Bird by Bird is the bible of writing guides - a wry, honest, down-to-earth book that has never stopped selling since it was first published in the United States in the 1990s. Bestselling novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott distils what she's learned over years of trial and error. Beautifully written, wise and immensely helpful, this is the book for all serious writers and writers-to-be.

Full-colour workbook consolidates vocabulary and grammar from the pupil's book

The Oxford Essential French Dictionary is a new compact French-English and English-French dictionary that offers up-to-date coverage of all the essential day-to-day vocabulary with over 40,000 words and phrases and 60,000 translations. This dictionary is easy to use and ideal for travel, work, or study. The latest words in each language have been added, reflecting all aspects of life today, from computing and technology to lifestyle and business. Additional features include guides to French and English pronunciation, as well as help with both French and English verbs. The Oxford Essential French Dictionary is ideal for anyone in need of a handy quick reference. An essential book for the study of French.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec Connection, Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links and parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue both enabled and delimited connections between these writers, restricting their potential with the language's own imperial history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for transformative independence.Importantly, the book expands the "francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean literatures to Quebecois literature, attending to their interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec Connection's analysis of transnational francophone solidarities radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come to be called the postcolonial world.

This book is about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The description may sound absurd, yet consideration of alternatives to a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a novel. Plot emerges out of the gradual elimination of possibilities, from the revelation, on the first page of a work, that we are in nineteenth-century London and not sixteenth-century Paris, to the final disclosure that Pip returns home too late to marry Biddy but is now free to pursue his lost love Estella. Through careful examination of the plots of such classics as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and others, Glatt argues for the central role of these "unwritten plots" in Victorian narrative construction. Abandoning the allegorical mode-in which characters are bound by fixed identities to reach a predetermined conclusion-and turning away from classical and historical plots with outcomes already known to audiences, the realist novel of the Victorian era was designed to simulate the openness and uncertainty of ordinary human experience. We are invested in these stories of David Copperfield or Elizabeth Bennet or Lucy Snowe in part because we cannot be entirely sure how those stories will end. As Glatt demonstrates, the Victorian novel is characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.