What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

Author: Daniel Pool

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 143914480X

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A “delightful reader’s companion” (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England. For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell “Tally Ho!” at a fox hunt, or how one landed in “debtor’s prison,” this book serves as an indispensable historical and literary resource. Author Daniel Pool provides countless intriguing details (did you know that the “plums” in Christmas plum pudding were actually raisins?) on the Church of England, sex, Parliament, dinner parties, country house visiting, and a host of other aspects of nineteenth-century English life—both “upstairs” and “downstairs. An illuminating glossary gives at a glance the meaning and significance of terms ranging from “ague” to “wainscoting,” the specifics of the currency system, and a lively host of other details and curiosities of the day.

Fancy Nancy: The Show Must Go On
Fancy Nancy: The Show Must Go On

Author: Jane O'Connor

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-06-23

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13: 0061703729

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Nancy and her partner for the talent show are very different. They don't have any of the same talents. How will they ever come up with an act?

Encyclopedia of the End
Encyclopedia of the End

Author: Deborah Noyes

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9780618823628

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How much do we truly know and understand about our own mortality? Enter Encyclopedia of the End, a compulsively readable and beautifully illustrated compendium that explores this most taboo of topics. Entries present a kaleidoscopic mix of topics from afterlife to assassination, forensic science to funeral foods, rigor mortis to reincarnation and more. With an appreciation for the profound and profane, Deborah Noyes helps lift the shroud of secrecy surrounding one of the most fascinating--and ordinary--phenomena of life. After all, who says that a book about death can't be lively?

The Lifespan of a Fact
The Lifespan of a Fact

Author: John D'Agata

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1529404630

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NOW A BROADWAY PLAY STARRING DANIEL RADCLIFFE 'Provocative, maddening and compulsively readable' Maggie Nelson In 2003, American essayist John D'Agata wrote a piece for Harper's about Las Vegas's alarmingly high suicide rate, after a sixteen-year-old boy had thrown himself from the top of the Stratosphere Tower. The article he delivered, 'What Happens There', was rejected by the magazine for inaccuracies. But it was soon picked up by another, who assigned it a fact checker: their fresh-faced intern, and recent Harvard graduate, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment, and beyond the essay's eventual publication in the magazine, was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D'Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction. This book includes an early draft of D'Agata's essay, along with D'Agata and Fingal's extensive discussion around the text. The Lifespan of a Fact is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between 'truth' and 'accuracy', and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. 'A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be' Lydia Davis