Category: Books Reading

By Andrew Stott

What's comedy? Andrew Stott tackles this query via an research of comedian varieties, theories and methods, tracing the old definitions of comedy from Aristotle to Chris Morris's Brass Eye through Wilde and Hancock. instead of trying to produce a totalising definition of 'the comic', this quantity specializes in the importance of comedian 'events' via examine of varied theoretical methodologies, together with deconstruction, psychoanalysis and gender idea, and gives case stories of a few subject matters, starting from the drag act to the simplicity of slipping on a banana dermis.

By Carolyn Hart

Whilst secret book shop proprietor Annie Laurance is invited to coach "The 3 nice women of the secret" type at Chastain neighborhood university, the someday sleuth discovers that each one isn't strictly educational in Chastain's hallowed halls of studying. And whilst a surprising scandal within the institution newspaper erupts in a suicide and violent deaths, Professor Laurance enlists the abilities of her new hubby, deepest eye Max Darling, and dons her pondering cap to probe intrigue and vengeance between Chastain's faculty.A harmful ThingMax and Annie, with doubtful support from 3 in their personal nice women of the secret -- Annie's pixilated partner's mother, a batty neighborhood dowager, and a Christie crime enthusiast -- research that nearly each person on the college had capability, reason, and entry to the homicide guns. From the secretly boozing professor of ads to the muscle-bound campus cad who barters passing grades for a bit extracurricular job, someone at the college is a potential killer -- ready to strike back!

By Noel Perrin

Certainly one of America's best essayists writes approximately forty literary masterpieces which were wrongfully forgotten or have been overlooked within the first position.

By Jane Rogers, Hermione Lee, Mike Harris, Douglas Houston

Masking each person from Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain to Don De Lillo and Lorrie Moore, sturdy Fiction consultant deals an informative reference paintings on novelists and their works, with an emphasis of twentieth-century fiction and well known classics, yet with considerable insurance of significant novelists of the prior. The consultant takes us on a stimulating travel of the literary panorama. listed below are multiple thousand alphabetically prepared biographies of vital novelists, starting from Chinua Achebe to Emile Zola. There are profiles of major modern writers, comparable to Ann Beattie, Thomas Pynchon, Jane Smiley, Martin Amis, Amy Tan, Peter Carey, V.S. Naipaul, and Harold Brodkey. The entries supply a style of every writer's paintings, suggest which in their books to learn, and contain feedback for comparable interpreting, prime you to different writers whose paintings should be both similar or an enticing distinction. both very important, the advisor comprises 34 essays that light up genres comparable to Crime, experience, Romance, and Magic Realism, or provide fascinating seems to be on the nationwide literatures of such areas as Australia, India, and the Caribbean. each one access is a private essay by means of a professional within the box and contains their best twelve urged titles. strong Fiction consultant is an ideal highway map for everybody exploring the highways and byways of fiction.

By Jane Mace

This name on hand in publication structure. click on right here for extra information.Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

By Ruben Quintero

This number of twenty-nine unique essays, surveys satire from its emergence in Western literature to the current.

• Tracks satire from its first appearances within the prophetic books of the outdated testomony throughout the Renaissance and the English culture in satire to Michael Moore’s satirical motion picture Fahrenheit September 11 .
• Highlights the real impact of the Bible within the literary and cultural improvement of Western satire.
• Focused ordinarily on significant classical and ecu impacts on and works of English satire, but additionally explores the advanced and fertile cultural cross-semination in the culture of literary satire.

By Christopher Coker

Considering Achilles first stormed into our mind's eye, literature has brought its readers to really unforgettable martial characters. In males at battle, Christopher Coker discusses probably the most recognized of those fictional creations and their influence on our realizing of battle and masculinity. Grouped into 5 archetypes-warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims-these characters variety throughout 3000 years of historical past, via epic poems, the fashionable novel and one of many 20th century's most renowned movie scripts.

Great authors like Homer and Tolstoy express us points of truth invisible other than via a literary lens, whereas fictional characters comparable to Achilles and Falstaff, Robert Jordan and Jack Aubrey, aren't simply greater than existence; they're life's largeness-and the reason is, we search them out. even supposing the Greeks knew that the enthusiasts, other halves and moms of squaddies are the executive sufferers of conflict, for the opponents, battle is a masculine pursuit. every one of Coker's chapters explores what fiction tells us approximately war's attract younger males and how it makes- and breaks-them. The existential allure of battle too is likely to be most sensible conveyed in fictional money owed, and those too are scrutinized through the writer.

By Roy Thomas [Adapted from the Epic Poem by Homer], Miguel Angel Sepulveda

The 2 maximum armies of the traditional world-greek and trojan-meet at the plains of troy...with the achingly appealing helen because the prize! And as this battle-to-the-end-them-all rages, the gods themselves input the fray!

By Keith Houston

“Everybody who has ever learn a booklet will enjoy the method Keith Houston explores the main strong item of our time. and everyone who has learn it is going to agree that studies of the book’s loss of life were significantly exaggerated.”―Erik Spiekermann, typographer

We could love books, yet can we understand what lies at the back of them? In The Book, Keith Houston unearths that the paper, ink, thread, glue, and board from which a e-book is made inform as wealthy a narrative because the phrases on its pages―of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity, and insanity. In an invitingly tactile background of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the improvement of writing, printing, the paintings of illustrations, and binding to teach how we have now moved from cuneiform pills and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of at the present time. guaranteed to pride booklet enthusiasts of all stripes with its lush, full-color illustrations, The Book supplies us the momentous and dazzling heritage at the back of humanity’s such a lot important―and universal―information technology.

seventy one colour illustrations

By Deborah O'Keefe

Readers in Wonderland levels from William Steig's small photograph books to J. R. R. Tolkien's epic sequence; from utopias like L. Frank Baum's ounces to dystopias like Virginia Hamilton's Dustland; from much less identified works like Patricia Wrightson's to the phenomenon that's J. okay. Rowling's Harry Potter.