Murder never takes a holiday...or so Loon Lake learns one wintry Thanksgiving Day. Chief of Police Lew Ferris, short-handed thanks to an AWOL coroner, never even gets the turkey stuffed before the bodies start to surface. By the end of the day, credit card theft and dysfunctional families have so muddied the waters that not even expert tracker and dedicated fishing guide Ray Pradt can hope to fish the final day of muskie season. And while retired dentist Doc Osborne had counted on sitting by the fire with Lew (out of uniform) and planning a fly-fishing trip to Wyoming, the unexpected arrival of Gina Palmer, former investigative reporter turned forensics database expert, ramps up the action with her pursuit of a Canadian link to the theft of merchandise from stores across the upper Midwest. Dead Hot Shot, ninth in the Loon Lake Mystery series, is a heady mix of murder, mayhem, and fishing in the northwoods of Wisconsin.
A revelatory work that examines the intricate relationship between history and literature, truth and fiction—with some surprising conclusions. Focusing on three literary masterpieces—Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901)—Peter Gay, a leading cultural historian, demonstrates that there is more than one way to read a novel. Typically, readers believe that fiction, especially the Realist novels that dominated Western culture for most of the nineteenth century and beyond, is based on historical truth and that great novels possess a documentary value. That trust, Gay brilliantly shows, is misplaced; novels take their own path to reality. Using Dickens, Flaubert, and Mann as his examples, Gay explores their world, their craftsmanship, and their minds. In the process, he discovers that all three share one overriding quality: a resentment and rage against the society that sustains the novel itself. Using their stylish writing as a form of revenge, they deal out savage reprisals, which have become part of our Western literary canon. A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of 2002.
George Orwell once said of Dickensâe(tm) work: âeoeIt is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world.âe In this book, J. Hillis Miller attempts to identify this âeoeworld,âe to show how a single view of life pervades every novel that Dickens wrote, and to trace the development of this view throughout the chronological span of Dickensâe(tm) career. There are full critical analyses of six of the novelsâe"Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friendâe"and shorter discussions of many of the others. Each novel has been viewed as the transformation of the real world of Dickensâe(tm) experience into an imaginary world with certain special qualities of its own. Certain elements persist through all the novels, the most important of which are the general situation of the hero at the beginning of the story and the general nature of the world in which he lives. Each of Dickensâe(tm) heroes begins his life cut off from other people, in a world which seems menacing and unfriendly and, on the social side, composed of inexplicable rituals and mysterious conventions; each lives, like Paul Dombey, âeoewith an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange.âe The heroes then move through successive adventures in an attempt to understand the world, to integrate themselves into it, and thus to find their true identity. Initially creatures of poverty and indigence, those characters reach out for something which transcends the material world and the self, something other than human, which will support and maintain the self without engulfing it. Within the totality of Dickens' novels this problemâe"the search for selfhoodâe"is stated and restated, until, in the later novels, the answer is found to line in a rejections of the past, the given, and the exterior, and a reorientation toward the future and the free human spirit itself as the only true sources of value. With a real understating and sympathy for his subject, Miller manages to transport us into the midst of Dickensâe(tm) âeoeworldâe and to bring alive for us the whole strange and wonderful tribe that people his novels. This is an enlightening, well-written, enjoyable book for anyone who has ever had an interest in Dickens and his work.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.
Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars—Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy—suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian.
The Chimes A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, a short novel by Charles Dickens, was written and published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol. It is the second in his series of Christmas books five short books with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840's.
This volume collects for the first time all of Charles Dickens' extant plans and notes for his novels. Dickens wrote his novels in segments during the course of serial publication. Beginning with Dombey and Son, the sixth novel, he wrote out plans for each segment as he went along, sketching future developments, querying himself about options, noting motifs, establishing recurrent images, working out chronologies, experimenting with names, and, in general, reminding himself of what he had done and what he should do next. Some notes survive from before Dombey and those for a few novels after that are incomplete or abbreviated, but for the most part the plan from Dombey on are full and complete. Each sheet of these notes is reproduced here in actual-size photographic facsimile and is transcribed on the facing page in typographic facsimile, a format that preserves Dickens' holographic nuances and at the same time allows for the instant decipherment of his often difficult hand. Included are his plans for The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood. The volume also contains thirty-three full-page illustrations and a full-color frontispiece. Harry Stone, an internationally recognized Dickens scholar, provides the reader with a full account of Dickens' methods of planning and working. In a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes, he uses Dickens' written plans to illuminate the thought and technique of the novels. He examines creative concerns, such as Dickens' process of naming and visualization, and technical matters, such as his use of various pen nibs, ink colors, and papers. By making fully available and comprehensible Dickens' own cache of in-process plans, possibilities, and alternatives for shaping his novels, Dickens' Working Notes offers unparalleled insights into the novelist's art and into the nature of the creative imagination.
A collection of the three best Charles Dickens novels: A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist. Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
No novelist is as intimately connected to a great city as Dickens is to London. The vibrancy of the city determined the shape and character of Dickens's work and he re-created London in his fiction. This book follows in his footsteps through the streets of the city, exploring the nature and architecture of Victorian London.
