"Anyone that has a cat will recognise the truth of this tender account by The Gentle Author. "I was always disparaging of those who doted over their pets, as if this apparent sentimentality were an indicator of some character flaw. That changed when I bought a cat, just a couple of weeks after the death of my father." Filled with sentiment yet never sentimental, The Life & Times of Mr Pussy is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals."--Provided by publisher
A sparkling biography of the poet and artist Edward Lear by the award-winning biographer Jenny Uglow Edward Lear, the renowned English artist, musician, author, and poet, lived a vivid, fascinating life, but confessed, “I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.” He was a man in a hurry, “running about on railroads” from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India, and Palestine. He is still loved for his “nonsenses,” from startling, joyous limericks to great love poems like “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes, and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly to the age of Darwin and Dickens—he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters—his genius for the absurd and his dazzling wordplay make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today. Lear was a man of great simplicity and charm—children adored him—yet his humor masked epilepsy, depression, and loneliness. Jenny Uglow’s beautifully illustrated biography, full of the color of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships, and restless travels. Above all, Mr. Lear shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires—an exile of the heart.
The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.
"Required reading for every woman who longs to step into her power and live with pleasure and purpose." — Kris Carr, New York Times best-selling author Author, educator, and School of Womanly Arts founder Regena Thomashauer has been working with women for the past 25 years, and what began as just a few women in her living room has since grown into a global movement with thousands of graduates worldwide. In her New York Times bestseller Pussy: A Reclamation, she reveals what no one taught you about the source of your feminine power and how to use it. This power is the part of a woman that she has been taught to ignore, push down, and despise. Indeed, the word that most viscerally sums it up is "arguably the most powerful pejorative word in the English language." Like any expletive used effectively, the title of this book is meant to be a wake-up call. It is a reclamation, in a world that desperately requires the feminine. Readers learn the secret ingredient every woman is missing; how to crack the confidence code; why sex appeal is an inside job; what’s ahead on the next frontier of feminism—and how they can help make it happen; and much more. By turns earthy and erudite, passionately argued and laugh-out-loud funny, Pussy delivers the tools and practices a woman requires to do and be whatever she wants in this life. It’s a call for her to tune in, turn on, and not drop out—but live more richly, fully, and lusciously than she ever thought she could.
One of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Mysteries of the Year “Amazing...This is a series for the ages, it’s so spectacular.”—Gillian Flynn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Gone Girl 1846: In New York City, slave catching isn’t just legal—it’s law enforcement. Six months after the formation of the NYPD, its most reluctant and talented officer, Timothy Wilde, learns of the gruesome underworld of lies and corruption ruled by the “blackbirders,” who snatch free Northerners of color from their homes, masquerade them as slaves, and sell them South to toil as plantation property. When the beautiful and terrified Lucy Adams staggers into Timothy’s office to report a robbery and is asked what was stolen, her reply is, “My family.” Their search for her mixed-race sister and son will plunge Timothy and his feral brother, Valentine, into a world where police are complicit and politics savage, and where corpses appear in the most shocking of places…
Steve Harvey, the host of the nationally syndicated Steve Harvey Morning Show, can't count the number of impressive women he's met over the years, whether it's through the "Strawberry Letters" segment of his program or while on tour for his comedy shows. Yet when it comes to relationships, they can't figure out what makes men tick. Why? According to Steve it's because they're asking other women for advice when no one but another man can tell them how to find and keep a man. In Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve lets women inside the mindset of a man and sheds light on concepts and questions such as: The Ninety Day Rule: Ford requires it of its employees. Should you require it of your man? The five questions every woman should ask a man to determine how serious he is. And much more . . . Sometimes funny, sometimes direct, but always truthful, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man is a book you must read if you want to understand how men think when it comes to relationships.
I am going to write every single day and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London... Drawing comparisons with Pepys, Mayhew and Dickens, the gentle author of Spitalfields Life has gained an extraordinary following in recent years, by writing hundreds of lively pen portraits of the infinite variety of people who live and work in the East End of London.
