Now in its second edition, A Handbook of Diction for Singers is a complete guide to achieving professional levels of diction in Italian, German, and French, the three major languages of the classical vocal repertory. Written for English-speaking singers and offering thorough, consistent explanations, it is an ideal tool for students and an invaluable reference for voice teachers, vocal coaches, and conductors. The book combines traditional approaches proven successful in the teaching of diction with important new material not readily available elsewhere, presenting the sounds of each language in logical order, along with essential information on matters such as diacritical marks, syllabification, word stress, and effective use of the variety of foreign-language dictionaries. Presented in an attractively concise format, the book goes into greater detail than comparable texts, providing specific information to clarify concepts typically difficult for English-speaking singers. Particular emphasis is placed on the characteristics of vowel length, the sequencing of sounds between words, as well as the differences between spoken and sung sounds in all three languages. Featuring significantly expanded coverage of each of the three languages and illustrated with numerous examples, this second edition of A Handbook of Diction for Singers is an exceptional text for courses in diction and a valuable reference source for all vocalists.

Envisioning a Tibetan Luminary examines the religious biography of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859-1934), the most significant modern figure representing the Tibetan Boen religion-a vital minority tradition that is underrepresented in Tibetan studies. The work is based on fieldwork conducted in eastern Tibet and in the Boen exile community in India, where traditional Tibetan scholars collaborated closely on the project. Utilizing close readings of two versions of Shardza's life-story, along with oral history collected in Boen communities, this book presents and interprets the biographical image of this major figure, culminating with an English translation of his life story. William M. Gorvine argues that the disciple-biographer's literary portrait not only enacts and shapes religious ideals to foster faith among its readership, but also attempts to quell tensions that had developed among his original audience. Among the Boen community today, Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen has come to be unequivocally revered for an impressive textual legacy and a saintly death. During his lifetime, however, he faced prominent critics within his own lineage who went so far as to issue polemical attacks against him. As Gorvine shows, the biographical texts that inform us about Shardza's life are best understood when read on multiple registers, with attention given to the ways in which the religious ideals on display reflect the broader literary, cultural, and historical contexts within which they were envisioned and articulated.

An updated and abridged edition of Bono’s bestselling memoir, including a new introduction by the author, Stories of Surrender is an unforgettable love story, a tribute to fatherhood, friendship, faith and music. Honest, irreverent, and intimate, it’s a backstage pass to a frontman's remarkable life, from Bono’s childhood in Dublin to the rise of U2. A companion to the Apple Original Film of his critically acclaimed solo theatre show, Stories of Surrender is a luminous autobiography of one of the great voices of our time.

Bono: Stories of Surrender, An Apple Original Film is streaming on Apple TV+ this May.

"The Library of Babel" is arguably Jorge Luis Borges' best known story--memorialized along with Borges on an Argentine postage stamp. Now, in The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch takes readers on a fascinating tour of the mathematical ideas hidden within one of the classic works of modern literature.
Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach, this original and imaginative book sheds light on one of Borges' most complex, richly layered works. Bloch begins each chapter with a mathematical idea--combinatorics, topology, geometry, information theory--followed by examples and illustrations that put flesh on the theoretical bones. In this way, he provides many fascinating insights into Borges' Library. He explains, for instance, a straightforward way to calculate how many books are in the Library--an easily notated but literally unimaginable number--and also shows that, if each book were the size of a grain of sand, the entire universe could only hold a fraction of the books in the Library. Indeed, if each book were the size of a proton, our universe would still not be big enough to hold anywhere near all the books.
Given Borges' well-known affection for mathematics, this exploration of the story through the eyes of a humanistic mathematician makes a unique and important contribution to the body of Borgesian criticism. Bloch not only illuminates one of the great short stories of modern literature but also exposes the reader--including those more inclined to the literary world--to many intriguing and entrancing mathematical ideas.

On a defining evening of the 1980s, Donald Trump hosted celebrities and high rollers in a Jersey Shore town to witness 21-year-old Mike Tyson knock out Michael Spinks in just 91 seconds, earning more than the annual payrolls of the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics combined.

Only eight years earlier, Tyson, a troubled child from Brooklyn, was taken under the wing of boxing legend Cus D’Amato in upstate New York. Their story of mutual redemption captivated novelists, screenwriters, and the emerging cable TV industry. Tyson became HBO’s leading man long before Tony Soprano.

Despite the immense success, Tyson's story was more complex and darker than it appeared. Over the decades, he has been villainized, lionized, and fetishized―but never fully humanized until now. Acclaimed biographer Mark Kriegel, who first encountered Tyson as a young reporter, explores Tyson's life through what he survived rather than whom he knocked out.

Tyson, often compared to Jack Dempsey, was more akin to Sonny Liston―Black, feared, and expected to die young. What made Liston a pariah made Tyson a touchstone for a generation influenced by hip hop and gunfire. Kriegel captures not just Tyson’s rise but his profound impact on the American psyche.

The groundbreaking, intimate and inspiring memoir from Pope Francis.

Pope Francis originally intended this exceptional book to appear only after his death, but the needs of our times and the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope have moved him to make this precious legacy available now.

HOPE is the first autobiography in history ever to be published by a Pope. Written over six years, this complete autobiography starts in the early years of the twentieth century, with Pope Francis’s Italian roots and his ancestors’ courageous migration to Latin America, continuing through his childhood, the enthusiasms and preoccupations of his youth, his vocation, adult life, and the whole of his papacy up to the present day.

In recounting his memories with intimate narrative force (not forgetting his own personal passions), Pope Francis deals unsparingly with some of the crucial moments of his papacy and writes candidly, fearlessly and prophetically about some of the most important and controversial questions of our present times: war and peace (including the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East), migration, environmental crisis, social policy, the position of women, sexuality, technological developments, the future of the Church and of religion in general.

HOPE includes a wealth of revelations, anecdotes and illuminating thoughts. It is a thrilling and very human memoir, moving and sometimes funny, which represents the ‘story of a life’ and, at the same time, a touching moral and spiritual testament that will fascinate readers throughout the world and will be Pope Francis’s legacy of hope for future generations.

This study provides a detailed account of the "Fables," including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the "moraliste" core. Dr Slater brings to light veiled satirical attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the "fable" element.

Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, Italian, English, Spanish, and German: those are the eight languages in which Dutch Golden Age poet Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) wrote his poetry and correspondence. He also knew a bit of Hebrew and Portuguese. Examining a wide range of Huygens's writings"including personal letters, state correspondence, and poetry"Christopher Joby explores how Huygens tested the boundaries of language with his virtuosity as a polyglot. From Huygens's multilingual code switching to his writings on architecture, music, and natural science, this comprehensive account is a must-read for anyone interested in this Dutch statesman and man of letters.

Coleridge's status as a philosopher has often been questioned. `I am a poor poet in England,' he admitted, `but in America, I am a great philosopher.' J. S. Mill's assertion that `the time is yet far distant when, in the estimation of Coleridge, and of his influence upon the intellect of our time, anything like unanimity can be looked for' seems to have been justified. Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a `logosophic' system which attempted `to reduce all knowledges into harmony'. She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which his unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings for the term `Logos', a recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought - philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting, his perceptions more acute, as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves.

In a postfactual world in which claims are often held to be true only to the extent that they confirm pre-existing or partisan beliefs, this book asks crucial questions: how can we identify the many forms of untruthfulness in discourse? How can we know when their use is ethically wrong? How can we judge untruthfulness in the messiness of situated discourse? Drawing on pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and law, All Bullshit and Lies? develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing untruthful discourse in situated context. TRUST, or Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text, sees untruthfulness as encompassing not only deliberate manipulations of what is believed to be true (the insincerity of withholding, misleading, and lying) but also the distortions that arise from an irresponsible attitude towards the truth (dogma, distortion, and bullshit). Chris Heffer discusses times when truth is not "in play," as in jokes or fiction, as well as instances when concealing the truth can achieve a greater good. The TRUST framework demonstrates that untruthfulness becomes unethical in discourse, though, when it unjustifiably breaches the trust an interlocutor invests in the speaker. In addition to the theoretical framework, this book provides a clear, practical heuristic for analyzing discursive untruthfulness and applies it to such cases of public discourse as the Brexit "battle bus," Trump's tweet about voter fraud, Blair and Bush's claims about weapons of mass destruction, and the multiple forms of untruthfulness associated with the Skripal poisoning case. In All Bullshit and Lies? Chris Heffer turns a critical eye to fundamental questions of truthfulness and trust in our society. This timely and interdisciplinary investigation of discourse provides readers a deeper theoretical understanding of untruthfulness in a postfactual world.

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

The last decade has witnessed the rise of the cell phone from a mode of communication to an indispensable multimedia device, and this phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of mobile communication studies in media, cultural studies, and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media seeks to be the definitive publication for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of mobile media. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize the increasingly convergent areas surrounding social, geosocial, and mobile media discourses. Features include: comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing mobile media; wide-ranging case studies that draw from this truly global field, including China, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as Europe, the UK, and the US; a consideration of mobile media as part of broader media ecologies and histories; chapters setting out the economic and policy underpinnings of mobile media; explorations of the artistic and creative dimensions of mobile media; studies of emerging issues such as ecological sustainability; up-to-date overviews on social and locative media by pioneers in the field. Drawn from a range of theoretical, artistic, and cultural approaches, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media will serve as a crucial reference text to inform and orient those interested in this quickly expanding and far-reaching field.

Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions restores a lost chapter in the history of feminism and illuminates the complexity of the rights debates of the eighteenth century. As the English language followed the routes of trade and colonialism to become the lingua franca of much of the Atlantic world, women who experienced dispossession and violence on the one hand, and new freedoms and opportunities on the other, wrote about their experiences. English, Scots and Irish women; colonists and indigenous women; Loyalists and Patriots; religious leaders and scandal-dogged actresses; slaves and free women of color-this anthology puts all these eighteenth-century voices in conversation with one another in an unprecedented archive of primary sources that will become indispensable to students and scholars of the eighteenth century in English, history, and women's and gender studies.

The first comprehensive and objective history of the literature of Georgia, revealed to be unique among those of the former Byzantine and Russian empires, both in its quality and its 1500 years' history. It is examined in the context of the extraordinarily diverse influences which affected it - from Greek and Persian to Russian and modern European literature, and the folklore of the Caucasus.

Economists and bankers have long been much maligned individuals; but never more so than in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Working as an economist for various financial institutions, for more than 25 years Russell Jones had a foot in both camps, plying his trade in a number of global financial centres and points in between, and experiencing at first hand the extraordinary ebb and flow of an industry that came to exert a disproportionate influence on the lives of almost everyone on the planet. In the process, he met some remarkable people, witnessed dramatic shifts in the balance of global economic and political power, explored in detail the labyrinthine complexities involved in managing modern day macroeconomies, and observed all the arrogance, hubris and day-to-day absurdities of an industry that was in effect allowed to run out of control. It was quite a ride. And not one without its moments of pathos and humour.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk offers the most intimate, complete and revelatory portrait of the most fascinating and controversial innovator in the world.
 
For two years, Isaacson had unprecedented access to Musk, his workplaces, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries – nothing was off-limits.

Musk’s journey from humble beginnings to one of the wealthiest people on the planet is a thrilling, mind-bending story and nobody could tell it better. Filled with amazing tales of triumph and turmoil, and lessons about leadership and business, it ultimately addresses the question everyone wants to ask: why is Elon Musk so successful?

This book includes over 100 integrated black and white images.

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan. It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. This collection of essays, featuring twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools, showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field while highlighting its many new directions. New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the methodological choices that have affected the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of approaches from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and expansion beyond text to performance and the image. Others grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law's construction of racialized bodies. The volume is designed to be a course book that is accessible to undergraduates and law students as well as relevant to academics with an interest in law and the humanities. The essays are simultaneously intended to be introductory and addressed to experts in law and literature. More than any other existing book in the field, New Directions furnishes a guide to the most exciting new work in law and literature while also situating that work within more established debates and conversations.