Cosman proves just how endlessly intriguing the answers to these questions are in this fascinating exploration of medieval food habits in service, table manners, menu, and courtly magnificence. Also provided are tempting recipes for the modern-day host and hostess who would like to delight their guests with a medieval feast. Fabulous Feasts received nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

    Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the ‘small nation’ of Finland. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical composers around the world.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

    The pieces that comprise Non-Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer - each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.

    In this timeless narrative, Farley Mowat describes in harrowing detail the devastation inflicted upon the birds, whales, fish, and mammals of this icy coast—from polar bears and otters to cod, seals, and ducks. Since its first publication some 20 years ago, this powerful work has served as both a warning to humanity and an inspiration for change.

    This book tells the Stone's story, from its discovery by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt to its current--and controversial-- status as the single most visited object on display in the British Museum.A pharaoh's forgotten decree, cut in granite in three scripts--Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic, and ancient Greek--the Rosetta Stone promised to unlock the door to the language of ancient Egypt and its 3,000 years of civilization, if only it could be deciphered. Capturing the drama of the race to decode this key to the ancient past, John Ray traces the paths pursued by the British polymath Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion, the "father of Egyptology" ultimately credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. He shows how Champollion "broke the code" and explains more generally how such deciphering is done, as well as its critical role in the history of Egyptology. Concluding with a chapter on the political and cultural controversy surrounding the Stone, the book also includes an appendix with a full translation of the Stone's text.Rich in anecdote and curious lore, "The Rosetta Stone and the Rebirth of Ancient Egypt" is a brilliant and frequently amusing guide to one of history's great mysteries and marvels.

    

    In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: Theology, historiography, reportage, and memoir--among many others--are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own.

    The Charles Ives that emerges from Swafford's story is a precocious, well-trained musician, a brilliant if mercurial thinker about art and life, and an experimenter in the spirit of Edison and the Wright brothers.

    But in this important new book, Carol Loeb Shloss reveals a different, more dramatic truth: her father loved Lucia, and they shared a deep creative bond.Lucia was born in a pauper’s hospital and educated haphazardly across Europe as her penniless father pursued his art. She wanted to strike out on her own and in her twenties emerged, to Joyce’s amazement, as a harbinger of expressive modern dance in Paris. He described her then as a wild, beautiful, “fantastic being†whose mind was “as clear and as unsparing as the lightning.†The family’s only reader of Joyce, she was a child of the imaginative realms her father created, and even after emotional turmoil wrought havoc with her and she was hospitalized in the 1930s, he saw in her a life lived in tandem with his own.Though most of the documents about Lucia have been destroyed, Shloss painstakingly reconstructs the poignant complexities of her life—and with them a vital episode in the early history of psychiatry, for in Joyce’s efforts to help her he sought the help of Europe’s most advanced doctors, including Jung. In Lucia’s world Shloss has also uncovered important material that deepens our understanding of Finnegans Wake, the book that redefined modern literature.

    This book covers a critical part of the Battle of Gettysburg.

    . . a major poet of our time.”Wendell Berry is the author of over forty works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Award, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. While he began publishing work in the 1960s, Booklist has written that “Berry has become ever more prophetic,” clearly standing up to the test of time.

    James, and H.P. Lovecraft. The result is a thorough study of the art, craft, philosophy, and aesthetics of an enduring genre of fantastic literature.

    By 1996 another collection may appear." And he was rights. Frazier's new collection, Coyote v. Acme, includes twenty-two more side-splitting glimpses into some of the more oddball corners of the American mind. The title essay imagines the opening statement of an attorney for cartoon character Wile E. Coyote in a product liability suit against the Acme Company, supplier of unpredictable rocket sleds and faulty spring-powered shoes. Other essays are about the golfing career of comedian Bob Hope, a commencement address given by a Satanist college president, a suburban short story attacked by Germans, the problem of issues versus non-issues, and the theories of revolutionary stand-up comedy from Comrade Stalin.

    Kris Loomis offers a collection of down-to-earth personal essays that demonstrates the many ways yoga has transformed her life off the mat and why she keeps showing up every day for more. Not only has yoga improved her health and mental well-being, the study of this ancient practice has taught her to take personal responsibility for her actions and to focus on the bright side no matter what life hurls her direction.Whether you’re at the beginning of your yoga journey or if you’re already a ways down the path, you will find this book full of inspiring, encouraging, and often humorous lessons learned from someone who has walked the yoga walk, both as a teacher and dedicated practitioner, for two decades and counting.

    But in the practical experience of erotic love—and perhaps especially in marriage—we find that love and lies often work hand in hand, and that it may be difficult to sustain long-term romantic love without deception, both of oneself and of others. Drawing on contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience, his own personal experience, and such famed and diverse writers on love as Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Adrienne Rich, and Raymond Carver, Clancy Martin—himself divorced twice and married three times—explores how love, truthfulness, and deception work together in contemporary life and society. He concludes that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying, but also argues that the best love relationships draw us slowly and with difficulty toward honesty and trust.Love and Lies is a relentlessly honest book about the difficulty of love, which is certain to both provoke and entertain.