Mcnally jackson books us (177 resultados)

Paperback. Condición: New. First published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1925, Jane Ellen Harrison's Reminiscences are the irreverent memoirs of a student who declared Victorian education "ingeniously useless," who blazed a trail for female scholars, and who changed the way we see the ancient world. Growing up in the Yorkshire countryside, Harrison showed an early aptitude for languages: by the age of seventeen, with the help of a governess, she had learned Greek, Latin, German, and some Hebrew. ("Unfortunately, having no guide, we began with the Psalms, which are hard nuts to crack.") She went on to become the most influential Classicist of her generation. Drawing on the insights of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud, and on archaeological research, she helped to revolutionise the study of Greek myth. "The great Mother," she wrote, "is prior to male divinities."Unconventional in her private life ("By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life I fell in love"), she spent her later years with the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, thirty-seven years her junior. Harrison's zest for life is everywhere in these pages. Sprightly, amused, and amusing, her Reminiscences form an unforgettable sketch of a woman ahead of her time.…

Paperback. Condición: New. On the night of July 3, 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confessed to her husband that she'd had an affair with their pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. This secret would soon transfix America, for Beecher was the most famous preacher of the day, founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, an influential supporter of Abolition, and a leader of the campaign for women's suffrage. When Beecher tried to silence the Tiltons, it was a whisper network of suffragists, notably Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who spread news of the affair, and it was the radical Victoria Woodhull - an outspoken proponent of "free love" - who seized on it, as political dynamite, to blow up the myth of monogamy among the political elite. Her public accusations led to even more public trials, which shocked the country and divided the most progressive thinkers of the era.In 1953, the journalist Robert Shaplen revisited the Tilton-Beecher affair in a series of articles for the New Yorker, relying on 3,000 pages of contemporary accounts - court transcripts, love-letters, newspaper reports and illustrations, even political cartoons - to reanimate a scandal that shook the American reform movement and to expose a strand of America's cultural DNA that remains recognisable today.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "Emily Dickinson springs to life in this remarkable, long-out-of-print biography written by her niece . . . Though millions of pages have been written about Dickinson . . . few have provided such a thrilling close-up portrait. Readers will be rapt from the first page." -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)What would it be like to have Emily Dickinson as your babysitter? In this astonishing memoir, out of print for almost a century, Martha "Matty" Dickinson describes the childhood she spent next door to-and often in the care of-her Aunt Emily. We see Matty as a little girl, hiding from the other grownups in Emily's upstairs rooms, helping Emily in the kitchen, venturing with her into the cellar for the gingerpead she wasn't supposed to have. As Matty becomes a teenager, she finds a confidante in her aunt, who is fascinated by the latest youth fads, school gossip, and the recurring question of what to wear to a party ("her 'vote' was for my highest-heeled red slippers")-not to mention the music, novels, and poems she and Matty both love. From an early age, Emily teaches Matty the joys of solitude and independence: "No one," Emily said, "could ever punish a Dickinson by shutting her up alone." First published in 1932, this is the most intimate record we have of Emily Dickinson, whose death sparked a long family struggle over her work and her image. In a foreword to this new edition, the poet and critic Anthony Madrid provides a biographical frame for Matty's recollections, and explains how such a remarkable document could spend so long out of sight. …

Paperback. Condición: New. When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn't have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why she'd vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he'd never met.Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a broken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated - by mistake - in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. Named one of the year's best books by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle when it first appeared in English, The Mystery Guest is a "darkly hilarious . . . odyssey . . . that wends its loopy way toward yes" (O, the Oprah Magazine).…

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Paperback. Condición: New. "Can't sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you." In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.…

Paperback. Condición: New. Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her breakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most brilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes's career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women "'tragique' and 'triste' and 'tremendous' all at once," of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, "[Barnes's] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive - spectacularly, grotesquely alive.". …

Paperback. Condición: New. When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rubric "Constant Reader," she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker's hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she's taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson ("She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell - does"), praising Hemingway's latest collection ("He discards detail with magnificent lavishness"), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh ("And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up").Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post. …

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Paperback. Condición: New.

Paperback. Condición: New. "How rare it is to find a book that contains such indelible characters, and such enormity of heart. Welcome back, Rattlebone, may you get all the love and attention you have long deserved." -Ann PatchettToo long unavailable, this luminous classic of small-town life in the segregated 1950s has "magic dust sprinkled over each and every page" (Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review).Irene Wilson knows that a "no-name invisible something" has settled over her parents' marriage and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In Rattlebone, a small Black town outside Kansas City in the segregated 1950s, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair.As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of neighbors whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own. Rattlebone is a one-of-a-kind triumph of American fiction, one that captures an entire world through the eyes of an unforgettable heroine.…

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Paperback. Condición: New. "A devastating account of the sexual awakening of an English lady . . . An intense, fastidiously crafted and disturbing novel." -Publishers WeeklyFrom the "brilliant forgotten novelist" behind the "ferocious" Lord Jim at Home (The Telegraph) comes a searing tale of a young woman's unravelling beneath the unforgiving Tuscan sun.Miranda, her husband Louis, and their infant daughter are set to spend the summer in a rented villa in Tuscany. He's a self-assured young American actor; she, a well-educated, well-bred English ingénue. But when Louis is called away to a shoot, Miranda is left alone with her baby in the remote Italian countryside-until a young Italian named Oreste arrives, claiming to have been invited by her now-absent husband.Miranda quickly falls under the interloper's spell-and into his arms-launching into a feverish affair that threatens to dissolve her already fragile, fracturing sense of self. As events spiral further out of her control, the novel hurtles headlong toward its horrifying conclusion.Written in the same "limpid, assured style: cruel, yes, but not detached or apathetic" (Harper's Magazine) as Lord Jim at Home, Dinah Brooke's transgressive debut remains every bit as shocking as when it was first published in 1971.…

Paperback. Condición: New. In a rustic, idyllic English village, on a summer's day, in the midst of a carefree tennis party, a fragile, needy child, left too much on her own, vanishes from her family's front garden.Years pass and the mystery persists: an enduring torment for the teenage Christine Gray, the last person to see Vivian alive. Perhaps if she'd shown the girl a little kindness, and seen her safely home, Vivian might still be with them? Yet when someone claiming to be a grown-up Vivian returns to the land of the living, the enigma seems only to deepen, threatening to consume the wicked and innocent alike.Equal parts The Turn of the Screw, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and gothic thriller, Twice Lost was admired by such authors as Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and John Cowper Powys-yet the strange, haunting novels of Phyllis Paul are themselves a mystery with no simple solution. Virtually lost to time even before her death, her novels have been out of print for more than fifty years, and fetch fantastic prices in the rare book trade.…

Paperback. Condición: New. A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theatre's postwar production of Peter Pan: its 'close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction.' (The Times)Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the grey postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theatre company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Treading the boards for the first time is sixteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, ambitious, idealistic, and still overwhelmingly innocent. She falls hard for the rakish, monocled director, Meredith Potter, but, unable to attract his attentions - and not understanding why he's spending quite so much time with their male colleagues - she turns to another colleague to initiate her into the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O'Hara, a dashing leading man who's nursing secrets of his own. When the curtain is up, fantastical entertainment abounds, but backstage a very different drama is playing out: a pitch-black comedy of indiscretion, intrigue, and eventual tragedy.Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and dusted with that magical 'air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice [that] lingers around the margins of [all of Beryl Bainbridge's] fiction,' (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author's very best - and best-loved - novels.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "[An] unsentimental, elegiac tale of a legendary gunslinger's final days . . . Neider's timeless novel sneaks up on readers with a kind of elliptical genius that simultaneously celebrates and subverts its mythos, anticipating and surpassing many of the revisionist Westerns that were to follow." -David Wright, Library Journal, Starred ReviewThe 1950s classic that rewrote the myth of the American West and inspired its subsequent chroniclers from Sam Peckinpah to Marlon Brando to Cormac McCarthy.Hendry Jones isn't quite Billy the Kid, but he's "the Kid" all the same, and like Billy's his story doesn't take long to tell. He'll do a fair amount of killing, be done in by an old friend, then get turned into a myth before his body is cold. Years later, one of the Kid's last living partners in crime, "Doc" Baker-old and less than sober-tries to set the record straight: who killed who and why, and how none of that old craziness is worth swooning over or rehashing. Except that Doc is a bit of a poet despite himself, and in drawing together what he knows and remembers about the Kid's last days, he winds up saying just about everything that needs to be said about the American West, about kids playing with guns, about boys playing at being men out on the frontier, where they thought no one was watching.As Will Oldham-whose moniker as a musician, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, was partly inspired by Billy the Kid-notes in his introduction, Hendry Jones served as fodder for a field of artists grappling with masculinity and violence in the West: Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian are all impossible to imagine without Neider's Kid having first blazed the trail. A concise and brutal modern masterpiece, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones is one of the few Western novels worthy of the name.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "Pulsating with passion, parochialism, guilt and greed, this exposé of scandal and secrets is shocking and witty." -Sally Morris, The Daily MailAn erotic nightmare of Catholic longing, guilt, and desire and a banned classic of modern Irish literature.Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael's increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into disarray when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.Banned in Ireland on its first publication in 1961, Broderick's debut arrived "like an incendiary device" (Sunday Independent). The Pilgrimage anticipated the deep shifts that would soon turn the country's theocratic society upside down. It is a darkly comic, blasphemous, and sexually charged chamber drama laying bare the hypocrisies of a small Irish town "as watchful as the jungle," and teetering on the brink of catastrophe. In the words of Colm Tóibín, in his foreword to this edition, The Pilgrimage "cleared a space in the jungle so that its wildness could be more easily seen.". …

Paperback. Condición: New. "A precocious literary triumph . . . E?lisabeth is far more than a footnote. It would be a rewarding, exciting read even if the identity of its author were unfamiliar." -Richard Brody, The New YorkerWitty banter, lust, ennui, and an undercurrent of violence percolate beneath a seemingly paradisiacal summer on the eve of World War II, in this landmark translation of the first and only novel by Éric Rohmer, the French New Wave's most prolific and beloved filmmaker.Fifteen years before completing his first feature film-and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at Cahiers du cinéma that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era-the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by Éditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the nouveau roman-and was also the "matrix," as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, Six Moral Tales.Set in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, Élisabeth is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present-as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace-their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies-with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "A devastating account of the sexual awakening of an English lady . . . An intense, fastidiously crafted and disturbing novel." -Publishers WeeklyFrom the "brilliant forgotten novelist" behind the "ferocious" Lord Jim at Home (The Telegraph) comes a searing tale of a young woman's unravelling beneath the unforgiving Tuscan sun.Miranda, her husband Louis, and their infant daughter are set to spend the summer in a rented villa in Tuscany. He's a self-assured young American actor; she, a well-educated, well-bred English ingénue. But when Louis is called away to a shoot, Miranda is left alone with her baby in the remote Italian countryside-until a young Italian named Oreste arrives, claiming to have been invited by her now-absent husband.Miranda quickly falls under the interloper's spell-and into his arms-launching into a feverish affair that threatens to dissolve her already fragile, fracturing sense of self. As events spiral further out of her control, the novel hurtles headlong toward its horrifying conclusion.Written in the same "limpid, assured style: cruel, yes, but not detached or apathetic" (Harper's Magazine) as Lord Jim at Home, Dinah Brooke's transgressive debut remains every bit as shocking as when it was first published in 1971.…

Paperback. Condición: New.

Paperback. Condición: New. "A compact, intricately patterned story of unrequited erotic obsession, focused on the relationship between a closeted English novelist and a beautiful Italian philosopher . . . Among the novel's daring ideas is its suggestion that closetedness and English taciturnity are part of a common condition, each an art of concealment." -Charlie Tyson, Harper's MagazineA witty, heartbreaking tale of unrequited love by "one of the finest and most remarkable English novelists of our time." (The Scotsman)Antonio Valli, a gifted Italian philosopher in his thirties, has left his wife and children behind in Florence for a one-year research fellowship at a provincial English university. Handsome and charming, Antonio is irresistible to men and women both-and he knows it. One who falls under his spell is Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist from whom Antonio rents a room. For the first time in years, Dick finds himself desperately, passionately in love, but the games the manipulative Italian plays with him throw the older man's life into chaos.Published only three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK, A Domestic Animal is Francis King's most intimate and daringly autobiographical novel: a "wry, anguished study . . . of love and jealousy [that] is hard to forget" (Robert Baldick, The Daily Telegraph).…

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Paperback. Condición: New. Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favourite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love-but his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behaviour of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker-native, adoptive, or far from home-and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called "the inscrutable and lovely town," but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "Can't sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you." In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "If Raymond Chandler or Flannery O'Connor had written a vampire novel, it might read with the brutal and passionate clarity of Stainless . . . The ultimate late night in L.A." -Katherine DunnA bloody, erotic love story from "the greatest horror writer you've never read . . . In Stainless, Todd Grimson set out to write 'the Ultimate, Final Vampire Novel'-and succeeded." (The Guardian)Justine is a vampire. Keith just lives like one. An ex-junkie and ex-rock star, his hands mangled by his dead ex's own jealous ex, he's let go of his ambitions. He's content to be Justine's live-in Renfield, helping her pick up dinner when she needs a bite, keeping an eye on her lavish L.A. manor when the sun is out and she's down for her beauty sleep. It's true that Justine has been around for a few centuries and Keith barely three decades, but they're good for each other: Justine is teaching Keith to take the long view; Keith is reminding her how it feels to be alive. Yet a cohort of criminals, desperate artists, dead-enders, hangers-on, and wanna-bes, undead and otherwise, threaten their curious union. Can love stay untainted in a world of monsters?First published in 1996, Todd Grimson's Stainless is a noir fantasia, a symphony of bloody horror, and a woozy, erotic tour of night-side L.A. Not only is it the greatest vampire novel of the twentieth century, it may be the last, best farewell to the mythic Los Angeles of Bette Davis, Dennis Hopper, and Less than Zero. In a league with the best of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler-and closing the coffin for good on poor old Bram Stoker-Stainless is the final word on fangs, hangovers, and heartbreak. …

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Paperback. Condición: New. 'Political intrigue, sexual chicanery, disappointment, betrayal' combine with 'dazzling' effect (Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) in this scandalous novel that exposed the secrets of Margaret Thatcher's government.As a senior clerk in the House of Commons, John is a man of gravitas, a well-respected widower with two grown-up daughters, who upholds establishmentarian codes of morality and decency. What his colleagues don't know is that he harbors a secret predilection for rent boys. Afternoon assignations in his current squeeze's discreet Earl's Court flat are one thing, but when his reputation, his job, and his relationship with his friends and family are all threatened, John takes desperate measures to protect himself. Set during the last days of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, and ingeniously narrated by an all-knowing incarnation of the Prime Minister herself, Kitchen Venom is a lethally entertaining story of sex, secrets, and scandal.A sensation when it was published in the UK in 1996, Kitchen Venom cost Philip Hensher his own job as a clerk in the British House of Commons - an achievement 'all the more remarkable,' the Independent noted, given the vehicle of this ruination was 'a stunningly intelligent, assured and compelling novel'.'[An] elegant novel of poisoned love and intimate violence.Sharp and funny.a beautifully polished performance.' - James Lakeman, The Times Literary Supplement"[An] assured and intriguing novel.Hensher's prose manages to be both immaculate and suggestive.' - David Profumo, The Daily Telegraph'Remarkable.a stately, inexorable pavane of yearning and violence.' - Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph'[Hensher] is an intensely sophisticated writer, a critic of discernment and exquisite sensibility.' - John Walsh, The Independent'Impressively stylish.written with a formal elegance, in counterpoint to the chaos of the characters' motivations.' - Russell Celyn Jones, The Financial Times'Stunning; beguilingly complex.' - Charles Osborne, The Sunday Telegraph'Set amongst the wigs and gowns of parliamentary officialdom, [Kitchen Venom] exposes the hidden tensions in apparently banal lives. The characterisation is incisive and the dialogue first-class.' - The Sunday Telegraph'His House of Commons is as tightly run as a lunatic asylum, as baffling as Lewis Carroll's Wonderland.[the plot] is at first intriguing then wholly beguiling, twisting tight its threads of power, betrayal, lust and love.' - Michele Roberts, The Independent On Sunday'A brilliant, hateful work.For what it's worth (and I did once work as a secretary to Margaret Thatcher) I think nobody has better described the trivial, as well as the grand, mechanisms of her mind.' - Matthew Parris, The Spectator'Airy, felicitous, superintendent, Hensher releases his staggered secrets and recognitions in a smart but unpredictable procession of bad behaviours.' - Jeremy Maule, The Guardian.…

Hardback. Condición: New. "Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist and celebrity public intellectual . . . cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness . . . with her sparky wit and refusal to be silenced . . . She remains my hero . . . She has remained the iron in my soul." -Mary Beard, London Review of BooksFrom Marginalian Editions: a far-seeing essay collection by the iconoclastic historian Jane Ellen Harrison-heroine to generations of writers from Virginia Woolf to Mary Beard-that explores the invisible tendrils between science and the sacred, the psychology of bias, the fulcrum of progress, and the countercultural courage of changing our minds in light of new understanding.Alpha and Omega is the culminating work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist who reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture and pioneered a radical vision of faith, imagination, and progress. Declaring herself a "deeply religious atheist," Harrison rejected the confines of dogma to explore faith as the human capacity to transcend the known and imagine the possible. This collection of essays-published at the dawn of World War I-unpacks the invisible connections between science and spirituality, individual belief and collective consciousness, and reason and love as forces for societal transformation. With wit and daring, Harrison dismantles the binaries that divide us-young and old, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane-revealing how these tensions, when reconciled, can catalyze change.As Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Harrison's essays are an "act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo," challenging us to rethink our biases, beliefs, and most deeply held assumptions. From the influence of Darwinism on religion to the psychology of conversion, from the evolution of gender roles to the ethics of pacifism, Alpha and Omega is a timeless guide to the imagination and courage required to live through an age of division and uncertainty.…

Paperback. Condición: New. In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as "the girls" - a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specialising in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life.So it's no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue's absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night.If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue's return to the nest, what's that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss?Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.…

Paperback. Condición: New. "A hidden treasure of Scottish literature, read this and then read all her other works." -Douglas StuartA mordant, cautionary tale about a working-class woman hemmed in on all sides, written by "the most unfairly neglected of all Scottish authors" (Alasdair Gray, author of Poor Things)."I've got a job," I told Adam."Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?""And I can save up for a divorce.""So, let's celebrate," said Adam.Discovered by three of Scotland's most celebrated writers, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Liz Lochhead, when they were visiting a local writers' workshop in the late 1970s, Agnes Owens-then in her 50s-claimed she'd joined the group just to "get out of the house." She had grown up in a working-class family outside Glasgow, done badly at school, and had worked in factories, as a cleaner, and as an occasional typist. When she published her highly acclaimed first novel at the age of 58, it launched a most unexpected literary career.Nowhere is Owens's black humor and attention to the surreal banalities and frustrations of ordinary existence better showcased than in her third novel, A Working Mother. Our beleaguered heroine is Betty, beset by her depressed, alcoholic war-vet husband Adam and their smart-mouthed kids. Neither an affair with Adam's attractive friend Brendan (a disappointment), nor her new job as a typist (for a leerer with roving hands) can lift her out of the rut. Is it any wonder she's taken to the bottle now too?As Megan Nolan writes in the foreword to this new edition, in a "shrewd and ironic style" that is all Owens's own, A Working Mother proves that "any given life rewards intelligent attention when it is as fine and as funny and incandescent as hers.".…