Publisher: epf
Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The story is framed as a puppet play, and the narrator, despite being an authorial voice, is somewhat unreliable.
“A raw and honest journey of addiction, love, trauma, and redemption—grounded in a deep love of place and all things mustang. The best memoirs reveal the deeply personal in order to see the larger world with renewed clarity and insight—this is one such book. As Wilder moves from heroin to horses, we see a substantive journey of recovery and strength—and ultimately, of resilience.” —LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Stars Go Blue “For too long, the lone cowboy myth has corralled the American West in the barbed wires of dominion and destruction. Tangled in that telling are women and mustangs—their wildness, togetherness, and vulnerability. In Desert Chrome, Wilder bucks against a story as desiccated as the deserts she has dwelled in—kicking hard enough to free what was bound, to redeem what was broken. Listen now, to the thundering of hearts and hooves. They’re coming for us, at last.” —AMY IRVINE, author of Air Mail and Desert Cabal “Desert Chrome journeys through parched valleys, on wild rivers, and into deep rock canyons on a unique quest. In this authentic, hard-won account of her life, Wilder finds the warm, true hearts she’s been seeking and that deserve our humanity, healing, and a hell of a lot better future than they’ve been dealt. There’s a quiet heroine at the center of this story, yes, pointing toward a beautiful world. It can be ours if we’ll love better, lean closer, and listen to the voices, like Wilder’s own, well worth heeding from birth.” —REBECCA LAWTON, author of The Oasis This Time “A powerful coming-of-age story, into the age of a woman’s strongest power, when, with complete awareness of her past, she can, with might and strength, will the future before her. Wilder writes with all the love, wisdom, and courage it takes to make positive changes for the western landscape, horses, and readers.” —CMARIE FUHRMAN, author of Camped Beneath the DamShow book
Girl Archaeologist recounts Alice Kehoe's life, begun in an era very different from the twenty-first century in which she retired as an honored elder archaeologist. She persisted against entrenched patriarchy in her childhood, at Harvard University, and as she did fieldwork with her husband in the northern plains. A senior male professor attempted to quash Kehoe's career by raping her. Her Harvard professors refused to allow her to write a dissertation in archaeology. Universities paid her less than her male counterparts. Her husband refused to participate in housework or childcare. Working in archaeology and in the histories of American First Nations, Kehoe published a series of groundbreaking books and articles. Although she was denied a conventional career, through her unconventional breadth of research and her empathy with First Nations people she gained a wide circle of collaborators and colleagues. Throughout her career Kehoe found and fostered a sisterhood of feminists—strong, bright women archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians who have been essential to the field. Girl Archaeologist is the story of how one woman pursued a professional career in a male-dominated field during a time of great change in American middle-class expectations for women.Show book
"The highlights of my extraordinary journey with Mr Clarkson included pizza with Harry and Wills; dancing with Mick Jagger on the private island of Mustique (Mick had to pull me up after, shamefully, I could not recover from the twist!); and having happy birthday sung to me by Brian Ferry and Richard E. Grant. I was asked out by Hugh Grant (and went!); partied at what I called Jimmy Carr’s celebtastic weekly house parties attended by Sir Elton John, James Corden and the like; and, at Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch’s engagement party, I received the ultimate compliment on my outfit from the Dame Joan Collins. The adventures, laughter, drama and excitement were neverending. Party after party, celeb after celeb, private villas, palaces, MPs and royalty adorned our crazy life on this road less travelled. From the low-budget, dark, smoke- and fume-filled halls of Earls Court Exhibition Centre and the NEC in Birmingham, where the highlights of our nights out were a good curry and gallons of beer followed by ridiculous games of girl-on-girl arm wrestling and the Celebrity Loo Roll Challenge – this entailed Clarkson, Hammond, May or The Stig having to return from the bathroom with loo roll tucked down their trousers, trailing a length of loo paper from cubicle to table without it breaking – Jeremy ascended to great heights, both in his professional career and his personal life. So too did our relationship, leading us both into a social circle that most can only dream of." In The Wonderful World of Jeremy Clarkson, Phillipa Sage shares her continuing adventures – the ongoing highs, lows and constant mayhem – she shared for so many years with Clarkson and his fellow presenters, Hammond and May, some of which she had begun to detail in her first book, Off Road with Clarkson, Hammond and May.Show book
Dawn Cogger’s memoir, Womb to Tomb to Womb, provides fodder for life’s journey, a journey with unimaginable positive changes. Her story demonstrates how our life journey and its teachings are unique for each of us. Her life starts with sporadic Christian teachings, and contrary messages that belief in God is not acceptable, her behaviour often unacceptable. Her love of nature brings her solace and inspiration. She shares her hunger for prayer and a relationship with God. The bold, yet gentle book of life memories starts as a child, travails through her moments of desperation, to a seasoned woman, nurse, spiritual director and writer. It will touch your heart, inviting transformation. Her memoir includes her struggle with the deaths of two young patients. She considered marriage to be a life-long commitment, and found it wasn’t. She went to therapy more than once. Dawn seeks and receives spiritual direction. She also walks the contemplative discernment process through the education of providing spiritual direction. As you witness her life, you’ll see her major losses turn into her gifts. Ageing and the virus COVID-19, at times seen as insurmountable challenges, bring about a grateful, inclusive, energized being. She shows the joys and woes of our lives have energy to foster: healing of a broken heart, a fulfilling relationship with God, and a life open to being true to our authentic selves.Show book
A Transatlantic Adventure Fueled by Tea and Hedgerow Fruit When American Claire Craig Evans married a charming British man, there was a cost for the snappy banter and countless offers of tea: she had to uproot life as she knew it and relocate to the UK. Who wouldn’t want to move to an enchanted island where mysterious women with dewy complexions made jam in thatched cottages with millennia-old lichen attached? Sure, experienced American expats offered nuggets of wisdom (“Bring over a lifetime supply of taco seasoning!”) but they weren’t even mild comfort as Claire tried to avoid death, jail, and wayward sheep while learning to navigate zebra crossings and drive on the “wrong” side of the road. The allure of a jet-setter lifestyle vanished as fast as Air India sent her Samsonite to Delhi instead of London Heathrow. Would more tea help her figure out how long she’d been wearing the single pair of underwear in her possession? (That was the jetlag talking. They do have underwear in the UK, too.) Fans of Bridget Jones and Bill Bryson alike will enjoy High Tea and the Low Down, a keenly-observed memoir full of laugh-out-loud moments as Claire experiences the reality of English living. If she couldn’t even pass a pub quiz, how would she ever pass the infamous Life in the UK test, the high-stakes hurdle required to stay on British soil (and with her husband) indefinitely?Show book
This debut collection by Yeo Wei Wei explores the realms between private selves, past and present, through vivid and haunting motifs—a singing bird, a lost soul in a yellow umbrella, an ivory carving, the diary of an ex-boyfriend's father. Revealing the regrets, obsessions, loss and sorrow of events in everyday life, These Foolish Things &Other Stories is a compelling piece of work ready to haunt, delight and touch its readers. A wife returns home to find that her husband has remarried ... An old woman in a nursing home is visited by a mynah that sings a Beatles song ... An artist remembers the time he was harangued by rambutans, magoes and other fruits in his studio ... “No word is out of place in Yeo Wei Wei’s exacting prose. The reader’s expectations and positions of empathy are put to the test in ways that both delight and shatter the heart.” -Cyril Wong, author of Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light and The Dictator's Eyebrow “Yeo Wei Wei weaves a purgatorial web of men and women caught between guilt, loss and unbearable longing. Her stories are intelligent, haunting, carefully composed yet deeply felt.” -Clarissa Oon, arts editor, The Straits Times “Yeo Wei Wei is set on uncovering whole realms between private past and present and between private selves; in the process, she justifies the incidence of art. Let each tale here walk your mind as though it were a painting -Gwee Li Sui, literary critic, graphic artist and author of One Thousand and One Nights: Love PoemsShow book
