This globe-spanning history of sewing and embroidery, culture and protest, is “an astonishing feat . . . richly textured and moving” (The Sunday Times, UK). In 1970s Argentina, mothers marched in headscarves embroidered with the names of their “disappeared” children. In Tudor, England, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was under house arrest, her needlework carried her messages to the outside world. From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework. Clare Hunter, master of the craft, threads her own narrative as she takes us over centuries and across continents—from medieval France to contemporary Mexico and the United States, and from a POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland—to celebrate the universal beauty and power of sewing.
A revised and updated edition of a popular classic primer shares comprehensive guidelines for beginning and experienced knitters that demonstrate how to approach a full range of techniques, incorporating into the new edition the author's broadened insights from the past 25 years.
Contains instruction for creating twenty knitted pieces inspired by different decades, from the 1820s to the early twenty-first century, including a baby blanket, a floor rug, throw pillows, and a quilt.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER Certain lives are at once so exceptional, and yet so in step with their historical moments, that they illuminate cultural forces far beyond the scope of a single person. Such is the case with Coco Chanel, whose life offers one of the most fascinating tales of the twentieth century—throwing into dramatic relief an era of war, fashion, ardent nationalism, and earth-shaking change—here brilliantly treated, for the first time, with wide-ranging and incisive historical scrutiny. Coco Chanel transformed forever the way women dressed. Her influence remains so pervasive that to this day we can see her afterimage a dozen times while just walking down a single street: in all the little black dresses, flat shoes, costume jewelry, cardigan sweaters, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses on women of every age and background. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume is sold every three seconds. Arguably, no other individual has had a deeper impact on the visual aesthetic of the world. But how did a poor orphan become a global icon of both luxury and everyday style? How did she develop such vast, undying influence? And what does our ongoing love of all things Chanel tell us about ourselves? These are the mysteries that Rhonda K. Garelick unravels in Mademoiselle. Raised in rural poverty and orphaned early, the young Chanel supported herself as best she could. Then, as an uneducated nineteen-year-old café singer, she attracted the attention of a wealthy and powerful admirer and parlayed his support into her own hat design business. For the rest of Chanel’s life, the professional, personal, and political were interwoven; her lovers included diplomat Boy Capel; composer Igor Stravinsky; Romanov heir Grand Duke Dmitri; Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster; poet Pierre Reverdy; a Nazi officer; and several women as well. For all that, she was profoundly alone, her romantic life relentlessly plagued by abandonment and tragedy. Chanel’s ambitions and accomplishments were unparalleled. Her hat shop evolved into a clothing empire. She became a noted theatrical and film costume designer, collaborating with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Luchino Visconti. The genius of Coco Chanel, Garelick shows, lay in the way she absorbed the zeitgeist, reflecting it back to the world in her designs and in what Garelick calls “wearable personality”—the irresistible and contagious style infused with both world history and Chanel’s nearly unbelievable life saga. By age forty, Chanel had become a multimillionaire and a household name, and her Chanel Corporation is still the highest-earning privately owned luxury goods manufacturer in the world. In Mademoiselle, Garelick delivers the most probing, well-researched, and insightful biography to date on this seemingly familiar but endlessly surprising figure—a work that is truly both a heady intellectual study and a literary page-turner. Praise for Mademoiselle “A detailed, wry and nuanced portrait of a complicated woman that leaves the reader in a state of utterly satisfying confusion—blissfully mesmerized and confounded by the reality of the human spirit.”—The Washington Post “Writing an exhaustive biography of Chanel is a challenge comparable to racing a four-horse chariot. . . . This makes the assured confidence with which Garelick tells her story all the more remarkable.”—The New York Review of Books “Broadly focused and beautifully written.”—The Wall Street Journal
From the author of STILL LIFE, TIN MAN and WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT. 'Will stand the test of time' Irish Examiner 'Beautiful prose that ebbs and flows' Independent 'A Year of Marvellous Ways is like Dylan Thomas given a sexy rewrite by Angela Carter' Patrick Gale This is a story about Marvellous Ways, an eighty-nine-year-old woman who lives alone in a remote Cornish creek, spending her days sitting by the river, peering through a telescope. And it's about Francis Drake, a young soldier who washes up in her creek, shattered by war and broken-hearted. It's about the magic in everyday life and the lure of the sea, the healing powers of storytelling and sloe gin, love and death, and how we carry on when grief comes snapping at our heels.
The worldwide phenomenon from the bestselling author of The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End, A Column of Fire, and The Evening and the Morning His code name was “The Needle.” He was a German aristocrat of extraordinary intelligence—a master spy with a legacy of violence in his blood, and the object of the most desperate manhunt in history. . . . But his fate lay in the hands of a young and vulnerable English woman, whose loyalty, if swayed, would assure his freedom—and win the war for the Nazis. . . .
This is not simply a triumph of style; it is both a reflection on a time of bloodshed and a raw vision of human misery. Guillermo Saccomanno, winner of the Argentine National Literature Prize. This man knows. He knows about guns, knows about women...
The sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, set shortly after the events in the first book A fantastical tale of endless imagination, this story follows the adventures of a young boy named Tip, who, for as long as he can remember has been under the guardianship of a witch named Mombi in the Land of Oz. One night he plans his escape to the Emerald City, stealing Mombi's powder of life. Along the way he meets with our old friends the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman as well as making some new ones such as Jack Pumpkinhead, the Wooden Sawhorse, the Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug, and the amazing Gump. Can they escape Mombi and make it to the Emerald City? This story is as exciting and endearing today as it was when first published more than 80 years ago.
In Concert Performance has earned Nikolai Dezhnev praise and international success that is unrivaled by any other contemporary Russian writer. A bestseller in Russia, it brings us, with wit and insight, into Russia's distressful past and perhaps equally distressful present, while telling a brilliant love story that surpasses time and space. Lukary is a fallen angel sent back to earth to atone for his past. In the form of a domovoi, a good domestic spirit of Russian folklore, he is sent to inhabit the apartment of an old Bolshevik woman, who dies almost immediately. At the old woman's funeral, in the disguise of a dashing middle-aged gentleman, he encounters her niece, Anna, and falls madly in love with her, interrupting the successful course of his penance. Forced to choose between his journey to higher lucidity and earthly love, he chooses the latter. Fortunately for Lukary, Anna and her husband--a conceited, no-nonsense Russian physicist--move into the deceased aunt's former home, where Lukary proceeds to wreak supernatural havoc upon their daily lives in his effort to simultaneously woo Anna and badger her into ending her marriage. Unfortunately for Lukary, a demon sent to watch over him on earth has begun to conspire against him with Anna's husband. And soon the havoc spreads far beyond the confines of a simple Moscow apartment. In Concert Performance travels from contemporary Moscow to the times of the Spanish Inquisition and back again, hitting more than a few points in between. It is a fantastic tale, a truly unique novel that is part romantic fantasy, part meditation on love and time, and part historical satire, echoing the mixture of genres and stylistic sophistication of its only worthy comparison, Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece The Master and Margarita.
