During a period of twenty years--from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken's classic pulp magazine The Black Mask in the early 1930s, through the publication of his novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s--Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.Drawn from those journals, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler offers an intimate view of the writer at work, revealing early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes that would later be used in The Long Goodbye, The Blue Dahlia, and other classics.Filled with both public and private writings, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler includes "Marlowesque" particulars such as pickpocket lingo, San Quentin jailhouse slang, a "Note on the Tommygun," and musings on "Craps." Here, too, are surprising, lesser known essays on Hollywood, the mystery story, British and American writing, and a wicked parody of Hemingway. This sampler--by turns whimsical, provocative, irreverent, and fascinating--also contains a list of possible story titles; "Chandlerisms;" and his short work "English Summer: A Gothic Romance," which the writer viewed as a turning point in his career.

An increasingly popular genre - addressing issues of empire, colonialism, post-colonialism, globalization, gender and politics - travel writing offers the reader a movement between the familiar and the unknown.

In this volume, Carl Thompson

• introduces the genre, outlining competing definitions and key debates
• provides a broad historical survey from the medieval period to the present day
• explores the autobiographical dimensions of the form

• looks at both men and women's travel writing, surveying a range of canonical and more marginal works, drawn from both the colonial and postcolonial eras

• utilises both British and American travelogues to consider the genre's role in shaping the history of both nations.

Concise and practical, Travel Writing is the ideal introduction for those new to the subject, as well as a crucial overview of current debates in the field.

Iain Banks is one of the most inventive writers in the UK today, producing an extraordinary range of work, from family sagas set in present-day Scotland to science fiction spanning vast gulfs of space and time. He enjoys breaking the arbitrary boundaries of genre, and often creates narratives blending "realistic" storylines with fantastical elements. Alan MacGillivray's Scotnote provides an overview of Iain Banks's fiction, and focuses on three novels in particular: The Wasp Factory, a darkly comic piece of Scottish Gothic fiction; The Crow Road, a cross-generational family saga with elements of a detective story; and Whit, following the adventures of an innocent thrust into modern society. Suitable for senior school pupils and students at all levels.

*** PRE-ORDER the first gripping book in the brand new San Diego Case Files series by Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller Karen Rose *** Colton Driscoll is a compulsive liar. But there's one thing his psychologist Sam Reeves fears he is telling the truth about: murder. Concerned his patient has committed an awful crime and that the life of another girl could be under threat, Sam calls in an anonymous tip to the San Diego Police Department. Detective Kit McKittrick works homicide in the hope that one day she will find out what happened to her foster sister, Wren. When a tip comes in from an anonymous caller it leads her to the body of a girl whose murder has the hallmarks of a serial killer that has been at large for almost twenty years. It also leads her to the source of the information: Dr Sam Reeves. Will Kit be able to crack the cold case in time to stop another murder being committed? And is Sam Reeves being a concerned citizen trying to help, or is there another more sinister reason he has so much information? READERS LOVE KAREN ROSE: ''Karen Rose never disappoints!' 'She is phenomenal at weaving an absorbing, detailed plot full of suspense and all interwoven with a beautiful love story' 'These books will make you laugh, cry, rage and marvel at how the written word can inspire every emotion you have!' 'The characters are so well described you feel as if they are real people' 'I love this author's writing. Each book is like meeting up with old friends. I can't recommend it highly enough' 'If you haven't read her before, I heartily recommend her' 'She keeps you wanting to learn all about the characters and anticipating what is going to happen next. Highly recommend all of her books' 'I just couldn't put it down, I'd definitely recommend this author' 'It is just painstaking waiting for her next novel'

Emile Zola's reputation as a landmark European novelist is undisputed. His monumental achievement, the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire sociale et naturelle d'une famille sous le Second Empire (1871-1893), fixed his status as a major writer in the naturalist tradition. Is there any more to be said? Susan Harrow answers boldly in the affirmative, challenging the commonplace view that Zola's writing is predictable, prolix and transparent (what Barthes called 'readerly', for which read 'tedious'). Harrow exposes the modernist and postmodernist strategies which surface in the Rougon-Macquart novels, and reveals Zola's innovatory representation of the body captured here at work, at war, at play, at rest, and in arresting abstraction. Informed by critical thought from Barthes and Deleuze to Michel de Certeau and Anthony Giddens, Zola, the Body Modern offers a model for how we can revitalize our understanding of the canonical nineteenth-century European novel, and learn to travel more flexibly between parameters of century, style and aesthetics.

A full-colour illustrated compendium chronicling the magical twenty-year journey of acclaimed art and design studio, MinaLima, the creative genius behind the graphics for the Harry Potter film series. "It all started with a letter . . ." Miraphora Mina and Eduardo Lima began their extraordinary partnership in 2001 when Warner Bros. invited them to realize the imaginative visual universe of the Harry Potter film series. The two artists would never have guessed that the graphic props they designed for the films - including the Hogwarts acceptance letter, Marauder's Map, Daily Prophet newspaper, The Quibbler and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes - would become cultural icons loved by Wizarding World fans around the world. Eight years later, the pair formed their own design studio, MinaLima, and expanded their work to include the graphics for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade at Universal Orlando Resort and the Fantastic Beasts film series. To showcase their treasury of designs, the studio has opened House of MinaLima, its immersive art galleries and shops in London and across the world. The Magic of MinaLima is an illustrated history and celebration of Mina and Lima's twenty-year evolution and groundbreaking vision. Their wondrous creations illuminate the Wizarding World as never before, and their commentary offers insights into the imaginative thinking that shaped their designs. This collection showcases the very best works from the award-winning studio's two decades and includes interactive elements such as the Marauder's Map, the Black Family Tapestry, and Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Designed to delight and enchant, The Magic of MinaLima will be an invaluable resource for Wizarding World and graphic art fans alike.

The starting point for this book, first published in 1992, is a question of rhetoric a " as much in the writings of feminism as in other writing about women. How do texts construct possibilities and limits, openings and impasses, which set the terms for the ways in which we think about what a woman is, or where women might be going, whether individually or collectively?

Some possible answers, as well as more questions, are offered in this book which moves from Virginia Woolf to advertising and from Freud to Feminist theory.

This book illuminates Jane Austen's exploration of masculinity through the courtship romance genre in the socially, politically and culturally turbulent Romantic era. Austen scrutinises, satirises, censures and ultimately rewrites dominant modes of masculinity through the courtship romance plot between her heroines and male protagonists. This book reveals that Austen pioneers and celebrates a new vision of masculinity that could complement the Romantic desire for agency, individualism and selfhood embodied in her heroines. Rewriting desirable masculinity as an internalised, psychologically complex and authentic gender identity - a model of manhood that drives the ongoing appeal and cultural power of her men in the twenty-first century - Austen explores both the challenges and the opportunities for male selfhood, romantic love and feminine agency. Jane Austen's Men is among the first full-length works to explore Austen's male protagonists as textual constructions of masculinity. Sarah Ailwood reveals the depth of Austen's engagement with her predecessors and contemporaries, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West and Jane Porter, on critical questions of masculinity and its relationship to femininity and narrative form. This book illuminates in new ways Jane Austen's ambitions for the novel, and the political power of the courtship romance genre in the Romantic era.

Nadine Gordimer is one of the most important writers to emerge in the twentieth century. Her anti-Apartheid novel July's People (1981) is a powerful example of resistance writing and continues even now to unsettle easy assumptions about issues of power, race, gender and identity. This guide to Gordimer's compelling novel offers: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of July's People a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new and reprinted critical essays on July's People, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key approaches identified in the critical survey cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of July's People and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Gordimer's text.

He is the law - and you better believe it! Judge, jury and executioner, Judge Dredd is the brutal comic book cop policing the chaotic future urban jungle of Mega-City One, created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra and launching in the pages of 2000 AD in 1977. But what began as a sci-fi action comic quickly evolved into a searing satire on hardline, militarised policing and 'law and order' politics, its endless inventiveness and ironic humour acting as a prophetic warning about our world today - and with important lessons for our future. Blending comic book history with contemporary radical theories on policing, I Am The Law takes key Dredd stories from the last 45 years and demonstrates how they provide a unique wake up call about our gradual, and not so gradual, slide towards authoritarian policing. From the politicisation of policing to 'zero tolerance', from violent suppression of protest to the rise of the surveillance state, I Am The Law examines how a comic book warned us about the chilling endgame of today's 'law and order' politics.

The spectacular development of early consumer society in Britain, France and the United States had a profound impact on constructions of femininity and masculinity, and commercial and cultural values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on novels by Theodore Dreiser, George Gissing and Emile Zola, Just Looking, first published in 1985, addresses itself to a central paradox of the period: the perceived antithesis of the terms "commerce" and "culture" which emerged at a time which saw the actual drawing together of commercial and cultural practices.

Drawing on structural, psychoanalytic and Marxist-feminist theory, Rachel Bowlby retrieves a relatively neglected literary area for contemporary political and theoretical concerns, re-establishing the naturalist novel as a rich source for feminists, literary theorists and cultural historians.

On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer. As well as setting the novelist's work in the context of Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite, energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and the mundane.

Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of Kafka, Checkov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with Roth's comic brashness and bravura.

In this new book, Noga Applebaum surveys science fiction novels published for children and young adults from 1980 to the present, exposing the anti-technological bias existing within a genre often associated with the celebration of technology. Applebaum argues that perceptions of technology as a corrupting force, particularly in relation to its use by young people, are a manifestation of the enduring allure of the myth of childhood innocence and result in young-adult fiction that endorses a technophobic agenda. This agenda is a form of resistance to the changing face of childhood and technology's contribution to this change. Further, Applebaum contends that technophobic literature disempowers its young readers by implying that the technologies of the future are inherently dangerous, while it neglects to acknowledge children's complex, yet pleasurable, interactions with technology today. The study looks at works by well-known authors including M.T. Anderson, Monica Hughes, Lois Lowry, Garth Nix, and Philip Reeve, and explores topics such as ecology, cloning, the impact of technology on narrative structure, and the adult-child hierarchy. While focusing on the popular genre of science fiction as a useful case study, Applebaum demonstrates that negative attitudes toward technology exist within children's literature in general, making the book of considerable interest to scholars of both science fiction and children's literature.

This study of Saul Bellow, initially published in 1982, looks at this Nobel Prize-winning author as a leading figure in the development of contemporary fiction, one whose work has, however, been challenged by more experimental, 'post-modern' developments in the novel.

Bradbury draws attention to Bellow's comedy, his sense of contemporary history and its stresses and anxieties, his attempt to sustain an adequate concept of the individual and the power of the imagination in an age of overwhelming concepts and notions of 'death of the subject'. Above all, emphasis is placed on Bellow's contemporaneity and significance, his role in the contemporary possibilities of the novel.

This is a reissue of a critical introduction to the novels of Virginia Woolf, first published in 1977. It makes close, illuminating readings of her nine novels, placing Woolf in her literary context and providing an accessible, clear and valuable guide for students starting out on a study of Woolf as a novelist, and for general readers seeking a fresh, helpful entry-point to the challenge of reading Woolf. Twenty years later, Hermione Lee wrote a prize-winning and acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf: this critical study represented an early stage in this biographer-critic 's life-long interest and involvement with Woolf 's life and work.

The historical novel is an enduringly popular genre that raises crucial questions about key literary concepts, fact and fiction, identity, history, reading, and writing. In this comprehensive, focused guide, Jerome de Groot offers an accessible introduction to the genre and critical debates that surround it, including:

• the development of the historical novel from early eighteenth-century works through to postmodern and contemporary historical fiction
• different genres, such as sensational or ?low? fiction, crime novels, literary works, counterfactual writing and related issues of audience, value, and authenticity
• the many functions of historical fiction, particularly the challenges it poses to accepted histories and postmodern questioning of ?grand narratives?
• the relationship of the historical novel to the wider cultural sphere with reference to historical theory, the internet, television, and film
• key theoretical concepts such as the authentic fallacy, postcolonialism, Marxism, queer and feminist reading.

Drawing on a wide range of examples from across the centuries and around the globe The Historical Novel is essential reading for students exploring the interface of history and fiction.

This is the first English translation of Le Roman social en Angleterre by Louis Cazamian, which is widely recognized as the classic survey of Victorian social fiction.

Starting from the eighteenth century, Cazamian traces the ways in which rationalism and romanticism intertwined and competed, particularly in relation to radical political philosophy. He shows how industrialization polarized England, setting the industrial bourgeoisie in the van of progress in the first decades of the nineteenth century, until their political and economic triumph stirred up a passionate reaction against them. This reaction propelled novelists such as Charles Dickens who lies at the centre of his discussion.

For this translation Martin Fido has provided a substantial foreword, and has revised and completed the bibliographical references and corrected the footnotes to assist the present-day reader.

This book describes Charles Dickens as an ordinary man who by being perfectly tuned to the public taste developed into a master of his art. The clue to this paradox lies, in the author 's opinion, in Dickens obsession with such topics as money, crowds and prisons which touch the life of everyone. From the deep fears of his childhood they became the main food for his imagination. As his creative mind worried over them, so his art developed. This process provided the driving force behind his work, and is at the root of his greatness as an artist.

The main concern of this volume is Dickens? role as "entertainer." It examines the results of this role: Dickens? important contribution to the techniques of comedy and irony in prose. The social commentary and criticism which arise from a primarily comic art is emphasized and exemplified. Other extracts are used to demonstrate more formal points of structure and prose technique.

In the introduction the Martin Fido discusses the changing levels of Dickens? literary and social reputation from the nineteenth century to the present day.

The essays in this volume examine questions such as Dickens symbolism, his political attitudes, his psychological tensions and his artistry. They are also concerned with aspects of Dickens which have been neglected in recent years, such as his handling of plot, his heroes and heroines, his journalism, his religious view and his philistinism.

This is the standard reference guide to the works of Charles Dickens. The material is arranged alphabetically, in dictionary style, and provides a quick means of reference to the plots of the novels and to all the characters and places mentioned in the novels. There are also useful explanatory notes on allusions and phrases.

What did Dickens mean to Dostoevsky, and what did the Russian writer owe to England's greatest entertainer? Many of Dickens? readers, including George Gissing and Edmund Wilson, have recognized that his achievement needs to be compared with Dostoevsky?s, and they have suspected, or assumed an influence. N M Lary's book shows what the literary influence really or probably was.

Although enjoyed my many as a masterpiece of Dickens comic writing, Martin Chuzzlewit has long been underrated by professional critics. This volume redresses the balance by devoting its attention to a full critical discussion of the novel and by including a full survey of the critical positions held in the past.

As well as discussing the themes of selfishness and hypocrisy, the history of the text is also explored, as is the complex relationship between Dickens and the United States which played a great part in the development of the novel and exerted considerable influence on it early reception.

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.