Best of
English-Literature

2003

The Ruthless Romans


Terry Deary - 2003
    Read on for the gory details about the cruel Colosseum and the people and animals who were massacred there.

How to Train Your Parents


Pete Johnson - 2003
    Suddenly Louis's life is no longer his own - until he meets Maddy, who claims to have trained her parents to ignore her- But does Louis really want to be ignored? A truly contemporary tale with characters kids will recognize instantly!

The How To Be British Collection


Martyn Ford - 2003
    Drawing on their many years' experience of teaching English as a Foreign Language the authors also offer the wider world a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to get around in English and at the same time make sense of our 'funny ways'. It's a gentle brand of satire, and although there's the occasional barbed arrow for bland food, fashion disasters or dubious standards of hygiene, the tone of The "How To Be British Collection" is more nostalgic than scornful, and the pet-loving, royal-watching, tea drinking characters that populate its pages are viewed with wry affection. Cartoons like "How to be Polite" and "How to Complain" have been reproduced in publications all over the world, perhaps because they put a finger on that peculiar tentativeness that foreigners find so puzzling (and so funny) about us. In order to be British, or at any rate to pass unnoticed in British society, the visitor must learn not to 'make a fuss'. A fuss is something that the true Brit cannot stand. It is nearly as bad as a 'scene', and in the same category as 'drawing attention to yourself'. In the first frame of How To Be Polite, a man -- presumably an uninitiated foreign visitor -- has fallen into a river. He's clearly in trouble and is shouting HELP! -- at the top of his voice, judging by the speech bubble. An English gentleman is walking his dog along the river bank. There's a lifebelt prominently displayed beside them, but the gent and his dog are walking away from the emergency with disapproving expressions. In the next frame, the man in the river has changed his strategy and is calling out: "Excuse me, Sir. I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you would mind helping me a moment, as long as it's no trouble, of course...". And this time, naturally, the English gent is rushing to his aid, throwing the lifebelt into the water. Even the dog is smiling. Much of the material in The "How to be British Collection" is about how cultural differences can prove a minefield for the unwary. To that extent its appeal - in an age where so many of us travel and even set up home overseas - is universal. Every visitor to Britain comes knowing that our favourite conversational gambit is the weather. But how many can successfully do it at 1) Elementary 2) Intermediate and 3) Advanced levels? The book's enduring popularity comes from the recognition factor -- how exposed we can be once we stray away from the comfort zone of our own native language. A hapless visitor, phrase book in hand, stops to ask an old lady in the street for directions. He looks pleased with himself for phrasing the question so nicely, but then is utterly at a loss to understand her long, rambling, minutely detailed reply. We've all been there. To help the poor innocent abroad around these cultural and linguistic booby-traps, the book includes on most pages collectible Expressions to learn and (of course) Expressions to avoid. Thus, under the entry for Real English, which negotiates the difficult area of colloquial speech including "idioms, slang and even the occasional taboo word, as used by flesh and blood native speakers" we find -- Expressions to learn:"'E nicked it off of a lorry and now the coppers 'ave done 'im for it." Expressions to avoid: "That's not correct English, Mrs. Jones -- it says so here in my grammar book".

B.S. Johnson Omnibus


B.S. Johnson - 2003
    Johnson's critically acclaimed novels - "Alberto Angelo", "Trawl" and "House Mother Normal - A Geriatric Comedy".

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold


Evelyn Waugh - 2003
    In Scoop, it is journalism’s turn to be drawn and quartered. The Loved One (which became a famously hilarious film) sends up the California mortuary business. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a burst of fictionalized autobiography in which Pinfold goes mad, more or less, on board an ocean liner.Here in four short–very different–novels are the mordant wit, inspired farce, snapping dialogue, and amazing characters that are the essence of everything Waugh ever wrote.

Romeo y Julieta/Macbeth/Hamlet/Otelo/La fierecilla domado/El sueño de una noche de verano/ El mercader de Venecia (Romeo and Juliet/Macbeth/Hamlet/Othello/The Taming of the Shrew/A Midsummer Night's Dream/The Merchant of Venice)


William Shakespeare - 2003
    Includes Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew.

Shakespeare: For All Time


Stanley Wells - 2003
     Drawing on a lifetime's experience of studying, teaching, editing, and writing about Shakespeare, Stanley Wells combines scholarly authority with authorial flair in a book that will appeal equally to the specialist and the untutored enthusiast. Chapters on Shakespeare's life in Stratford and in London offer a fresh view of the development of the writer's career and personality. At the core of the book lies a magisterial study of the writings themselves--how Shakespeare set about writing a play, his relationships with the company of actors with whom he worked, his developing mastery of the literary and rhetorical skills that he learned at the Stratford grammar school, the essentially theatrical quality of the structure and language of his plays. Subsequent chapters trace the fluctuating fortunes of his reputation and influence. Here are accounts of adaptations, productions, and individual performances in England and, increasingly, overseas; of great occasions such as the Garrick Jubilee and the tercentenary celebrations of 1864; of the spread of Shakespeare's reputation in France and Germany, Russia and America, and, more recently, the Far East; of Shakespearian discoveries and forgeries; of critical reactions, favorable and otherwise, and of scholarly activity; of paintings, music, films and other works of art inspired by the plays; of the plays' use in education and the political arena, and of the pleasure and intellectual stimulus that they have given to an increasingly international public. Shakespeare, said Ben Jonson, was not of an age but for all time. This is a book about him for our time.

The Horde


Igor Baranko - 2003
    To do this, his secret service must find the corpse of the latest reincarnation of Ghengis Khan. Suggested for mature readers.

The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise Edition


Paul Lauter - 2003
    While other one-volume texts continue to anthologize primarily canonical works, the new Heath Concise offers a fresh perspective for the course, based on the successful hallmarks of the two-volume set.

The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama


W.B. Worthen - 2003
    In its fifth edition, THE WADSWORTH ANTHOLOGY OF DRAMA broadens its scope to offer even more plays than ever before.

The Monstrous Middle Ages


Bettina Bildhauer - 2003
    Monstrosity is bound up with questions of body image and deformity, nature and knowledge, hybridity and horror. To explore a culture's attitudes to the monstrous is to comprehend one of its most important symbolic tools.The Monstrous Middle Ages looks at both the representation of literal monsters and the consumption and exploitation of monstrous metaphors in a wide variety of high and late-medieval cultural productions, from travel writings and mystical texts to sermons, manuscript illuminations and maps. Individual essays explore the ways in which monstrosity shaped the construction of gender and sexual identity, religious symbolism, and social prejudice in the Middle Ages.Reading the Middle Ages through its monsters provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The Monstrous Middle Ages will be essential reading for anyone interested in the concept of monstrosity and its significance for both medieval cultural production and contemporary critical practice.

The Wild West: History, Myth & the Making of America


Frederick Nolan - 2003
    

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing (Contemporary Classics)


Evelyn Waugh - 2003
    Waugh’s accounts of his travels–spanning the years from 1929 to 1958–describe journeys through the West Indies, Mexico, South America, the Holy Land, and Africa. And just as his travels informed his fiction, his novelist’s sensibility is apparent in each of these pieces. Waugh pioneered the genre of modern travel writing in which the comic predicament of the traveler is as central as the world he encounters. He wrote with as sharp an eye for folly as for foliage, and a delight in the absurd, not least where his own comfort and dignity are concerned. From his fresh take on the well-traveled and hence already “fully labeled” Mediterranean region in Labels, to a close-up view of Haile Selassie’s coronation in Remote People, from a comically miserable stint in British Guiana.

Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Put Out More Flags


Evelyn Waugh - 2003
    English writer, regarded by many as the leading satirical novelist of his day. Among Waugh's most popular books is Brideshead Revisited. Waugh established his literary reputation with this novel, Decline and Fall, an episodic story of the hilarious misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, whose feckless odyssey begins when he loses his trousers. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Collins Good Writing Guide


Graham King - 2003
    This new edition of the the essential single-volume guide for all who aspire to improve their writing skills is the perfect desk companion for anyone requiring a friendly guide to modern communication.

Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories of Hugh Walpole


Hugh Walpole - 2003
    350 copies. (500 copies, according to the copyright page)Contents: -An Introduction by George Gorniak-The Clocks/ The Twisted Inn/ The Silver Mask/ The Staircase/ A Carnation For An Old Man/ Tarnhelm Or, The Death of My Uncle Robert/ Seashore Macabre/ The Little Ghost/ Mrs Lunt/ The Snow/ Miss Morganhurst/ Mrs Porter and Miss Allen/ Lizzie Rand/ The Tarn/ Major Wilbraham/ The Tiger/ Hugh Seymour (A Prologue)/ Angelina/ ’Enery/ The Fear of Death/ Field With Five Trees/ The Conjurer/ The White Cat/ The Perfect Close/ Mr Huffam, A Christmas Story. 'If subtlety, originality and ambiguity are hallmarks of the best supernatural tales, then Walpole’s stand with the very best.’—So writes George Gorniak in his Introduction to this definitive collection of the most admired of Hugh Walpole’s supernatural and macabre shorter works, along with two previously uncollected early masterpieces, ‘The Clocks’ and ‘The Twisted Inn’. Perhaps best known for The Herries Chronicle (1930-34), four historical Lakeland novels which remain in print to this day, Walpole was widely recognised in his own lifetime as a consummate literary craftsman with a fine narrative style and an admirable ability to portray character, humour and dialogue. In classic tales such as ‘The Silver Mask’, ‘Tarnhelm’ and ‘The Snow’, he also demonstrates beyond question that he understood the experience of sheer, stark terror. Walpole had a deep and abiding interest in the supernatural and consistently incorporated macabre, mystical and supernatural elements in his work. He also exhibits a markedly modern understanding of the psychological, and it is this combination which allows his more traditional ghost stories, such as ‘The Little Ghost’ and ‘Mrs Lunt’, to retain their power today. This collection of twenty-five stories should help renew the recognition enjoyed by Walpole in his own lifetime. As he said himself ‘. . . the creator who relies more upon the inference behind the fact than upon the fact itself, more upon the dream than the actual business, more upon the intangible world of poetry than upon the actual world of concrete evidence, this kind of creator will come into his kingdom again.’