"Marley was dead, to begin with." Why does the most beloved of Christmas books open with a death? What has death to do with Christmas and New Years, and with Dickens's Christmas books and stories over his entire life? This book starts at the Paris Morgue and takes Dickens through his Christmas experiences from childhood and beyond, his celebrations of the season, and the sorrows that he often reviews in the New Year. Robert L. Patten weaves together Dickens's life, career, writings, journa...

Dickens' rise to fame and his world-wide popularity were by no means inevitable. He started out with no clear career in mind, drifting in and out of the theatre, journalism and editing before finding unexpected success as a creative writer. Taking account of everything known about Dickens' apprentice years, Robert L. Patten narrates the fierce struggle Dickens then had to create an alter ego, Boz, and later to contain and extinguish him. His revision of Dickens' biography in the context of...

This interdisciplinary book honors Columbia professor and New York intellectual Carl Woodring. Chapters on Romantic and Victorian literary culture written by leading scholars in the field join in conversation with Woodring’s teachings on literature and visual art and his commentaries on American culture. A multiple-authored chapter of postscripts on the aesthetic range of Woodring’s intellectual interests across cultural disciplines, his contributions to English studies and his informing i...

This book is both a celebration of the life and career of the eminent literary scholar, critic, and journalist John Sutherland and an extension of Sutherland’s work in various fields, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, the publishing industry, and its impact upon creativity and literary puzzles. With contributions from over twenty-five distinguished critics, literary journalists and scholars, this book goes beyond merely describing Sutherland’s work. The...

Montana Stone wants to start a new life on the Gulf Coast. She left her job as a crime analyst with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department after her father was murdered during a burglary, a burglary she believes she could have prevented, and moved to White Sands, Alabama.But soon after moving to White Sands, Tana, as she is known, is called upon by White Sands Police Chief Jett Jeanrette to help with an investigation. Tana struggles to work through her feelings for Jett and t...

Montana Stone wants to start a new life on the Gulf Coast. She left her job as a crime analyst with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department after her father was murdered during a burglary, a burglary she believes she could have prevented, and moved to White Sands, Alabama.But soon after moving to White Sands, Tana, as she is known, is called upon by White Sands Police Chief Jett Jeanrette to help with an investigation. Tana struggles to work through her feelings for Jett and t...

This book traces how the student loan system has created insurmountable student debt traps for millions of student borrowers contrary to its original purpose of promoting social mobility. Today, approximately 45 million Americans hold over $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, with over 20% of borrowers in default. Student loan debt has the greatest negative impact of wealth-poor students, with Black and first-generation students less likely to attain a college degree, more likely to default...

Recognizable for his cherubic countenance and roles playing mild-mannered fathers in movies and on TV, Dick Van Patten had one of the lengthiest and most impressive track records in the acting business. As a child, Van Patten performed alongside Broadway stars such as Melvyn Douglas, Tallulah Bankhead, Alfred Lunt,and Lynn Fontanne, often winning roles over newcomers such as Marlon Brando and Roddy McDowell. He worked in radio and became a familiar face in the early days of television, ult...

Jimmy Spain is back. After the events of the first book, THE PICASSO FLOP, Jimmy and his protégé, Kat Landrigan, are competing in another World Poker Tour event in Niagara Falls. Among all the bizarre and crazy gamblers who will literally bet on anything, as well as poker players—such as a puppet, a woman who recites poetry between hands, and a Marilyn Monroe impersonator—Jimmy finds himself once again involved in a murder plot. Attempting to find a killer while concentrating on his cards ...

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. H...

With its thirty-three essays, This Impermanent Earth charts the course of the American literary response to the twentieth century’s accumulation of environmental deprivations. Arranged chronologically from 1974 to the present, the works have been culled from The Georgia Review, long considered an important venue for nonfiction among literary magazines published in the United States.The essays range in subject matter from twentieth-century examples of what was then...

Embark on the dark tale of “Sea Curse” by renowned author Robert E. Howard. Set in the rugged coastal village of Faring town, this gripping tale follows the fates of sailors John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool. They are reckless and dangerous men who are feared and admired by the people of Faring town. When they commit a heinous act against Moll Farrell's niece, the villagers are too afraid to do anything about it, allowing the men to continue their reign of terror unchecked. However, Moll Farr...