I had the urge to poison a monk.' Along the way, it touches on bad books, ideal readers, historical form, and the metaphysics of the detective story.

    The story of Sylvia Beach's love for Shakespeare and Company supplies the lifeblood of this book.

    Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan and Roland Barthes. He also writes of actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer.

    Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way in which she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.

    "a full description of 1,775 books"

    

    Drawing on the novels to illuminate themes such as domestic life, romantic love, sex, psychoanalysis, the Great War and ‘surplus’ women, A Very Great Profession uses the work of numerous women writers to present a portrait, though their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen in the period between the wars.

    But an information-processing society that neglects to pass on the real wisdom of [children's] tales and rhymes from one generation to another... will eventually become desiccated, distempered, and self-destroying." Childhood, he reminds us, is the time of "our earliest and deepest feelings and truths... our link to the past and a path to the future." And it is Cott's belief that the best children's books are not meant only for children; they are significant sources of delight and wisdom for grown-ups as well. In fact, as Cott argues, it is adults who may need children's books more than their offspring "lest ther be no more Wise Women or Wise Men."Pipers at the Gates of Dawn consists of Cott's reflections about and encounters with six extraordinary creators of children's literature - Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Astrid Lindgren, Chinua Achebe, P.L. Travers - and with Iona and Peter Opie, the great contemporary scholars of children's lore, games, and language. In seven broad-ranging, incisive essay-interviews, he explores with the authors themselves the lives of their created characters and the characters of their own lives. Despite differences in nationality, generation, and gender, all share with Cott an impassioned sense of the richness, complexity, and lucidity of childhood, and of the enduring importance of children's literature in the lives of all of us.

    The first and second sections are original to this new edition. The first section explores social and cultural theory in order to argue that radical media should be a central part of our understanding of media in history. The second section weaves an historical and international tapestry of radical media to illustrate their centrality and diversity, from dance and graffiti to video and the internet and from satirical prints and street theatre to culture-jamming, subversive song, performance art and underground radio. The section also includes consideration of ultra-rightist media as a key contrast case. The book′s third section provides detailed case studies of the anti-fascist media explosion of 1974-75 in Portugal, Italy′s long-running radical media, radio and access video in the USA, and illegal media in the dissolution of the former Soviet bloc dictatorships.