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Jo Walton is an award-winning author of, inveterate reader of, and chronic re-reader of science fiction and fantasy books. What Makes This Book So Great? is a selection of the best of her musings about her prodigious reading habit. Jo Walton’s many subjects range from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. Among them, the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by ‘mainstream’; the under-appreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field’s many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers.
The short story is one of the most difficult types of prose to write and one of the most pleasurable to read. From Boccaccio's Decameron to The Collected Stories ofReynolds Price, Charles May gives us an understanding of the history and structure of this demanding form of fiction. Beginning with a general history of the genre, he moves on to focus on the nineteenth-century when the modern short story began to come into focus. From there he moves on to later nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century formalism and finally to the modern renaissance of the form that shows no signs of abating. A chronology of significant events, works and figures from the genre's history, notes and references and an extensive bibliographic essay with recommended reading round out the volume.
"In this collection of essays, Johnson writes of the profound connection between Buddhism and creativity, and of the role of Eastern philosophy in the quest for a free and thoughtful life." "He looks at basic Buddhist principles and practices, demonstrating how Buddhism is both the most revolutionary and most civilized of possible human choices. He discusses fundamental Buddhist practices such as the Eightfold Path, Taming the Mind, and Sangha and illuminates their place in the American Civil Rights movement."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Throughout this text, Valerie Shaw addresses two key questions: 'What are the special satisfactions afforded by reading short stories?' and 'How are these satisfactions derived from each story's literary techniques and narrative strategies?'. She then attempts to answer these questions by drawing on stories from different periods and countries - by authors who were also great novelists, like Henry James, Flaubert, Kafka and D.H. Lawrence; by authors who specifically dedicated themselves to the art of the short story, like Kipling, Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield; by contemporary practitioners like Angela Carter and Jorge Luis Borges; and by unfairly neglected writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Joel Chandler Harris.
An annotated and copiously illustrated edition of the 24 short stories published between 1914 and 1919 by Ring Lardner, which include the stories collected later and known as "You know me, Al."
This is a critical study of Friel's entire oeuvre, relating Friel's work to the problems of subjectivity, representation, history and the body, with a view to offering some placement of Friel in relation to both postmodernism and traditional humanism. Central to this study is Friel's concept of 'translation', whereby he offers us the tension of shaping the new through a 'translation' or reformulation of the old.
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JANE AUSTEN’S HEROES is a sociological study of her half a dozen novels from what was most difficult to master life’s small measures, till her disc became her orb. The book deals with a few important questions whether Austen’s men, heroes and other male characters are protagonists of what she stood for. Does she create fully rounded characterisations of men or make them tangential, partisan studies? Does Austen fulfil the Freudian new scientific concept of id which contains everything that is inherited? Is she influenced by the revolutionary implications of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women†? Is she a Marxist Feminist or a Remorseless realist in terms of Lukacs true great realism or an incurable Romantic? The book is a meticulous, useful and a thorough study of Austen and her times.