviews and coverage of Hollywood's most treasured films. Featuring many of cinema's most revered critics, including Philip French, Dilys Powell, Tom Shone and Kate Muir, whose award-winning journalism has often determined the success or failure of a film, the book spans seven decades of film criticism. Editor and critic Brian Pendreigh also complies a selection of the most infamously scathing reviews ever to grace the pages of The Times, as well as a collection of legendary interviews with iconic actors, actresses, directors and producers, who lay bare the secrets to their successes. Featuring a range of rare film stills from The Times' collection, The Times on Cinema is the first book of its kind to make use of such an extensive archive, and is the perfect gift for all cinephiles.
Herman Bang (1857-1912) was a sharp-witted observer of the society and manners of his age; with an eye for telling details, he could at one moment mercilessly puncture hypocrisy and arrogance, at the next invoke indignant sympathy for the outcasts and failures of a ruthlessly competitive world. In his novels and especially in his short stories he often takes as his protagonist an unremarkable character who might be dismissed by a casual observer as uninteresting: a failed ballet dancer who scrapes a living as a peripatetic dance teacher in outlying villages ('Irene Holm'), or a lodging-house-keeper's daughter who toils from dawn to dusk to make ends meet ('Froken Caja'). He can also make wicked fun of pretensions and plots, as in 'The Ravens', where the family of the aging Froken Sejer are scheming to have her declared incapable, whilst she is selling off her valuables behind their backs to cheat them of their inheritance. His wide-ranging journalism has many targets, alerting readers to the wretched poverty hidden just a few steps from the thriving city shops or the ineptitude of Europe's ruling houses - as well as celebrating the innovations of the modern age, such as the automobile or the department store. Bang was well known throughout Europe in his lifetime, especially in Germany, where his works were translated early. In the English-speaking world he has had little impact, partly no doubt because of his homosexuality. Even now, only a couple of his novels have been translated. This volume is an attempt to remedy this lack by introducing a broad selection of his short stories and journalism to a new public.
Rana Jawad, a British-Lebanese journalist who has reported from Tripoli for the BBC for seven years, found herself the last British journalist reporting from inside Tripoli early in 2010. Defiant and terrified in turns, she went into hiding and bravely issued the series of anonymous Tripoli Witness blogs that have become famous among anyone following the course of the insurgency. The raw blog accounts published here are accompanied by a short introductory pieces as well as a series of opening essays of what it was like to live in Gaddafi's Libya. Paul Kenyon, the acclaimed Panorama Presenter who was recently awarded for his BBC documentary on Libya, introduces Rana's work and gives an insight into this remarkable young journalists's brave reporting through harrowing times.
Professor Rammelkamp examines the St. Louis Post-Dispatch during its formative years, seeing it as the foundation of the highly successful World and of Pulitzer's career itself. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK BY THE NEW YORK POST ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIOBOOK A from-the-trenches view of New York Daily News and New York Post runners and photographers as they stop at nothing to break the story and squash their tabloid arch-rivals. When author Mike Jaccarino was offered a job at the Daily News in 2006, he was asked a single question: "Kid, what are you going to do to help us beat the Post?" That was the year things went sideways at the News, when the New York Post surpassed its nemesis in circulation for the first time in the history of both papers. Tasked with one job-crush the Post-Jaccarino here provides the behind-the-scenes story of how the runners and shooters on both sides would do anything and everything to get the scoop before their opponents. The New York Daily News and the New York Post have long been the Hatfields and McCoys of American media: two warring tabloids in a town big enough for only one of them. As digital news rendered print journalism obsolete, the fight to survive in NYC became an epic, Darwinian battle. In America's Last Great Newspaper War, Jaccarino exposes the untold story of this tabloid death match of such ferocity and obsession its like has not occurred since Pulitzer- Hearst. Told through the eyes of hungry "runners" (field reporters) and "shooters" (photographers) who would employ phony police lights to overcome traffic, Mike Jaccarino's memoir unmasks the do-whatever-it-takes era of reporting-where the ends justified the means and nothing was off-limits. His no-holds-barred account describes sneaking into hospitals, months-long stakeouts, infiltrating John Gotti's crypt, bidding wars for scoops, high-speed car chases with Hillary Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and the baby mama of a philandering congressman-all to get that coveted front-page story. Today, few runners and shooters remain on the street. Their age and exploits are as bygone as the News-Post war and American newspapers, generally. Where armies once battled, often no one is covering the story at all. Funding for this book was provided by: Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
In Easterine Kire's stories, the boundaries between magic and reality drift away, leaving us to marvel at simple yet fantastical folktales about human connection. The title story in this collection is about feeling trapped by other people's definitions of who we are. The Bear-man finds love in the beautiful and compassionate Rain-maiden but thinks he would never be good enough for her. He concludes that if he reveals his true feelings she would ridicule him like everyone in his life has always done. He grows gruff and antisocial, believing that he could never find friendship-least of all, love. The other stories in this collection represent oral narratives from the people of Nagaland in northeast India, stories shared privately around a glowing hearth-spirit stories that the narrators swear are true encounters. While "Forest Song," "New Road," "River and Earth Story," and "The Man Who Lost His Spirit" were narrated to the author by local storytellers, "The Man Who Went to Heaven" and "One Day" are entirely based on Naga folktales. "The Weretigerman," meanwhile, is woven around the pre-Christian Naga tradition of certain men becoming dual-souled with the tiger. In these stories, illustrated in full color by graphic artist Sunandini Banerjee, Kire brings Nagaland come alive with her rich portrayal of both the natural and the spiritual world, which, to the Naga mind, harmoniously coexisted until the recent past.
News organizations have always sought to deliver information faster and to larger audiences. But when clicks drive journalism, the result is often simplistic, sensational, and error-ridden reporting. In this book, Seong Jae Min argues in favor of "slow journalism," a growing movement that aims to produce more considered, deliberate reporting that better serves the interests of democracy. Min explores the role of technology in journalism from the printing press to artificial intelligence, documenting the hype and hope associated with each new breakthrough as well as the sometimes disappointing-and even damaging-unintended consequences. His analysis cuts through the discussion of clickbait headlines and social-media clout chasing to identify technological bells and whistles as the core problem with journalism today. At its heart, Min maintains, traditional shoe-leather reporting-knocking on doors, talking to people, careful observation and analysis-is still the best way for journalism to serve its civic purpose. Thoughtful and engaging, Rethinking the New Technology of Journalism is a compelling call for news gathering to return to its roots. Reporters, those studying and teaching journalism, and avid consumers of the media will be interested in this book.
'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing' The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War Poland Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
The first collection of food writing by Britain's funniest and most feared critic A.A. Gill knows food, and loves food. A meal is never just a meal. It has a past, a history, connotations. It is a metaphor for life. A.A. Gill delights in decoding what lies behind the food on our plates: famously, his reviews are as much ruminations on society at large as they are about the restaurants themselves. So alongside the concepts, customers and cuisines, ten years of writing about restaurants has yielded insights on everything from yaks to cowboys, picnics to politics. TABLE TALK is an idiosyncratic selection of A.A. Gill's writing about food, taken from his Sunday Times and Tatler columns. Sometimes inspired by the traditions of a whole country, sometimes by a single ingredient, it is a celebration of what great eating can be, an excoriation of those who get it wrong, and an education about our own appetites. Because it spans a decade, the book focuses on A.A. Gill's general dining experiences rather than individual restaurants - food fads, tipping, chefs, ingredients, eating in town and country and abroad, and the best and worst dining experiences. Fizzing with wit, it is a treat for gourmands, gourmets and anyone who relishes good writing.
American Modernism and Depression Documentary surveys the uneven terrain of American modernity through the lens of the documentary book. Jeff Allred argues that photo-texts of the 1930s stage a set of mediations between rural hinterlands and metropolitan areas, between elite producers of culture and the "forgotten man" of Depression-era culture, between a myth of consensual national unity and various competing ethnic and regional collectivities. In light of the complexity this entails, this study takes issue with a critical tradition that has painted the documentary expression" of the 1930s as a simplistic and propagandistic divergence from literary modernism. Allred situates these texts, and the "documentary modernism" they represent, as a central part of American modernism and response to American modernity, as he looks at the impoverished sharecroppers depcited in the groundbreaking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the disenfranchised African Americans in Richard Wright's polemical 12 Million Black Voices, and the experiments in Depression-era photography found in Life magazine.
Das Buch beinhaltet die Beitrage einer internationalen Tagung in Peking im September 2011. Aus chinesischer und deutscher Sicht werden Aspekte von Deutsch als Fremdsprache, chinesisch-deutschen Kulturbeziehungen und interkultureller Kommunikation diskutiert. Dabei zeigt sich ein breites Spektrum von inhaltlichen und methodischen Herangehensweisen, durch die die Vielfalt, aber auch die Heterogenitat des wissenschaftlichen Diskurses zum gleichen Thema in den beiden Landern deutlich wird: tagesaktuelle Themen, theoretisch grundlegende und systematische Abhandlungen, pragmatische Fragestellungen bis hin zu kommunikationsphilosophischen Reflexionen. Der Band selbst ist so ein Beispiel interkultureller Kommunikation.
William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) was a novelist, poet, and essayist and was considered the South's premier literary figure at the height of his popularity. No less an authority than Edgar Allen Poe remarked of Simms that "he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen" as a novelist. Simms's literary achievements include more than twenty major novels, several volumes of poetry, and biographies of important figures in American history. Perhaps the least considered parts of Simms's overall body of writings are those he did for newspapers, the most interesting of which are from the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Writing War and Reunion offers a selection of the best of those so that we can track Simms's thoughts about, and reactions to, the conflict, from its beginnings through to its conclusion and into the early years of Reconstruction. These works provide a valuable insight into how a prominent southern intellectual interpreted and participated in these momentous events in U.S. history. In the decades following the Civil War, Simms's reputation suffered a steady decline. Because of his associations with the antebellum South, slavery, and Confederate defeat, as well as changes in literary tastes, Simms came to be regarded as a talented but failed Southern author of a bygone era. Today a robust scholarly literature exists that has reexamined Simms, his literary works, and previous scholarly judgments and finds him to have been an important figure in the development of nineteenth-century American literature and worthy of serious study.
Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.
Come and walk the offbeat world of Mike Strobels popular column in the Toronto Sun. Meet the legendary panhandler Shaky Lady; the Weasel, who knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried; the secretive swinger Sexy Boots; the notorious Bicycle Bandit, who quit robbing banks, got a loan, and opened a bar; and Dr. Hook, the top doc whose professional fate rested on the cut of his jib. Youll also get a look at a fake orgasm champ, a practising witch turned beauty pageant queen, a boss cannonballer, and assorted other heroes, rogues, athletes, finks, politicos, celebrities, bureaucrats, sons, and lovers. Each column in this collection is a mini-world, tight and bright. Youll smile at Strobels take on the fads, fashions, morals, and hot topics of the day. Even the most serious issues are dissected and dispatched with often biting wit and cheek. (Warning: If youre a Montreal Canadiens fan, do not read this book.)
Thoburn H. "Toby" Wiant was a fig h t e r from an early age, and
words were his weapons of choice. During World War II, he fought to
scoop stories from rival reporters on the front lines as an
Associated Press war correspondent. In chronicling the war from the
China-Burma-India and European theaters of operation, he skillfully
reported the battles of an all-too-real war while often in personal
peril. In letters to his parents he revealed his personal reactions
to the war. In this remarkable book, his daughter brings together
Wiantas printed articles and his private letters. With her aid, we
view the war through his eyes as we watch a scrappy boy grow into
manhood and an
The next instalment in the acclaimed New Yorker 'decades' series featuring an all-star line-up of historical pieces from the 1960s alongside new pieces by current New Yorker staffers. The 1960s, the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, were a time of tectonic shifts in all aspects of society - from the March on Washington and the Second Vatican Council to the Summer of Love and Woodstock. No magazine chronicled the immense changes of the period better than The New Yorker. This capacious volume includes historic pieces from the magazine's pages that brilliantly capture the sixties, set alongside new assessments by some of today's finest writers. Here are real-time accounts of these years of turmoil: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Six-Day War: all are brought to immediate and profound life in these pages. The New Yorker of the 1960s was also the wellspring of some of the truly timeless works of American journalism. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time all first appeared in The New Yorker and are featured here. The magazine also published such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever's 'The Swimmer' and John Updike's 'A & P', alongside poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The arts underwent an extraordinary transformation during the decade, one mirrored by the emergence in The New Yorker of critical voices as arresting as Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan. Among the crucial cultural figures profiled here are Simon & Garfunkel, Tom Stoppard, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammad Ali), and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The assembled pieces are given fascinating contemporary context by current New Yorker writers, including Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell and David Remnick. The result is an incomparable collective portrait of a truly galvanising era. With contributions from: Truman Capote, John Updike, E.B. White, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Jonathan Schell, Dwight Macdonald, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, AJ Liebling, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Xavuer Rynne, John McPhee, Anthony Hiss and more.
A collection of essays by top international correspondants in print, broadcasting, and photojournalism, International News Reporting offers an introduction to journalism written by the people who have made the profession what it is today. * Contributors identify the major areas of professional practice which students and young journalists need to know in order to work safely in, and understand fully, the field of international news gathering* Looks at events from conflicts to humanitarian disasters* Covers crucial topics such as how to report stories about the developing world, how to avoid stereotyping, the uses and abuses of blogging, and risk assessment for journalists in conflict zones |
You may like...
The President's Keepers - Those Keeping…
Jacques Pauw
Paperback
(74)
|