Powerful...Poignant...Inspiring As a child growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Gregory Marshall was enamored with the fast life. Money, women and cars were the things to have and Greg was determined to get them-by any means necessary. It wasn't long before the innocent youngster had turned into a cold-hearted gangster known around town simply as G Man. His ruthless life of crime made him a legend in South Central LA-and the go-to man for everyone from Tupac Shakur to the notorious Mon...

In his latest book, Marshall Gregory begins with the premise that our lives are saturated with stories, ranging from magazines, books, films, television, and blogs to the words spoken by politicians, pastors, and teachers. He then explores the ethical implication of this nearly universal human obsession with narratives. Through careful readings of Katherine Anne Porter’s "The Grave," Thurber’s "The Catbird Seat," as well as David Copperfield and Wuthering Heights, Gregory...

Farspace 2 is, at times, darker, more cautionary and less care-free than its predecessor. It is an exploration of the dangers of the future that we will be challenged with, should our species be so fortunate to reach that distant land. There are stories about control—by entities that want to harm or protect us. Stories about exploration—not the happy, "everything is wonderful out there and all will be great if we only go" stories, but rather the "yes it's dangerous out there, and we can ge...

Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader brings together the work of contemporary scholars, teachers, and writers into lively discussion on the moral role of literature and the relationship between aesthetics, art, and ethics. Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex...

′It is scarcely possible to imagine a truly educated person who cannot read well. Yet it is not clear how or even if courses in literature actually work. How can teachers of English help students in their developmental journey toward becoming skillful readers and educated persons? This is the complex question that Chambers and Gregory address in Teaching and Learning English Literature.The authors consider practical matters such as course design and student assessm...

Marshall Gregory argues that teachers at the university and high school levels can achieve teaching excellence by grounding their teaching in pedagogical theory that takes into account students' abilities and the ultimate goals of teaching: to develop students' capacities for thought, reflection, questioning, and engagement to their fullest extent.

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “mercilessly entertaining” (Vanity Fair) instant classic “about the nature of identity and the terrible secrets that can survive and thrive in even the most intimate relationships” (Lev Grossman, Time “One of the Best Books of the Decade”)—now featuring never-before-published deleted scenesTHE NEW YORK TIMES’S BEST THRILLER OF THE CENTURY • ONE OF TIME'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ...

"Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." **—David Brooks, New York TimesHow to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we’re not as good at thinking as we assume—but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life.**As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jaco...

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the wi...

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good...

Humour has been discovered in every known human culture and thinkers have discussed it for over two thousand years. Humour can serve many functions; it can be used to relieve stress, to promote goodwill among strangers, to dissipate tension within a fractious group, to display intelligence, and some have even claimed that it improves health and fights sickness. In this Very Short Introduction Noel Carroll examines the leading theories of humour including The Superiority Theory and...

Accessible, entertaining, anecdotal. A good introduction to issues in contemporary civics as well as a measured and thoughtful response to major themes and figures in cultural studies.Civility in politics is a subject throughout, and analyses of both Obama's rhetoric and the use of lowest-common-denominator insults in public debate will be well-timed going into the 2012 election campaignNot just formal essays: some are dialogues, some personal meditations, some direct addre...