But this Christmas nothing is the same. After the recent loss of both her husband and her loyal canine companion, Heddi wonders if she should celebrate Christmas at all. But all of that changes when the true gift of healing comes to her in a most mysterious way. This is a short story perfect for a quick holiday read!

    Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence—and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live?Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover’s take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age.Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.Praise for Douglas Glover"A master of narrative structure." - Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life, Wall Street Journal"So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ... the author's poetic grace." - The New Yorker"Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ... a direction for future literary criticism to take." - The Denver Quarterly"A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation." - The Globe and Mail"Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny." - Maclean's"Passionately intricate." - The Chicago Tribune"Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless." - Kirkus Reviews

    H. Auden once wrote that “art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present—and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our “personal density.”Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought—plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs’s answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know.What can Homer teach us about force? How does Frederick Douglass deal with the massive blind spots of America’s Founding Fathers? And what can we learn from modern authors who engage passionately and profoundly with the past? How can Ursula K. Le Guin show us truths about Virgil’s female characters that Virgil himself could never have seen? In Breaking Bread with the Dead, a gifted scholar draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with texts from across the ages, including the work of Anita Desai, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Amitav Ghosh, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Italo Calvino, and many more.By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.

    But as pets became more common, human attitudes toward animals evolved steadily. An unconventional duchess defended their intellect in her writings. A gentleman scientist believed that animals should be treated with compassion. And with the concentrated efforts of an eccentric Scots barrister and a flamboyant Irishman, the lives of beasts—and, correspondingly, men and women—began to change. Kathryn Shevelow, a respected eighteenth-century scholar, gives us the dramatic story of the bold reformers who braved attacks because they sympathized with the plight of creatures everywhere. More than just a history, this is an eye-opening exploration into how our feelings toward animals reveal our ideas about ourselves, God, mercy, and nature. Accessible and lively, For the Love of Animals is a captivating cultural narrative that takes us into the lives of animals—and into the minds of humans—during some of history's most fascinating times.

    The book uses captivating illustrations and carefully chosen words to teach children about "the farmer’s friend”. This series is known as one of the most beautiful on the kindle. The pictures look great even in black and white and are excellent on the full color kindle. The description in the large text beneath is simple enough for early readers or for a parent to guide a child through. There are also picture captions that provide more information to talk about with your child. Alternatively, a child of any age (even the child in you) can just look at the images and appreciate their beauty. This book depicts the wonder of the world of Snakes in all its glory. Children are given a well-rounded understanding of this beautiful reptile: its anatomy, feeding habits and behavior. The following Snakes are featured: * The magnificent Anaconda * The fearsome Boa Constrictor * The majestic Cobra * The gentle Corn Snake * The social Garter * The fierce Inland Taipan * The awesome Python * The ominous Rattlesnake * The stealthy Sea Snake Get this book at this SPECIAL PRICE exclusive to the Amazon Store. *** Your child will love it - this is guaranteed.***

    Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts."The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean.The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

    THE SINNER AND THE SAINT is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story--and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There, he spent years studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of those closest to him, and literary banishment to craft an enduring classic.The germ of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT came from the sensational story of Pierre Fran�ois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egoist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Dostoevsky began creating a Russian incarnation of Lacenaire, a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas. His name would be Raskolnikov.Lacenaire shaped Raskolnikov in profound ways, but the deeper insight, as Birmingham shows, is that Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster. No. The murderer would be chilling because he wants so desperately to be good.The writing consumed Dostoevsky. As his debts and the predatory terms of his contract caught up with him, he hired a stenographer to dictate the final chapters in time. Anna Grigorievna became Dostoevsky's first reader and chief critic and changed the way he wrote forever. By the time Dostoevsky finished his great novel, he had fallen in love.Dostoevsky's great subject was self-consciousness. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT advanced a revolution in artistic thinking and began the greatest phase of Dostoevsky's career. THE SINNER AND THE SAINT now gives us the thrilling and definitive story of that triumph.

    But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?

    In the pages of MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman re-enters the Pulitzer prize-winning Maus, the modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since it was first published twenty-five years ago. Does he probe the questions that Maus most often evokes—Why the Holocaust? Why mice? Why comics?—and gives us a new and essential work about the creative process. MetaMaus includes a bonus DVD-R that provides a digitized reference copy of The Complete Maus linked to a deep archive of audio interviews with his survivor father, historical documents, and a wealth of Spiegelman’s private notebooks and sketches. Compelling and intimate, MetaMaus is poised to become a classic in its own right.

    But when she drops out of vet school to get her jockey’s license in New York, intent on coming back to Ontario to ride Chique in the Queen’s Plate in three years, he’s the obvious choice to keep an eye on the filly. Nate’s content to watch Liv go, even though he’s got similar aspirations – when he’s not talked out of them by voices from his past. His growing bond with Chique might earn him Liv’s approval and give him the fresh start he’s looking for, but that’s as involved as he’s getting with the boss’s daughter. Not that Liv’s been receptive to anything more. Liv’s determined to keep their relationship professional, no matter how much Chique draws them together. Because racetrack romances are messy…and nothing can interfere with getting Chique to the Plate.Set against the backdrop of North America’s greatest racetracks, Good Things Come is a story about the hearts of Thoroughbreds...thepeople who love them...and the allure of Canada’s most prestigious race.

    This symposium was published in Paris ten years before Joyce's work in progress was completed and the contributors were all friends or acquaintances of the author: Samuel Beckett, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams. There are also "Letters of Protest" from G.V.L. Slingsby and Vladimir Dixon.

    The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

    The Weird and the Eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The Weird and the Eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie. These two modes will be analysed with reference to the work of authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christoper Nolan.

    It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: respectively, the most influential English-language novel and poem of the century. To this day, these two works remain the titanic figures of modern literature—some would say, of modernity itself. And it was the indefatigable Pound who played a significant part in the launch of both writers’ careers. In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the accomplishments of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. We see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of Dada, and the death of Proust. Meanwhile, Hollywood transformed the nature of fame, making Charlie Chaplin the most recognizable man on the planet. Hitchcock directed his first feature, Kandinsky and Klee joined the Bauhaus, and Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the start of modern jazz. Gloriously entertaining, erudite, and idiosyncratic, this is a biography of a year, a journey through the diaries of the anthropologists, actors, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation that split the world in two.Some of the people discussed are: Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, E. M. Forster, George Gershwin, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Sergei Prokofiev, Luis Buñuel, Bertolt Brecht, Wyndham Lewis, Fritz Lang, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, Katherine Mansfield, Aleister Crowley, Bronisław Malinowski, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Nikola Tesla, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertrand Russell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Walt Disney, Lois Armstrong, Franz Kafka, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W. B. Yeats, Benito Mussolini, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, Le Corbusier, John Maynard Keynes, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Diaghilev, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, André Breton, Rudyard Kipling, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Duchamp, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Bataille, Aldous Huxley, Andrei Bely, Henri Matisse, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein

    She knows the mountains and rivers like the back of her hand, and every day she can spend exploring with her horse, Beatrice, is a great one.But, tragedy strikes and the whole family is forced to move to the sprawling, manicured estate of grandparents they’ve never met. And their Grandfather makes it no secret that he doesn’t want any of them there.The only bright spot is that there are horses everywhere and Fina soon finds herself caught up with the wild, charismatic girls who own the fancy stable next door. But will following her new dreams mean giving up on Beatrice and the family she loves?