Key Features: *Study methods *Introduction to the text *Summaries with critical notes *Themes and techniques *Textual analysis of key passages *Author biography *Historical and literary background *Modern and historical critical approaches *Chronology *Glossary of literary terms

    Richard and Sophie are chaotic, drunken, frequently outrageous but also warm, generous and kind to Mirka, despite their argumentative and turbulent marriage. Mirka is swiftly commandeered by Richard for his latest money-making enterprise, taxidermy, and soon surpasses him in skill. After a traumatic break two years ago with her family in Slovakia, Mirka finds to her surprise that she is happy at Fairmont Hall. But when she tells Sophie that she is gay, everything she values is put in danger and she must learn the hard way what she really believes in. English Animals is a funny, subversive, poignant and beautifully written novel about a doomed love affair, a certain kind of Englishness and prejudice.

    In his screenplays and short stories, Ethan Coen surprises and delights us with a rich brew of ideas, observations, and perceptions. In his first collection of poems he does much the same. The range of his poems is remarkable–funny, ribald, provocative, sometimes raw, and often touching and profound.In these poems Coen writes of his childhood, his hopes and dreams, his disappointments, his career in Hollywood, his physically demanding love affair with Mamie Eisenhower, and his decade-long battle with amphetamines that produced some of the lengthier poems in the collection. You will chuckle, nodding with recognition as you turn the pages, perhaps even stopping occasionally to read a poem. Handsomely and durably bound between hard covers, this is a book that will stand up to most readers’ attempts to destroy it.

    Here’s a body of new work to cheer about.” Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness will be available in May 2010.

    Not so with Daphne Gottlieb. In Why Things Burn, Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, urban life, and a host of other topics with the same power of her live performances.

    Now with a new preface and illustrations, this "scrapbook" of their work—along with Andrea Weiss' lively commentary—highlights the political, social, and artistic lives of the renowned lesbian and bisexual Modernists, including Colette, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach, and many more.Painstakingly researched and profusely illustrated, it is an enlightening account of women who between wars found their selves and their voices in Paris. A wealth of photographs, paintings, drawings, and literary fragments combine with Weiss' revealing text to give an unparalleled insight into this extraordinary network of women for who Paris was neither mistress nor muse, but a different kind of woman.

    . . He is - it is now yet more evident - a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual sensationalism" (Financial Times)