The Wheel Spins is the novel about young and bright Iris Carr, who is on her way back to England after spending a holiday somewhere in the Balkans. After she is left alone by her friends, Iris catches the train for Trieste and finds company in Miss Froy, chatty elderly English woman. When she wakes up from a short nap, she discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever having seen the elderly lady, the young woman is on the verge of her nerves. She is helped by a young English traveler, and the two proceed to search the train for clues to the old woman's disappearance. Ethel Lina White (1876-1944) was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins, on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes, was based.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Quick conjures up a celluloid world that will be catnip to fans of that era evoking the sensation it was plucked straight from the Warner Bros. vault."--Entertainment Weekly The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Knew Too Much sweeps readers back to 1930s California--where the most dazzling of illusions can't hide the darkest secrets... After escaping from a private sanitarium, Adelaide Blake arrives in Burning Cove, California, desperate to start over. Working at an herbal tea shop puts her on the radar of those who frequent the seaside resort town: Hollywood movers and shakers always in need of hangover cures and tonics. One such customer is Jake Truett, a recently widowed businessman in town for a therapeutic rest. But unbeknownst to Adelaide, his exhaustion is just a cover. In Burning Cove, no one is who they seem. Behind facades of glamour and power hide drug dealers, gangsters, and grifters. Into this make-believe world comes psychic to the stars Madame Zolanda. Adelaide and Jake know better than to fall for her kind of con. But when the medium becomes a victim of her own dire prediction and is killed, they'll be drawn into a murky world of duplicity and misdirection. Neither Adelaide or Jake can predict that in the shadowy underground they'll find connections to the woman Adelaide used to be--and uncover the specter of a killer who's been real all along...
IT'S ONLY A MOVIE is as close to an autobiography by Alfred Hitchcock that you could ever have. Drawn from years of interviews with her subject, his friends and the actors who worked with him on such classics as THE BIRDS, PSYCHO and REAR VIEW WINDOW, Charlotte Chandler has created a rich, complex, affectionate and honest picture of the man and his milieu. This is Hitchcock in his own voice and through the eyes of those who knew him better than anyone could.
"The Lady Vanishes focuses on the representation of women in two key works of the Italian Renaissance: Baldassarre Castiglione's treatise Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) and Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric romance Orlando Furioso. Using feminist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytical arguments, the author investigates power relations and the construction of women's subjectivities in sixteenth-century debates on women and popular narratives." "The book examines the construction of women in different modes: woman as exemplary model and as ridiculed object; woman as narcissistically self-centered and as masochistically altruistic; woman as subject of desire and as object of desire; woman as ambiguously gendered and as radical spectacle of femininity. Because they offer an array of characters ranging from masculine women to feminized men and experiment with many forms of transgressive desire, Castiglione and Ariosto provide the perfect arena for problematizing the Italian Renaissance discourses on gender and sexual difference, on the production of pleasure and theories of selfhood, and on the body and modes of spectatorship." "The author argues that women are indispensable to Castiglione's conversation on the courtier and the court lady not because, as is often contended, he was sympathetic toward women, but because he found women useful for their central role in the male construction of men's own image. As for Ariosto, he resolves his narrative by subsuming women to culture and society, thus sealing out disorder. Although at times portraying female rebellion and resentment as empowering, in the end he punishes women displaying these qualities by banishing them from the text. In contrast, he celebrates the acquiescent woman in the figure of the lady warrior Bradamante, who, upon resuming a properly feminine role, becomes the progenitrix of a dynasty." "The Italian Renaissance discourse on women cast them in both assertive and docile roles. In the end, however, they were restrained or expelled; their society could envision a freer order for men but not for women."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In this traditional auteurist examination of Hitchcock's early work, author Maurice Yacowar considers Hitchcock's British films in chronological order, reading the composition of individual shots and scenes in each, and paying special attention to the films' verbal effects.
"This volume of critical essays meditates on the evidence and representation of the ghostly in the visual, literary, and cultural imagination of Britain, Europe, America, and Asia from the nineteenth century to the contemporary"--
Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority, reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this volume, an influential group of international scholars examines these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The result is a series of striking and original readings from different critical perspectives that display the centrality of these questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication, the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar texts.
"An exciting novel with magic and serial killers.... One of the hottest books coming out."—Hypable.com Fans of Marie Lu, Leigh Bardugo, and Kristin Cashore will be captivated by this stunning first book in a must-have new fantasy trilogy about a spy who can vanish at will and who discovers that monsters, mystery, and magic are also lurking—just out of sight. Julia has the unusual ability to be . . . unseen. Not invisible, exactly. Just beyond most people's senses. It's a dangerous trait in a city that has banned all forms of magic and drowns witches in public Cleansings. But it's a useful trait for a thief and a spy. And Julia has learned—crime pays. She's being paid very well indeed to infiltrate the grand house of Mrs. Och and report back on the odd characters who live there and the suspicious dealings that take place behind locked doors. But what Julia discovers shakes her to the core. She certainly never imagined that the traitor in the house would turn out to be . . . her. Murder, thievery, witchcraft, betrayal--Catherine Egan builds a dangerous world where her fierce and flawed heroine finds that even a girl who can vanish can't walk away from her own worst deeds.
In 1980, Lady Caroline Blackwood was commissioned by The Sunday Times to write an article on the aging Duchess of Windsor, who was said to be convalescing in her French mansion in the Bois de Boulogne. Yet what began as a curiosity was to become for Blackwood one of the most challenging experiences of her writing career, launching her into a battle of wits with the Duchess's formidable lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum. Maître Blum refused to let Blackwood near the Duchess, spinning elaborate excuses as to why she was unavailable and threatening anyone who dared suggest that she was in anything other than the best of health. Still, while Blum's machinations restricted Blackwood's ability to publish a frank interview, it only served to pique her interest in the bizarre relationship between the infamous Duchess—a woman who once inspired a king to abdicate his crown—and her eccentric, domineering gatekeeper. Sixteen years later, Blackwood turned her experiences into this riveting and excoriating modern classic about the frailties of old age, the foibles of society, and the dual-edged nature of celebrity.
