But the world’s best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of surprising collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Brontë; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship fired by an underlying erotic charge. Through letters and diaries that have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these forgotten stories of female friendships. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always—until now—tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.

    The original structure of the book has been improved and new material has been added, including extracts from the writings of Marx, Freud, and de Beauvoir, and a new section devoted to contemporary critical debates and issues.

     James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

    It includes some familiar names and some surprises. Witty and controversial, their aim is to encourage reading.

    Almost two hundred years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, constantly open to revival and reinterpretation and known to millions of people through film and television adaptations as much as through her books. In Jane's Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography―of both the author and her lasting cultural influence―making this essential reading for anyone interested in Austen's life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

    Every comedy, tragedy, history, and poem of Shakespeare's is collected here in this comprehensive guide.Shakespeare's canon comes to life with images, idea webs, timelines, and quotes that help the reader understand the context of Shakespeare's plays and poems. Each play includes a glance-able guide to story chronology, so you can easily get back on track if you get lost in Shakespeare's beautiful language. Character guides are a handy reference for casual readers and an invaluable resource for playgoers and students writing reports on Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Book includes the best of Shakespeare, and it's set to become a staple for theater lovers, Shakespeare students, and Shakespeare fans because its information is delivered in such an understandable and inspirational way.

    Each year, the series editor and guest editor curate a truly exceptional collection. The only shared traits among all these diverse styles, voices, and stories are the extraordinarily high caliber of writing, and the pure passion they tap into that can only come from sports.

    Distracting symptoms, confusing medical advice, unsympathetic reactions from loved ones, and the scornful attitudes of socieyt-at-large often make menopause a lonely and emotionally draining experience. "[...] Sheehy sets out to erase the stigma of menopause and 'render normalcy to a normal physical process.'"

    I thought of us going all over the world doing interviews—we’ve signed for three interviews a day for six weeks.”—Al Pacino, in an interview with Lawrence GrobelHighly respected in journalist circles and hailed as “the Interviewer’s Interviewer,” Lawrence Grobel is the author of well-received biographies of Truman Capote, Marlon Brando, James Michener, and the Huston family, with bylines from Rolling Stone and Playboy to the New York Times. He has spent his thirty-year career getting tough subjects to truly open up and talk. Now, in The Art of the Interview, he offers step-by-step instruction on all aspects of nailing an effective interview and provides an inside look on how he elicted such colorful responses as:“I don’t like Shakespeare. I’d rather be in Malibu.” —Anthony Hopkins“Feminists don’t like me, and I don’t like them.”—Mel Gibson“I hope to God my friends steal my body out of a morgue and throw a party when I’m dead.”—Drew Barrymore“I want you out of here. And I want those goddamn tapes!”—Bob Knight“I smoked pot with my father when I was eleven in 1973. . . . He thought he was giving me a mind-extending experience just like he used to give me Hemingway novels and Woody Allen films.”—Anthony KiedisIn The Art of the Interview, Grobel reveals the most memorable stories from his career, along with examples of the most candid moments from his long list of famous interviewees, from Oscar-winning actors and Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prizewinning writers and sports figures. Taking us step by step through the interview process, from research and question writing to final editing, The Art of the Interview is a treat for journalists and culture vultures alike.

    Conventional wisdom calls it incurable, but renowned Dr. Gabriel Cousens counters that claim with this breakthrough book. There Is a Cure for Diabetes lays out a three-week plan for reversing the negative genetic expression of diabetes to a physiology of health and well-being. Dr. Cousens’s method, widely tested at his famous Tree of Life centers, is to reset the DNA through green juice fasting and a 100% organic, nutrient-dense, vegan, low-glycemic, low-insulin-scoring, and high-mineral diet of living foods in the first twenty-one days. Both practical and inspirational, the book explains how to abandon the widespread “culture of death”–symbolized by addictive junk food–that fosters diabetes in favor of a more natural, nurturing approach. The program renders insulin and related medicines unnecessary within four days as the blood sugar drops to normal levels; and the diabetic shifts into a non-diabetic physiology within two weeks. The third week focuses on live-food preparation, featuring 100 delicious raw recipes. Dr. Cousens emphasizes regular consultations, monitoring blood chemistries, and emotional support, and includes a one-year support program to help maintain a diabetes-free life.

    The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accesible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their applications demonstrated.Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspiring writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.Beginning (Jane Austen, Ford Madox Ford) --The intrusive author (George Eliot, E.M. Forster) --Suspense (Thomas Hardy) --Teenage Skaz (J.D. Salinger) --The epistolary novel (Michael Frayn) --Point of view (Henry James) --Mystery (Rudyard Kipling) --Names (David Lodge, Paul Auster) --The stream of consciousness (Virginia Woolf) --Interior monologue (James Joyce) --Defamiliarization (Charlotte Bronte) --The sense of place (Martin Amis) --Lists (F. Scott Fitzgerald) --Introducing a character (Christopher Isherwood) --Surprise (William Makepeace Thackeray) --Time-shift (Muriel Spark) --The reader in the text (Laurence Sterne) --Weather (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens) --Repetition (Ernest Hemingway) --Fancy prose (Vladimir Nabokov) --Intertextuality (Joseph Conrad) --The experimental novel (Henry Green) --The comic novel (Kingsley Amis) --Magic realism (Milan Kundera) --Staying on the surface (Malcolm Bradbury) --Showing and telling (Henry Fielding) --Telling in different voices (Fay Weldon) --A sense of the past (John Fowles). Imagining the future (George Orwell) --Symbolism (D.H. Lawrence) --Allegory (Samuel Butler) --Epiphany (John Updike) --Coincidence (Henry James) --The unreliable narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro) --The exotic (Graham Greene) --Chapters etc. (Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Sil Walter Scott, George Eliot, James Joyce) --The telephone (Evelyn Waugh) --Surrealism (Leonora Carringotn) --Irony (Arnold Bennett) --Motivation (George Eliot) --Duration (Donald Barthelme) --Implication (William Cooper) --The title (George Gissing) --Ideas (Anthony Burgess) --The non-fiction novel (Thomas Carlyle) --Metafiction (John Barth) --The uncanny (Edgar Allen Poe) --Narrative structure (Leonard Michaels) --Aporia (Samuel Beckett) --Ending (Jane Austen, William Golding)

    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

    This guide answers some of the questions of this complex but endlessly fascinating saga.

    From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays cover an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing's clear-eyed vision and clearly expressed prose.

    Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out.Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office.In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.“By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.