Hey Yeah Right Get a Life


Book Description

In this collection of short stories, Helen Simpson explores the multiplicity and variety of London life through the experiences of women at work, at home and on holiday.




Cockfosters


Book Description

A wickedly wry, tender new collection from one of our finest internationally acclaimed short story writers. Nine virtuoso stories that take up the preoccupations and fixations of time's passing and of middle age and that take us from today's London and Berlin to the wild west of the USA and the wilder shores of Mother Russia; stories finely balanced between devastation and optimism. In the title story, long-ago school pals take the London Underground to the end of the Piccadilly line--Cockfosters Station--to retrieve a lost pair of newly prescribed bifocals ("The worst thing about needing glasses is the bumbling," says Julie. "I've turned into a bumbler overnight. Me! I run marathons!"); each station stop prompting reflections on their shared past, present, and possible futures . . . In "Erewhon," a gender-role flip: after having sex with his wife, who has turned over and instantly fallen asleep, a man lies awake fretting about his body shape, his dissatisfaction with sex, his children, his role in the marriage . . . In "Kythera," lemon drizzle cake is a mother's ritual preparation for her (now grown) daughter's birthday as she conjures up memories of all the birthday cakes she has made for her, each one more poignant than the last; this new cake becoming a memento mori, an act of love, and a symbol of transformation ... And in "Berlin," a fiftysomething couple on a "Ring package" to Germany spend four evenings watching Wagner's epic, recalling their life together, reckoning with the husband's infidelity, the wife noting the similarity between their marriage and the Ring Cycle itself: "I'm glad I stuck it out but I'd never want to sit through it again."




Teaching the Short Story


Book Description

The short story is moving from relative neglect to a central position in the curriculum; as a teaching tool, it offers students a route into many complex areas, including critical theory, gender studies, postcolonialism and genre. This book offers a practical guide to the short story in the classroom, covering all these fields and more.




Supermarket


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The stunning debut novel from one of the most creative artists of our generation, Bobby Hall, a.k.a. Logic. “Bobby Hall has crafted a mind-bending first novel, with prose that is just as fierce and moving as his lyrics. Supermarket is like Naked Lunch meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—if they met at Fight Club.”—Ernest Cline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ready Player One Flynn is stuck—depressed, recently dumped, and living at his mom’s house. The supermarket was supposed to change all that. An ordinary job and a steady check. Work isn’t work when it’s saving you from yourself. But things aren’t quite as they seem in these aisles. Arriving to work one day to a crime scene, Flynn’s world collapses as the secrets of his tortured mind are revealed. And Flynn doesn’t want to go looking for answers at the supermarket. Because something there seems to be looking for him. A darkly funny psychological thriller, Supermarket is a gripping exploration into madness and creativity. Who knew you could find sex, drugs, and murder all in aisle nine?




Love Lives


Book Description

The story of how women's lives, loves, and dreams have been re-shaped since 1950, the year of Walt Disney's Cinderella and a time when teenage girls dreamed of marriage, Mr Right, and happy endings... Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control - and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale. This book is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013 - a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women?




Constructing Coherence in the British Short Story Cycle


Book Description

The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form’s multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre’s manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy.




On the move


Book Description

This volume brings together a selection of the papers and round tables delivered at the 39th AEDEAN Conference, held at the University of Deusto in November 2015. The essays in On the Move: Glancing Backwards to Build a Future in English Studies often begin with typically-academic gestures such as retrieving a classic text and finding new ways of studying its genre or characterization; or remarking how certain ungrammatical constructions have gone frequently unnoticed —even in well-known texts— for various reasons; or entangling oneself in contentions about the adequacy of dissecting a literary text or linguistic problem by using innovative analytical tools. In all cases, though, there is the intention of putting forth certain views and notions that will help future scholars to deal in a better light with the dilemmas regularly encountered in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. The book opens with three essays by professors Bartholomae, Pullum and Río, who demonstrate not only their mastery in their respective subjects but also their ability to tailor their contents to multifarious audiences. The next two sections represent the main body of the e-book, with nearly forty contributions on both literature and cultural studies (Part II) and language and linguistics (Part III). These short academic pieces are a representative showcase of the research being done lately in the different areas of expertise. The last section of the volume gathers together the results of four research projects dealing with such engaging topics as postcolonial crime fiction or forgotten texts by Anglo writers about the Spanish Civil War. It is hard to think of any potential reader schooled in English Studies who will not find something suitable to their interests and tastes in this volume.




British Women Short Story Writers


Book Description

Essays tracing the evolving relationship between British women writers and the short story genre from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.




The Broadview Anthology of Short Fiction - Third Edition


Book Description

This selection of 45 stories, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Shaun Tan, shows the range of short fiction in the past 150 years. This third edition includes more works from the past 20 years and a greater representation of American authors; new to this edition are works by Katherine Anne Porter, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Edward P. Jones, Gish Jen, and George Saunders, among others. Stories are organized chronologically, annotated, and prefaced by engaging short introductions. Also included is a glossary of basic critical terms.




The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story


Book Description

A comprehensive reference to short fiction from Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth. With approximately 450 entries, this A-to-Z guide explores the literary contributions of such writers as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Martin Amis, and others.




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