A bold new account of how celebrity worksWhy do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive?In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break...

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer cul...

Since 2012, Public Books has championed a new kind of community for intellectual engagement, discussion, and action. An online magazine that unites the best of the university with the openness of the internet, Public Books is where new ideas are debuted, old facts revived, and dangerous illusions dismantled. Here, young scholars present fresh thinking to audiences outside the academy, accomplished authors weigh in on timely issues, and a wide range of readers encounter th...

On Election Day in 2016, it seemed unthinkable to many Americans that Donald Trump could become president of the United States. But the victories of the Obama administration hid from view fundamental problems deeply rooted in American social institutions and history. The election’s consequences drastically changed how Americans experience their country, especially for those threatened by the public outburst of bigotry and repression. Amid the deluge of tweets and breaking news stories that...

When the boatman ferrying souls of the dead across the river is on holiday, we linger on the far shore of hell, sweat and study the terrain. For that reason we move slow motion through the novel, a frieze of images projected by memory and desire, ghosts haunting the past activated by the imminence of the future. Like an ancient fable the story unwinds on that far shore, who will be plunged into darkness, who will survive? As one eye glances quickly at the past, the other scanning ahead, Th...

A tradition on the nature of consciousness offers a platform to build an ascent to the revelations of divine wisdom, mysteries as irrelevant to the molecules and atoms of science as they are to the assumptions of psychology. It is a systematic analysis based on presumptions of faith in God and the determination to make that faith deeper and deeper, based in fact, on the longing and hunger of the soul to know its source, its origin, to merge in a blissful union of one with One. We turn to G...

From the early sixties to the mid-eighties this highly reflective novel, set frequently in downtown Toronto, traces events in the lives of Jennie Weber and Bill Corelli, the protagonists whose story imprints itself against this unambiguous skyline. Jennie devotes herself to supporting Bill’s career as a musician, a classical musician who is suddenly caught by the delirium of performance in a famous rock band, with revolutionizing consequences for both of them. The narrator, occasionally be...

This is the voyage of the soul which moves in its own direction, away from the world to planes of inner light where truth is its own resonance and grace a flood of bliss. We have our own mystery locked in the secrets of the soul, secrets which can be told, although the mystery will unfold only in revelation, the experience which comes as its own verification. Here we are not talking about anything miraculous, just the extraordinary, sometimes even the ordinary, the confirmation of what we ...

Not revelation, but the accent, the flavor of revelation, this commentary offers a description or analysis of the mysteries at the heart of Sufi experience. The true study of Sufism does not begin in a book or in scholarly investigations because this is an inner pursuit, a path which lies within that must be examined experientially by anyone who has a hunger to know what must be known, and that translated means a hunger for God and His truth. Some talk of losing their faith, some talk of n...

This audiobook narrated by Olivia Vinall provides a bold new account of how celebrity worksWhy do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive?In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for be...

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work ...

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.Victorian London was a world where long-st...