Other books that might interest you

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  Why Marianne Faithfull Matters

  Tanya Pearson

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  First as a doe-eyed ingénue with “As Tears Go By,” then as a gravel-voiced phoenix rising from the ashes of the 1960s with a landmark punk album, Broken English, and finally as a genre-less icon, Marianne Faithfull carved her name into the history of rock ’n’ roll to chart a career spanning five decades and multiple detours. In Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, Tanya Pearson crafts a feminist account that explains the musician’s absence from the male-dominated history of the British Invasion and champions the eclectic late career that confirmed her redemption. 
   
  Putting memoir on equal footing with biographical history, Pearson writes about Faithfull as an avid fan, recovered addict, and queer musician at a crossroads. She’s also a professional historian unafraid to break from the expectations of the discipline if a “titty-centered analysis” or astrology can illuminate the work of her subject. Whether exploring Faithfull’s rise to celebrity, her drug addiction and fall from grace as spurned “muse,” or her reinvention as a sober, soulful chanteuse subverting all expectations for an aging woman in music, Pearson affirms the deep connections between listeners and creators and reveals, in her own particular way, why Marianne Faithfull matters.

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  Arthur Conan Doyle - Six of the...

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number. 
   
  Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best. 
   
  In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words. 
   
  These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master. 
   
   1 - Six of the Best - Arthur Conan Doyle - An Introduction 
  2 - Arthur Conan Doyle - An Introduction 
  3 - The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  4 - The Leather Funnel by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  5 - The Story of B 24 by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  6 - A Pastoral Horror by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  7 - The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  8 - The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Rental Person Who Does Nothing -...

  Shoji Morimoto

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  ***Now an International Bestseller!***"Distinctively Japanese musings on meaning and connection."—ObserverI'm starting a service... available for any situation in which all you want is a person to be there. Maybe there's a restaurant you want to go to, but you feel awkward going on your own.Maybe a game you want to play, but you're one person short.Or perhaps you'd like someone to keep a space in the park for your cherry blossom viewing party...Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told by his boss, "It makes no difference whether you’re here or not," and that his presence contributed nothing to the company. Morimoto began to wonder whether a person who "does nothing" could still have actual value and a place in the world. Perhaps he could turn "doing nothing" into a service? With one tweet, Rental Person was born.Rental Person provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. This book details thousands of his true-life adventures:Accompanying a divorcee to her favorite restaurantWaving goodbye to a client from the train platformSitting in the courtroom during a client’s trialSupporting a client during a difficult surgeryRental Person is dependable, nonjudgmental and committed to remaining a stranger, and the curious encounters he shares are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology.In Rental Person Who Does Nothing, Morimoto chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Joseph Conrad, Saki the...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  It may well be that Empire has raised generations of its Nation’s kin abroad.  And some, born abroad, adopted England as their home in preference to their own.  For both this lure of ‘Home’ has nourished their ambition whilst all around them stories are to be found that they, with their unique outsider’s view, can create and deliver to our ears their literary masterpieces. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The English. Born Abroad - An Introduction 
  2 - The Informer by Joseph Conrad 
  3 - The Interlopers by Saki the pseudonym for H H Munro 
  4 - The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling 
  5 - Major Wilbraham by Hugh Walpole 
  6 - A Little Dinner At Timmin's by William Makepeace Thackeray 
  7 - The Story of the RipplingTrain by Mary Louisa Molesworth 
  8 - The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railroad by Baroness Emmuska Orczy 
  9 - A Little Holiday by Oswald Sickert 
  10 - A Resurrection by H B Marriott Watson 
  11 - Amour Dure - Part 1 by Violet Paget writing as Vernon Lee 
  12 - Amour Dure - Part 2 by Violet Paget writing as Vernon Lee

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  South of the Slot - Iconic...

  Jack London

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  John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.   
   
  His father, William Chaney, was living with Flora Wellman when she became pregnant.  Chaney insisted she have an abortion.  Flora's response was to turn a gun on herself.  Although her wounds were not severe the trauma made her temporarily deranged. 
   
  In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. 
   
  Jack worked hard at several jobs, sometimes 12-18 hours a day, but his dream was university.  He studied hard and borrowed the money to enrol in the summer of 1896 at the University of California in Berkeley. 
   
  In 1897, at 21, Jack searched out newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and for the name of his biological father. He wrote to Chaney, then living in Chicago, who claimed he could not be Jack’s father because he was impotent and casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men.  Jack, devastated by the response, quit Berkeley and went to the Klondike. Other accounts suggest that his dire finances presented Jack with the excuse he needed to leave. 
   
  In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing but also accumulated many health problems, including scurvy, which together with hip and leg problems he would carry for the rest of his life. 
   
  During the late 1890's Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full blown novels. 
   
  By 1904 Jack had married, fathered two children and was now in the process of divorcing.  A stint as a reporter on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was equal amounts trouble and experience. But that experience was always put to good use in a continuing and remarkable output of work. 
   
  In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge who at last was a soul and companion who brought him some semblance of peace despite his advancing alcoholism and his incurable wanderlust. 
   
  Twelve years later Jack had amassed both wealth and a literary reputation through such classics as ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ and many others. He had a reputation as a social activist and was a tireless friend of the workers.   
   
  Jack London died suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and uremia, aged only 40, on November 22nd 1916 at his property in Glen Elen in California 
   
  In ‘South of the Slot’ Jack London reveals yet another facet of his writing talents. In turn of the Century San Francisco, a Professor of Sociology explores the working-class neighbourhoods gradually revealing an alter-ego with his Union loving personality and name.  The question is which is his real character.

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  White Fang

  Jack London

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  White Fang is a novel by American author Jack London  — and the name of the book's eponymous character, a wild wolfdog. First serialized in Outing magazine, it was published in 1906. 
  The story details White Fang's journey to domestication in Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush. It is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best-known work, The Call of the Wild, which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.
  Much of White Fang is written from the viewpoint of the titular canine character, enabling London to explore how animals view their world and how they view humans. White Fang examines the violent world of wild animals and the equally violent world of humans. The book also explores complex themes including morality and redemption.
  The story begins before the wolf-dog hybrid is born, with two men and their sled dog team on a journey to deliver the coffin of Lord Alfred to a remote town named Fort McGurry in the higher area of the Yukon Territory. The men, Bill and Henry, are stalked by a large pack of starving wolves over the course of several days. Finally, after all of their dogs and Bill have been eaten, four more teams find Henry trying to escape from the wolves; the wolf pack scatters when they hear the large group of people coming...

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