Mumsnet 'Best Books for Christmas 2016' 'Ideal for anyone who has ever wondered what on earth to read next' SJ WATSON 'Witty, engaging and informative. The sort of book you choose for a friend and end up wanting to keep' RACHEL JOYCE This is a medical handbook with a difference. Whether you have a stubbed toe or a severe case of the blues, within these pages you'll find a cure in the form of a novel to help ease your pain. You'll also find advice on how to tackle common reading ailments - such as what to do when you feel overwhelmed by the number of books in the world, or you have a tendency to give up halfway through. When read at the right moment, a novel can change your life and The Novel Cure is an enchanting reminder of that power.

Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

Selected lectures and writings on the return of this solar being to the direction of earthly evolution.

Contributions by Deborah N. Cohn, Leigh Anne Duck, Robert W. Hamblin, Michael Kreyling, Barbara Ladd, Walter Benn Michaels, Patrick O'Donnell, Theresa M. Towner, Annette Trefzer, and Karl F. Zender. Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century presents the thoughts of ten noted Faulkner scholars who spoke at the twenty-seventh annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi. Theresa M. Towner attacks the traditional classification of Faulkner's works as "major" and "minor" and argues that this causes the neglect of other significant works and characters. Michael Kreyling uses photographs of Faulkner to analyze the interrelationships of Faulkner's texts with the politics and culture of Mississippi. Barbara Ladd and Deborah Cohn invoke the relevance of Faulkner's works to "the other South," postcolonial Latin America. Also, approaching Faulkner from a postcolonial perspective, Annette Trefzer looks at his contradictory treatment of Native Americans.Within the tragic fates of such characters as Quentin Compson, Gail Hightower, and Rosa Coldfield, Leigh Ann Duck finds an inability to cope with painful memories. Patrick O'Donnell examines the use of the future tense and Faulkner's growing skepticism of history as a linear progression. To postmodern critics who denigrate "The Fire and the Hearth," Karl F. Zender offers a rebuttal. Walter Benn Michaels contends that in Faulkner's South, and indeed the United States as a whole, the question of racial identification tends to overpower all other issues. Faulkner's recurring interest in frontier life and values inspires Robert W. Hamblin's piece.

Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown. Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), New York, and Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing. Didion describes her methods of writing, the ways in which the various genres she has worked in inform one another, and the concerns that have motivated her to write.

The period of 1850-1865 consisted of violent struggle and crisis as the United States underwent the prodigious transition from slaveholding to ostensibly 'free' nation. This volume reframes mid-century African American literature and challenges our current understandings of both African American and American literature. It presents a fluid tradition that includes history, science, politics, economics, space and movement, the visual, and the sonic. Black writing was highly conscious of transnational and international politics, textual circulation, and revolutionary imaginaries. Chapters explore how Black literature was being produced and circulated; how and why it marked its relation to other literary and expressive traditions; what geopolitical imaginaries it facilitated through representation; and what technologies, including print, enabled African Americans to pursue such a complex and ongoing aesthetic and political project.

A fresh examination of Harper's body of work as an archive of Black life, thought, and culture.The first book devoted to the groundbreaking poet's work, Understanding Michael S. Harper locates his poetic project within Black expressive tradition. The study examines poems drawn from the eleven volumes of verse that Harper (1938-2016) produced between 1970 and 2010, bringing attention to his poetry's sustained engagement with music, literature, and the visual arts. Author Michael A. Antonucci offers readers an account of the poet's career while assessing his verse and providing a sense of its perspective on Black America and American experience. Throughout his examination of Harper's verse, Antonucci builds upon the critical attention the poet received at the outset of his career-he was twice nominated for the National Book Award. Exploring the poet's celebrated examinations of history, kinship, and Black music, Understanding Michael S. Harper develops and expands critical dialogues about the poet and his body of work, which, Antonucci argues, presents a counter narrative about the composition and origins of the United States, reshaping prevailing discourse about race, nation, and identity.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the ages Covers reading practices around the world from 19th-century Africa to the reading of music in the 20th-century US Employs a wide range of methodologies Showcases new research including reading at night; readers as writers and critics; and 21st-century neuroscience Challenges previous models with new data on travelling readers, images of readers, and digital reading and fan cultures Modern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century, from the bedrooms of the English upper classes, through large parts of nineteenth-century Africa and on-board ships and trains travelling the world, to twenty-first-century reading groups. It encompasses a range of genres from to science fiction, music and self-help to Government propaganda.

Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of "Young American" writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism.Focusing on Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer's Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson's anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson's primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production. The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the "buried cultures" of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the "folk" aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer's monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity. Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to "Young America," suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.

Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography-both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images- Amihay shows how the presence of visual elements in a textual work of fiction has a powerful subversive function. Contemporary Hebrew authors have turned to photography as a tool to disrupt narratives and give voice to marginalized sectors in Israel, including women, immigrants, Mizrahi Israelis, LGBTQ+ individuals, second-generation Holocaust survivors, and traumatized army veterans. Amihay discusses standard novels alongside graphic novels, challenging the dominance of the written word in literature. In addition to providing a poetic analysis of imagetext pages, Amihay addresses the social and political issues authors are responding to, including gender roles, Zionism, the ethnic divide in Israel, and its Palestinian minority. In exploring these avant-garde novels and their authors, Amihay elevates their significance and calls for a more expansive definition of canonical Hebrew literature.

This Element looks at adaptations of bestselling works of popular fiction to cinema, television, stage, radio, video games and other media platforms. It focuses on 'transmedia storytelling', building its case studies around the genre of modern fantasy: because the elaborate storyworlds produced by writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin have readily lent themselves to adaptations across various media platforms. This has also made it possible for media entertainment corporations to invest in them over the long term, enabling the development of franchises through which their storyworlds are presented and marketed in new ways to new audiences.

The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature emphasizes the importance of understanding Latina/o literature not simply as a US ethnic phenomenon but more broadly as an important element of a trans-American literary imagination. Engaging with the dynamics of migration, linguistic and cultural translation, and the uneven distribution of resources across the Americas that characterize Latina/o literature, the essays in this History provide a critical overview of key texts, authors, themes, and contexts as discussed by leading scholars in the field. This book demonstrates the relevance of Latina/o literature for a world defined by the migration of people, commodities, and cultural expressions.

Latin was for many centuries the common literary language of Europe, and Latin literature of immense range, stylistic power and social and political significance was produced throughout Europe and beyond from the time of Petrarch (c.1400) well into the eighteenth century. This is the first available work devoted specifically to the enormous wealth and variety of neo-Latin literature, and offers both essential background to the understanding of this material and sixteen chapters by leading scholars which are devoted to individual forms. Each contributor relates a wide range of fascinating but now little-known texts to the handful of more familiar Latin works of the period, such as Thomas More's Utopia, Milton's Latin poetry and the works of Petrarch and Erasmus. All Latin is translated throughout the volume.

Reveals the secrets and stories that lie beneath the surface of Watson's narratives The Case of Sherlock Holmes uncovers what is untold, partly told, wrongly told, or deliberately concealed in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes saga. This engaging study uses a scholarly approach, combining close reading with historicism, to read the stories afresh, sceptically probing Dr Watson's narratives and Holmes's often barely credible solutions. Drawing on Victorian and Edwardian history, Conan Doyle's life and works, and Doyle's literary sources, the book offers new insights into the Holmes stories and reveals what they say about money, class, family, sex, race, war, and secrecy. Key Features New insights into the ever-popular Holmes stories New contexts for late-Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction, from forgotten scandals to the social controversies of the age A literary-critical approach to these popular works that is both scholarly and accessible

The first comprehensive study to address Franzen's work to date, including his latest novel, Crossroads. Jonathan Franzen-novelist and essayist-is a critical darling, commercial success, and magnet for controversy. His third novel, The Corrections (2000), was selected for Oprah's book club, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the National Book Award. Franzen has been featured on the cover of Time and in an episode of The Simpsons. Love him or hate him, the publication of each new novel is a literary event. In Understanding Jonathan Franzen, Timothy Galow studies Franzen's first five novels plus his most recent, Crossroads, which was published to much fanfare in 2021. He opens with the Oprah controversy-Franzen, it seems, did not want his books to be popular-and goes on to unpack the author's ambivalent relationship to his status within the "Theory Generation" of 1980s college graduates turned writers and the postmodern threads that run throughout his work. For Franzen, the social and individual are inseparable. Galow examines why Franzen's stories of (white, bourgeois) American life have inspired and provoked readers for over two decades.

The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Faiza Guene's Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai's autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire's Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

How have African American writers drawn on bad men and black boys as creative touchstones for their evocative and vibrant art? This is the question posed by Howard Rambsy's new book, which explores bad men as a central, recurring, and understudied figure in African American literature, and music. By focusing on how various iterations of the black bad man figure serve as creative muse and inspiration for literary production, Rambsy puts a wide variety of contemporary African American literary and cultural works in conversation with creativity research for the first time. Employing concepts such as playfulness, productivity, divergent thinking, and problem finding, Rambsy examines the works of a wide range of writers-including Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Paul Beatty, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tyehimba Jess, Trymaine Lee, Adrian Matejka, Aaron McGruder, Evie Shockley, and Kevin Young-who have drawn on notions of bad black men and boys to create innovative and challenging works in a variety of genres. Through groundbreaking readings, Rambsy demonstrates the fruitfulness of viewing black literary art through the lens of the field of creativity research.

From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature, presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary 'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.

At the heart of this book is a belief that poetry matters, and that it enables us to enjoy and understand life. In this accessible guide, Andrew Hodgson equips the reader for the challenging and rewarding experience of unlocking poetry, considering the key questions about language, technique, feeling and subject matter which illuminate what a poem has to say. In a lucid and sympathetic manner, he considers a diverse range of poets writing in English to demonstrate how their work enlarges our perception of ourselves and our world. The process of independent research is modeled step-by-step, as the guide shows where to start, how to develop ideas, and how to draw conclusions. Providing guidance on how to plan, organise and write essays, close readings and commentaries, from initial annotation to final editing, this book will provide you with the confidence to discover and express your own personal response to poetry.

Few writers are as inextricably linked with a city as Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles. The neon-lit streets, mobbed-up joints and seedy rooming houses portrayed in his fiction were real places, familiar to Angelenos of the time, and in some cases recognisable today. This is a guide to the world of Raymond Chandler and his noble alter-ego, the private detective Philip Marlowe. It mixes locations from the books, the films and Chandler's personal life. There's the crummy dive where Moose Malloy went looking for Velma; the actual lounge where Marlowe and Terry Lennox ordered gimlets; the top-floor suite where oil executive Chandler got his priceless education in how a dirty, sun-drenched city really operated. This is the Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler carried in his heart. And now, you can too.

In 2012 the Swedish Academy announced that Mo Yan had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work that "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary." The announcement marked the first time a resident of mainland China had ever received the award. This is the first English-language study of the Chinese writer's work and influence, featuring essays from scholars in a range of disciplines, from both China and the United States. Its introduction, twelve articles, and epilogue aim to deepen and widen critical discussions of both a specific literary author and the globalisation of Chinese literature more generally. The book takes the "root-seeking" movement with which Mo Yan's works are associated as a metaphor for its organisational structure. The four articles of "Part I: Leaves" focus on Mo Yan's works as world literature, exploring the long shadow his works have cast globally. Howard Goldblatt, Mo Yan's English translator, explores the difficulties and rewards of interpreting his work, while subsequent articles cover issues such as censorship and the "performativity" associated with being a global author. "Part II: Trunk" explores the nativist core of Mo Yan's works. Through careful comparative treatment of related historical events, the five articles in this section show how specific literary works intermingle with China's national and international politics, its mid-twentieth-century visual culture, and its rich religious and literary conventions, including humor. The three articles in "Part III: Roots" delve into the theoretical and practical extensions of Mo Yan's works, uncovering the vibrant critical and cultural systems that ground Eastern and Western literatures and cultures. Mo Yan in Context concludes with an epilogue by sociologist Fenggang Yang, offering a personal and globally aware reflection on the recognition Mo Yan's works have received at this historical juncture.

Catching the Torch examines contemporary novels and plays written about Canada's participation in World War I. Exploring such works as Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, Jack Hodgins's Broken Ground, Kevin Kerr's Unity (1918), Stephen Massicotte's Mary's Wedding, and Frances Itani's Deafening, the book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War.In contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic difference, the ability to do one's duty without complaint or arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of war while making use of its productive cultural effects. Through a close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national identity, one that is articulated via the representation of straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national ""character.

Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is amongst the most acclaimed and widely studied of contemporary authors. The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee provides a compelling introduction for new readers, as well as fresh perspectives and provocations for those long familiar with Coetzee's works. All of Coetzee's published novels and autobiographical fictions are discussed at length, and there is extensive treatment of his translations, scholarly books and essays, and volumes of correspondence. Confronting Coetzee's works on the grounds of his practice, the chapters address his craft, his literary relations and horizons, and the relationship between his writings and other arts, disciplines and institutions. Written by an international team of contributors, this Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to this important writer, establishes new avenues of discovery, and explains Coetzee's undiminished ability to challenge and surprise his readers with inventive works of striking power and intensity.

The turn of the twentieth century was a period of experimental possibility for U.S. ethnic literature as a number of writers of color began to collaborate with the predominantly white publishing trade to make their work commercially available. In this new book, Lucas A. Dietrich analyzes publishers' and writers' archives to show how authors -- including Mar?!a Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Charles W. Chesnutt, Finley Peter Dunne, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sui Sin Far -- drew readers into their texts by subverting existing stereotypes and adapting styles of literary regionalism and dialect writing.Writing across the Color Line details how this body of literature was selected for publication, edited, manufactured, advertised, and distributed, even as it faced hostile criticism and frequent misinterpretation by white readers. Shedding light on the transformative potential of multiethnic literature and the tenacity of racist attitudes that dominated the literary marketplace, Dietrich proves that Native American, African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Irish American writers of the period relied on self-caricature, tricksterism, and the careful control of authorial personae to influence white audiences.