The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, bestselling author of Swing Time and White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays.

No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for Zadie Smith's insatiable curiosity. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has endless enthusiasmand the boundless wit, insight and wisdom to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect, set brilliantly against the context of the utterly contemporary, and considered with a deep humanity and compassion.

This electrifying new collection showcases its author as a true literary powerhouse, demonstrating once again her credentials as an essential voice of her generation.

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King.

Part memoir, part masterclass by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 - and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery.

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King's critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.

Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it - fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.

An invaluable source of information on the personalities and organizations of the literary world.
This essential directory and guide to the field of literature profiles the most important writers and authors, both established and up-and-coming, at work today. All entries are updated just prior to publication ensuring the utmost accuracy.
Features include:
* Over 5,000 entries
* Concise biographical information on novelists, authors, playwrights, columnists, journalists, editors and critics
* Biographical details of established writers as well as those who have recently risen to prominence
* Each entry details career, works published, literary awards and prizes, membership and contact addresses where available
* A detailed listing of major international literary awards and prizes, and winners of those prizes
* A directory of major literary organizations and literary agents, and a listing of members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Suitable for ages 10 and 11 (Year 6) Provides targeted questions for grammar, punctuation and spelling Ideal for home learning and additional practice outside of the classroom Answers included in the back of the book Remember, revise and practise This bright, colourful and easy to use write-in workbook makes it simple and fun for Year 6 children to recap, revisit and reinforce what they've learned about grammar, punctuation and spelling throughout Key Stage 2. Its lively, friendly approach will test and strengthen their knowledge as it recognises their achievements and gently motivates further progress. Boost skills and build confidence An engaging array of targeted exercises allow Year 6 children to test their understanding of grammar, punctuation and spelling, practise all their skills, cement their knowledge and feel positive and confident about their ability to achieve and succeed. Get prepared for test success! With SATs-style practice questions, vital revision content that recaps what they've been learning in class, tick boxes to mark their progress and full answers to check their work, children will quickly begin to feel ready for success in the tests.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz, and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.

Ever since Arthur Conan Doyle created the pipe-smoking, deer stalkered character, Sherlock Holmes, he has become a part of popular culture for generations, and here every aspect of the legendary detective is investigated. Brimming with strange and amusing facts, Sherlock Holmes explores this timeless character and the continuation of impact it has had on audiences today. Brief, accessible and entertaining pieces on a wide variety of subjects makes it the perfect book to dip in to. The amazing and extraordinary facts series presents interesting, surprising and little-known facts and stories about a wide-range of topics which are guaranteed to inform, absorb and entertain in equal measure.

It has been very difficult over the years for collectors to know just what has been produced from the works of Tolkien, and where it can be purchased. There is not, and has never been, any 'official' Lord of the Rings cataloguing. Clear and specific documentation has been almost impossible to find, and any listing that has been available has been a patchwork at best. Over the last few years, the Internet has become a great source of assistance through various webrings that connect the many Lord of the Rings fans. This four-colour, highly graphic book will provide information on all things Tolkien; books, calendars, toys and movie memorabilia. Both the novice and die-hard collector will find this guide helpful and like the new film trilogy from Peter Jackson, make us believe again.

Bringing together leading voices from across the globe, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edith Wharton represents state-of-the-art scholarship on the American writer Edith Wharton, once primarily known as a New York novelist. Focusing on Wharton's extensive body of work and renaissance across 21st-century popular culture, chapters consider: - Wharton in the context of queer studies, race studies, whiteness studies, age studies, disability studies, anthropological studies, and economics; - Wharton's achievements in genres for which she deserves to be better known: poetry, drama, the short story, and non-fiction prose; - Comparative studies with Christina Rossetti, Henry James, and Willa Cather; -The places and cultures Wharton documented in her writing, including France, Greece, Italy, and Morocco; - Wharton's work as a reader and writer and her intersections with film and the digital humanities. Book-ended by Dale Bauer and Elaine Showalter, and with a foreword by the Director and senior staff at The Mount, Wharton's historic Massachusetts home, the Handbook underscores Wharton's lasting impact for our new Gilded Age. It is an indispensable resource for readers interested in Wharton and 19th- and 20th-century literature and culture.

Teaching guides and lesson plans designed to make classic literature engaging and relevant to today's students! This comprehensive book of lesson plans, projects, discussion questions, reproducible worksheets, and more provides teachers with everything they need to engage middle- and high-school students in the study of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Each SparkTeach Guide includes: - Dozens of lessons and contextual "Real Life Lens" discussion prompts - "Big Idea Question" prompts, activities, and projects that explore the work's key themes - Poetics lesson plans - Film comparative lesson plans - Exercises in studying the play's use of metaphor, simile, personification, and motifs - Lesson plans for differentiated instruction - Reproducible worksheets and lesson assessments that build reading, vocabulary, and comprehension skills - Answer keys - Student rubrics There are also tips for class planning and management, ideas for personalizing content, Common Core references, and more, making this the perfect resource to engage students in literature study that's meaningful, exciting, and above all, FUN.

In late 1872, the New York Herald named James J. O'Kelly its special correspondent to Cuba, to cover what would later be known as the Ten Years' War. O'Kelly was tasked with crossing Spanish lines, locating the insurgent camps, and interviewing the president of the Cuban republic, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes. O'Kelly became a political lightning rod when, after fulfilling his mission, he was arrested, court-martialed, and threatened with execution in Spanish Cuba. For the book that followed, The Mambi-Land, or Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba, O'Kelly assembled edited versions of the eighteen dispatches he sent to the Herald, some written in the remotest imaginable places in the Cuban interior. The Mambi-Land constitutes the first book-length account of Cuba's Ten Years' War for independence from Spain (1868-1878) and provides a window on an understudied moment in U.S.-Cuba relations. More than recovering an important lost work, this critical edition draws attention to Cuba's crucial place in American national consciousness in the post-Civil War period and represents a timely and significant contribution to our understanding of the complicated history of Cuba-U.S. relations.

Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific War as fought by "Frogs" and "Toads," humanoid creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts. The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic strips from America's small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father's adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers, radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of progressive American educational reform, these violent comic stories, often in settings modeled on the artist's small Nebraska town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral conventions consistent with comic art's reputation for "outsider" or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kugler's thorough analysis of his father's adolescent art explains how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious, even shocking terms.

In the early twentieth century, historical imaginings of Japan contributed to the Argentine vision of "transpacific modernity." Intellectuals such as Eduardo Wilde and Manuel Domecq GarcIa celebrated Japanese customs and traditions as important values that can be integrated into Argentine society. But a new generation of Nikkei or Japanese Argentines is rewriting this conventional narrative in the twenty-first century. Nikkei writers such as Maximiliano Matayoshi and Alejandra Kamiya are challenging the earlier, unapologetic view of Japan based on their own immigrant experiences. Compared to the experience of political persecution against Japanese immigrants in Brazil and Peru, the Japanese in Argentina generally lived under a more agreeable sociopolitical climate. In order to understand the "positive" perception of Japan in Argentine history and literature, Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho turns to the current debate on race in Argentina, particularly as it relates to the discourse of whiteness. One of the central arguments is that Argentina's century-old interest in Japan represents a disguised method of (re)claiming its white, Western identity. Through close readings of diverse genres (travel writing, essay, novel, short story, and film) Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho yields a multi-layered analysis in order to underline the role Japan has played in both defining and defying Argentine modernity from the twentieth century to the present.

We are living a moment in which famous chefs, Michelin stars, culinary techniques, and gastronomical accolades attract moneyed tourists to Spain from all over the world. This has prompted the Spanish government to declare its cuisine as part of Spanish patrimony. Yet even with this widespread global attention, we know little about how Spanish cooking became a litmus test for demonstrating Spain's modernity and, in relation, the roles ascribed to the modern Spanish women responsible for daily cooking. Efforts to articulate a new, modern Spain infiltrated writing in multiple genres and media. Women's Work places these efforts in their historical context to yield a better understanding of the roles of food within an inherently uneven modernization process. Further, the book reveals the paradoxical messages women have navigated, even in texts about a daily practice that shaped their domestic and work lives. This argument is significant because of the degree to which domestic activities, including cooking, occupied women's daily lives, even while issues like their fitness as citizens and participation in the public sphere were hotly debated. At the same time, progressive intellectuals from diverse backgrounds began to invoke Spanish cooking and eating as one measure of Spanish modernity. Women's Work shows how culinary writing engaged these debates and reached women at the site of much of their daily labor-the kitchen-and, in this way, shaped their thinking about their roles in modernizing Spain.

Contributions by Beverly Lyon Clark, Christine Doyle, Gregory Eiselein, John Matteson, Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Anne K. Phillips, Daniel Shealy, and Roberta Seelinger Trites As the golden age of children's literature dawned in America in the mid-1860s, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a work that many scholars view as one of the first realistic novels for young people, soon became a classic. Never out of print, Alcott's tale of four sisters growing up in nineteenth-century New England has been published in more than fifty countries around the world. Over the century and a half since its publication, the novel has grown into a cherished book for girls and boys alike. Readers as diverse as Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J. K. Rowling have declared it a favorite. Little Women at 150, a collection of eight original essays by scholars whose research and writings over the past twenty years have helped elevate Alcott's reputation in the academic community, examines anew the enduring popularity of the novel and explores the myriad complexities of Alcott's most famous work. Examining key issues about philanthropy, class, feminism, Marxism, Transcendentalism, canon formation, domestic labor, marriage, and Australian literature, Little Women at 150 presents new perspectives on one of the United States' most enduring novels. A historical and critical introduction discusses the creation and publication of the novel, briefly traces the scholarly critical response, and demonstrates how these new essays show us that Little Women and its illustrations still have riches to reveal to its readers in the twenty-first century.

Infamous for authoring two concepts since favored by government powers seeking license for ruthlessness-the utilitarian notion of privileging the greatest happiness for the most people and the panopticon-Jeremy Bentham is not commonly associated with political emancipation. But perhaps he should be. In his private manuscripts, Bentham agonized over the injustice of laws prohibiting sexual nonconformity, questioning state policy that would put someone to death merely for enjoying an uncommon pleasure. He identified sources of hatred for sexual nonconformists in philosophy, law, religion, and literature, arguing that his goal of "the greatest happiness" would be impossible as long as authorities dictate whose pleasures can be tolerated and whose must be forbidden. Ultimately, Bentham came to believe that authorities worked to maximize the suffering of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists in order to demoralize disenfranchised people and prevent any challenge to power. In Uncommon Sense, Carrie Shanafelt reads Bentham's sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as the foundation for egalitarian liberty, shedding new light on eighteenth-century aesthetics and politics. At odds with the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, this innovative study shows Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of sanctioned, discriminatory violence.

The Dark Tower series is the backbone of Stephen King's legendary career. Eight books and more than three thousand pages make up this bestselling fantasy epic. This revised and updated concordance, incorporating the 2012 Dark Tower novel The Wind Through the Keyhole, is the definitive encyclopedic reference book that provides readers with everything they need to navigate their way through the series. With hundreds of characters, Mid-World geography, High Speech lexicon, and extensive cross-references, this comprehensive handbook is essential for any Dark Tower fan.
Includes:
Characters and Genealogies
Magical Objects and Forces
Mid-World and Our World Places
Portals and Magical Places
Mid-, End-, and Our World Maps
Timeline for the Dark Tower Series
Mid-World Dialects
Mid-World Rhymes, Songs, and Prayers
Political and Cultural References
References to Stephen King's Own Work

Serial Mexico responds to a continued need to historicize and contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation. Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the development of both the novel and national identities-to Mexican popular culture-during its foundational period. In the twentieth century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales, themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study? Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds) have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand some of the possible answers to these questions through five case studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to larger notions of how national identities are created through narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political implications.

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty's ingenious play with readers' expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories' secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty's investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race-outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre's greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald's novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its "underground woman," its unexpected "sleeping beauty.