'A funny, frightening book that is also refreshingly bonkers' Guardian 'A brilliant writer...a great novelist' Richard and Judy Northern girl Harriet lives and works on a London estate which is a battleground between the white working class plus the immigrants versus the newly arrived middle class focaccia-eaters. Unhappy and overweight, she hires a personal trainer who lures her into joining the martial arts class he runs. There she learns the regime of the completely phoney martial arts master and embarks on a spiritual and literal journey which leads her to a hotel opposite the railway station at Crewe, the Weeping Women Hotel. 'If you like your weirdness with warmth and wit, Sayle's your man' Metro
Kicking off a new mystery series, set in the roaring 1920s, this installment introduces Bedford Green, a man-about-town who rubs elbows with famous personalities of the Jazz Age, dabbles in art dealing--and solves a few crimes. With help from Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald, Green and his assistant, Sloane, search for a girl who vanished in Paris.
The six European port cities known as the Cities on the Edge Liverpool, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Marseilles and Naples - share a history of dissent, diversity and economic reinvention. Once gateways to the world, bringing wealth and innovation to their respective nations, they've long been maligned and misunderstood by their compatriots, preferring instead to look outwards, towards the sea - to the possibilities of change, of travel and of rebirth. Featuring short stories by twelve acclaimed writers from the Cities on the Edge, ReBerth explores these landscapes of change - the social tensions, the scars of war and economic decline, the attempts at regeneration, and the startling and sometimes unsavoury secrets of how these cities inhabitants thrive and survive. ...In Gdansk, a German exile returns to his childhood home in search of a valuable coin collection left behind during World War II... ...In Naples, a young woman desperate to escape the slums by any means necessary rises from street kid, to Camorra moll, to political powerbroker... ...In Liverpool, a young Spanish footballer arrives to fulfil his dream of playing in the Premiership. But in the backstreets of Anfield he meets a local resident with a very different perspective on the beautiful game ...
'Fascinating and hugely entertaining' Daily Telegraph 'It's not like other comedians' memoirs. It's funny' Guardian THE SAYLES MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN THE ONLY JEWISH ATHEIST COMMUNIST FAMILY IN LIVERPOOL, BUT ALEXEI KNEW FROM AN EARLY AGE THAT THEY WERE ONE OF THE MORE ECCENTRIC. Born on the day egg rationing came to an end, Alexei was the only child of Joe, an affable trade unionist who led the family on railway expeditions across eastern Europe, and Molly, a hot-tempered red-head who terrified teachers and insisted Alexei see the Red Army Choir instead of the Beatles. Perceptive and hilarious, this is a portrait of a family, a city, a country and a continent going through enormous changes. 'Sayle's book has charm and substance, both as memoir and history' Times Literary Supplement
"Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends Show Them a Good Time tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity's girlfriend, the widower's second wife, the lecherous professor's student, the corporate employee. But these women are too intelligent, too ferociously mordant and painfully funny to remain in their places. In "Not the End Yet,” Flattery probes the hilarious and wrenching ambivalence of Internet dating as the apocalypse nears; in "Sweet Talk,” the mysterious disappearance of local women sets the scene for a young girl to confront the dangerous uncertainties of her own sexuality; in "Abortion, A Love Story,” two college students in a dystopian campus reconfigure the perilous stories of their bodies in a fraught academic culture to offer a subversive play that takes over their own offstage lives. Together, the stories in Show Them a Good Time provide a riveting, hilarious introduction to one of today's most original young writers.
This collection of twelve new essays examines some of what Jane Austen has become in the two hundred years since her death. Some of the chapters explore adaptations or repurposings of her work while others trace her influence on a surprising variety of different kinds of writing, sometimes even when there is no announced or obvious debt to her. In so doing they also inevitably shed light on Austen herself. Austen is often considered romantic and not often considered political, but both those perceptions are challenged her, as is the idea that she is primarily a writer for and about women. Her books are comic and ironic, but they have been reworked and drawn upon in very different genres and styles. Collectively these essays testify to the extraordinary versatility and resonance of Austen’s books.
A gun moll with a knack for disappearing flees from Prohibition-era Harlem to Portland's Paragon Hotel. The year is 1921, and "Nobody" Alice James has just arrived in Oregon with a bullet wound, a lifetime's experience battling the New York Mafia, and fifty thousand dollars in illicit cash. She befriends Max, a black Pullman porter who reminds her achingly of home and who saves Alice by leading her to the Paragon Hotel. But her unlikely sanctuary turns out to be an all-black hotel in a Jim Crow city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a white woman on the premises. As she meets the churlish Dr. Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and the club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine, she understands their dread. The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland in fearful numbers--burning crosses, electing officials, infiltrating newspapers, and brutalizing blacks. And only Alice and her new Paragon "family" are searching for a missing mulatto child who has mysteriously vanished into the woods. To untangle the web of lies and misdeeds around her, Alice will have to answer for her own past, too. A richly imagined novel starring two indomitable heroines, The Paragon Hotel at once plumbs the darkest parts of America's past and the most redemptive facets of humanity. From international-bestselling, multi-award-nominated writer Lyndsay Faye, it's a masterwork of historical suspense.
In 1859, at the largest recorded slave auction in American history, over 400 men, women, and children were sold by the Butler Plantation estates. This book is one of the first to analyze the operation of this auction and trace the lives of slaves before, during, and after their sale. Immersing herself in the personal papers of the Butlers, accounts from journalists that witnessed the auction, genealogical records, and oral histories, Anne C. Bailey weaves together a narrative that brings the auction to life. Demonstrating the resilience of African American families, she includes interviews from the living descendants of slaves sold on the auction block, showing how the memories of slavery have shaped people's lives today. Using the auction as the focal point, The Weeping Time is a compelling and nuanced narrative of one of the most pivotal eras in American history, and how its legacy persists today.
"The Invention of Martial Arts examines the media history of what we now call 'martial arts' and argues that martial arts is a cultural construction that was born in film, TV and other media. It argues that 'martial arts' exploded into popular consciousness entirely thanks to the work of media. Of course, the book does not deny the existence of real, material histories and non-media dimensions in martial arts practices. But it thoroughly recasts the status of such histories, combining recent myth-busting findings in historical martial arts research with important insights into the discontinuous character of history, the widespread 'invention of tradition', the orientalism and imagined geographies that animate many ideas about history, and the frequent manipulation of history for reasons of status, cultural capital, private or public power, politics, and/or financial gain. In doing so, The Invention of Martial Arts argues for the primacy of media representation as key player in the emergence and spread of martial arts. This argument overturns the dominant belief that 'real practices' are primary, while representations are secondary. The book makes its case via historical analysis of the British media history of such Eastern and Western martial arts as Bartitsu, jujutsu, judo, karate, tai chi and MMA across a range of media, from newspapers, comics and books to cartoon, film and TV series, as well as television adverts and music videos, focusing on key but often overlooked texts such as adverts for 'Hai Karate', the 1970s disco hit 'Kung Fu Fighting', and many other mainstream and marginal media texts"--
