York Notes author John Scicluna discusses all aspect of An Inspector Calls --a thorough run-down very helpful to anyone studying the famous Priestley play.

     Indian attacks, Mexican invasions, murderous bandits and the persistent threat of disease and famine plagued these early settlers. In the first third of the book A. J. Sowell gathers numerous first-hand accounts to construct a history of this area in the mid-nineteenth century, when life was tough and often short. Particularly focusing on the attacks by Native Americans, Sowell examines how early settlers defended themselves in ad hoc groups and volunteer companies. Then Sowell examines the advent of the Republic of Texas in the aftermath of the Texas Revolution. Many of Texas’ most famous events are covered in this section, drawn from eyewitness accounts and sometimes seen by Sowell himself, including the Battle of Concepcion, the Siege of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto. Part three of Sowell’s work covers his own fascinating involvement with the Texas Rangers, including the Wichita Campaign in northwest Texas where he endured a brutally cold winter and participated in a number of deadly fights with Native Americans. Andrew Jackson Sowell was first of his family to be born in Texas after his relations moved to the area in 1830. His grandfather was involved in the Texas Revolution, as was his uncle, who served in the Alamo garrison but departed to obtain supplies prior to its fall. From 1870 November until 1871 June, he was a Texas Ranger in Company F of the Frontier Battalion, serving under Capt. David P. Baker. Drawing on his own experiences as a Texas Ranger, events in his relatives’ lives, family history, and interviews, Sowell wrote numerous books and articles about the early history of Texas. His books include Rangers and Pioneers of Texas, Life of Big Foot Wallace, Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas, and History of Fort Bend County. Rangers and Pioneers of Texas was published in 1884. Sowell died in 1921.

    "What They Did There: Profiles From the Battle of Gettysburg" offers a unique view of its subject, telling the story of the battle not through convention narrative but via 170 mini-bios of not only combatants blue and gray, but of civilians, doctors, nurses, artists, photographers, Samaritans; saints, sinners and the moral terrain in-between.

    Essays include discussion of the psychological implications in the novel as well as themes and character analysis.

    Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts.In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

    In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in Tehran was for Iran, The Republic of Imagination is for America. Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, she challenges those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels—from Huckleberry Finn to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—she invites us to join her as citizens of her "Republic of Imagination," a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy, and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

    Discover What it Really takes to Catch a Husband! You're about to find not guesswork but hard facts based on the same kind of scientific research that pollsters use to predict consumer behavior with pinpoint accuracy. John T. Molloy and his staff polled over 2,500 women and their fiances and over 1,000 single people who answered a host of detailed, often intimate questions. The information proved so powerful that half the single women working on this book got married within three years! Now you, too, can learn: How to increase your chances of marrying by up to sixty percent * The ten warning signals that a man is never going to marry * How to make a man want to marry you and how to trigger a proposal * The advantages-and dangers-of dating divorced or widowed men * What you absolutely must wear when you meet your boyfriend's parents, and much more.

    

    In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Since his untimely death by suicide at the age of forty-six in 2008, Wallace has become more than the quintessential writer for his time—he has become a symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age.  In the end, as Max shows us, what is most interesting about Wallace is not just what he wrote but how he taught us all to live. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of his unpublished letters, manuscripts, and audio tapes, this portrait of an extraordinarily gifted writer is as fresh as news, as intimate as a love note, as painful as a goodbye.

    Within a few months she was pregnant, married, and traveling across the country to Austin . . . to the 250,000-acre spread known as Sunbridge and into the tantalizing world of the Texas rich. In a vast land dominated by the industrious Colemans, Billie fights to maintain control of her life and her marriage.This is the captivating story of four generations. There's Moss, living in the shadow of a father whose obsession with power overshadows the needs of his only son; Jessica, the doomed mother who gave up everything to become the perfect Coleman wife; Moss and Billie's children, desperately trying to live up to insurmountable expectations; and the grandchildren, heirs to a tarnished empire who just might fulfill their dreams. Most of all this is the triumphant story of Billie Ames Coleman, a woman of courage and strength who holds them all together--in a tale as magnificent as the land that inspired it.

    As companion to its volume of Wilder?s collected plays, The Library of America?s edition of his early novels and stories brings together five novels that highlight his wit, erudition, innovative formal structures, and philosophical wisdom. Drawing on the post-collegiate year he spent in Rome, Wilder fashioned in The Cabala a tale of youthful enchantment with the Eternal City in the form of a fictitious memoir of an American student and the enigmatic coterie of noble Romans who draw him into their midst. He followed this debut novel two years later with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which catapulted him to literary prominence and earned him the first of his three Pulitzer prizes. ?The Bridge,? Wilder later wrote, ?asked the question whether the intention that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.? Set in 18th-century Peru, the book is a kind of theological detective story concerning a friar?s investigations into the lives of five individuals before they were killed in a bridge collapse. An elegantly told parable, with credible historical ambience and psychologically rounded characters, The Bridge of San Luis Rey is primarily a probing inquiry into the nature of destiny and divine intention: Why did God allow these particular people to die?The Woman of Andros, based on the Andria of Roman writer Terence, is a meditation on the ancient world filtered through the sensibility of a meditative courtesan; Heaven?s My Destination, a departure from Wilder?s historical themes, is a picaresque romp through Depression-era America; and The Ides of March takes up the story of Julius Caesar?s assassination by imagining the exchange of letters among such prominent ancient figures as Catullus, Cleopatra, Cicero, and Caesar himself, ?groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him.? The volume concludes with a selection of early short stories?among them ?Précautions Inutiles,? published here for the first time?and a selection of essays that offers Wilder?s insights into the works of Stein and Joyce, as well as a lecture on letter writers that bears on both The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Ides of March.

    

    With Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls he has given himself the greatest challenge and produced his greatest triumph.In Playing for Keeps, Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the book chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him in to history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

    For others, later, there was Greenwich Village, Big Sur, and Woodstock. But for an even later generation--one defined by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson--there was another moveable feast: KeyWest, Florida. The small town on the two-by-four-mile island has long been an artistic haven, a wild refuge for people of all persuasions, and the inspirational home for a league of great American writers. Some of the artists went there to be literary he-men. Some went to re-create themselves. Others just went to disappear--and succeeded. No matter what inspired the trip, Key West in the seventies was the right place at the right time, where and when an astonishing collection of artists wove a web of creative inspiration. "Mile Marker Zero "tells the story of how these writers and artists found their identities in Key West and maintained their friendships over the decades, despite oceans of booze and boatloads of pot, through serial marriages and sexual escapades, in that dangerous paradise. Unlike the "Lost Generation" of Paris in the twenties, we have a generation that invented, reinvented, and found itself at the unending cocktail party at the end--and the beginning--of America's highway.

    But women often get paid less than men, even when they're doing equal work.Mostly they don't know because pay is secret. But what if a woman finds out? What should she do? What should her male colleague do? What should the boss do?Equal is the inside story of how award-winning journalist Carrie Gracie challenged unequal pay at the BBC, alongside a wider investigation into why men and women are still paid unequally. It's a book that will open your eyes, fix your resolve and give you the tools to act - and act now.