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The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister – Vol.2: The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, the Inspiration for Gentleman Jack
by Anne Lister'The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history; they changed everything. By resurrecting them and editing them with such loving attention and intelligence, Helena Whitbread has earned the gratitude of a whole generation' EMMA DONOGHUE'Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing: Anne Lister's diaries are an indispensable read' SARAH WATERSAnne Lister (1791-1840) was one of the most remarkable women of her time. Fearless and uncompromising, she wasdetermined to live life on her own terms, both financially and sexually. She wrote extensive diaries in 'crypthand', which allowed her to record her life in intimate, and sometimes explicit, detail. When they were decoded by Helena Whitbread, lesbian history was changed for ever. This is the second volume of her diaries.No Priest But Love begins in 1824. After an ill-fated love affair with a married woman, Anne Lister embarks on a journey alone to post-revolutionary Paris, a city alive with political intrigue. Here, she becomes romantically involved with a young widow, a relationship at odds with her social ambitions. Anne's efforts, firstly to extricate herself from this new 'scrape' and then to make a choice between the two women in her life, provides an absorbing sexual and social drama.'[Anne Lister's] sense of self, and self-awareness, is what makes her modern to us. She was a woman exercising conscious choice. She controlled her cash and her body. At a time when women had to marry, or be looked after by a male relative, and when all their property on marriage passed to their husband, Anne Lister not only dodged the traps of being female, she set up a liaison with another woman that enhanced her own wealth and left both of them free to live as they wished . . . The diaries gave me courage' JEANETTE WINTERSON
Fear: A Cultural History
by Joanna BourkeFear is one of the most basic and most powerful of all the human emotions. Sometimes it is hauntingly specific: flames searing patterns on the ceiling, a hydrogen bomb, a terrorist. More often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source within: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom. In this astonishing book we encounter the fears and anxieties of hundreds of British and American men, women and children. From fear of the crowd to agoraphobia, from battle experiences to fear of nuclear attack, from cancer to AIDS, this is an utterly original insight into the mindset of the twentieth century from one of most brilliant historians and thinkers of our time.
Fear: A Cultural History
by Professor Joanna BourkeFear is one of the most basic and most powerful of all the human emotions. Sometimes it is hauntingly specific: flames searing patterns on the ceiling, a hydrogen bomb, a terrorist. More often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source within: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom. In this astonishing book we encounter the fears and anxieties of hundreds of British and American men, women and children. From fear of the crowd to agoraphobia, from battle experiences to fear of nuclear attack, from cancer to AIDS, this is an utterly original insight into the mindset of the twentieth century from one of most brilliant historians and thinkers of our time.
Rape: A Hist From 1860 To Pr
by Joanna BourkeJoanna Bourke, author of the critically-acclaimed Fear, unflinchingly and controversially moves away from looking at victims to look at the rapists. She examines the nature of rape, drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence. Rape - A History looks at the perception of rape, both in the mass media and the wider public, and considers the crucial questions of treatment and punishment. Should sexual offenders be castrated? Will Freud's couch or the behaviourists' laboratory work most effectively? Particular groups of offenders such as female abusers, psychopaths and exhibitionists are given special attention here, as are potentially dangerous environments, including the home, prison, and the military. By demystifying the category of the rapist and revealing the specificities of the past, Joanna Bourke dares to consider a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the human experience.
Rape: A Hist From 1860 To Pr
by Professor Joanna BourkeJoanna Bourke, author of the critically-acclaimed Fear, unflinchingly and controversially moves away from looking at victims to look at the rapists. She examines the nature of rape, drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence. Rape - A History looks at the perception of rape, both in the mass media and the wider public, and considers the crucial questions of treatment and punishment. Should sexual offenders be castrated? Will Freud's couch or the behaviourists' laboratory work most effectively? Particular groups of offenders such as female abusers, psychopaths and exhibitionists are given special attention here, as are potentially dangerous environments, including the home, prison, and the military. By demystifying the category of the rapist and revealing the specificities of the past, Joanna Bourke dares to consider a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the human experience.
With Their Backs To The World: Portraits from Serbia - from the bestselling author of the Bookseller of Kabul
by Asne SeierstadFrom the bestselling author of THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL comes a remarkable exploration of the lives of ordinary Serbs under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic-during the dramatic events leading up to his fall, and finally in the troubled years that have followed. Asne Seierstad traveled extensively through Serbia between 1999 and 2004, following the lives of people from across the political spectrum. Her moving and perceptive account follows nationalists, Titoists, Yugonostalgics, rock stars, fugitives and poets. Seierstad brings her acclaimed attention to detail to bear on the lives of those whom she encounters in With Their Backs to the World, as she creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation made up of so many different-and often conflicting-hopes, dreams, and points of view.
With Their Backs To The World: Portraits from Serbia - from the bestselling author of the Bookseller of Kabul
by x Asne SeierstadFrom the bestselling author of THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL comes a remarkable exploration of the lives of ordinary Serbs under the regime of Slobodan Milosevic-during the dramatic events leading up to his fall, and finally in the troubled years that have followed. Asne Seierstad traveled extensively through Serbia between 1999 and 2004, following the lives of people from across the political spectrum. Her moving and perceptive account follows nationalists, Titoists, Yugonostalgics, rock stars, fugitives and poets. Seierstad brings her acclaimed attention to detail to bear on the lives of those whom she encounters in With Their Backs to the World, as she creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation made up of so many different-and often conflicting-hopes, dreams, and points of view.
A Hundred And One Days: A Baghdad Journal - from the bestselling author of The Bookseller of Kabul
by Asne SeierstadA fascinating, personal and insightful account of the Iraq war from the bestselling author of THE BOOKSELLER OF KABULIn January 2003 Åsne Seierstad entered Baghdad on a ten-day visa. She was to stay for over three months, reporting on the war and its aftermath. A Hundred and One Days is her compelling account of a city under siege, and a fascinating insight into the life of a foreign correspondent. An award-winning writer, Seierstad brilliantly details the frustrations and dangers journalists faced trying to uncover the truth behind the all-pervasive propaganda. She also offers a unique portrait of Baghdad and its people, trying to go about their daily business under the constant threat of attack. Seierstad's passionate and erudite book conveys both the drama and the tragedy of her one hundred and one days in a city at war.'Åsne Seierstad is the supreme non-fiction writer of her generation' Luke Harding
A Hundred And One Days: A Baghdad Journal - from the bestselling author of The Bookseller of Kabul
by x Asne SeierstadA fascinating, personal and insightful account of the Iraq war from the bestselling author of THE BOOKSELLER OF KABULIn January 2003 Åsne Seierstad entered Baghdad on a ten-day visa. She was to stay for over three months, reporting on the war and its aftermath. A Hundred and One Days is her compelling account of a city under siege, and a fascinating insight into the life of a foreign correspondent. An award-winning writer, Seierstad brilliantly details the frustrations and dangers journalists faced trying to uncover the truth behind the all-pervasive propaganda. She also offers a unique portrait of Baghdad and its people, trying to go about their daily business under the constant threat of attack. Seierstad's passionate and erudite book conveys both the drama and the tragedy of her one hundred and one days in a city at war.'Åsne Seierstad is the supreme non-fiction writer of her generation' Luke Harding
Dancing On the Outskirts
by Shena MackayHere is a wonderful collection of short stories by the writer known for 'the Mackay vision, suburban - as kitsch, as unexceptional, and yet as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house, its threshold radiant with tiling and stained-glass birds of paradise encased in leaded lights' - Guardian.Shena Mackay, who first came to fame before the age of twenty with two novellas, is the doyenne of the short form. In this volume of previously uncollected stories - including those read on radio - she constantly surprises with a view of the ordinary world that is not at all ordinary.A grasshopper determinedly takes up residence on a bathroom ceiling; a gecko hiding in a cupboard brings a strange sort of luck; a woman spies from a distance two older women friends after many long years and a memory of how they gallopedin the playground as Starlight Blaze and Pepperpot plays sweetly, suddenly in her mind; pigs are swaddled in blankets, looking like babies in shawls; luggage is packed with youthful hopes and ideals.She observes how people rub along and reveals the best and worst of us all: a disgruntled schoolboy and his hapless teacher conquer mountains and their antipathy for each other; a girl with green eyes and iridescent hair discovers revenge; a race to be the best mushroom-picker creates only losers; and rotten apples, in the right pair of hands, make a loving pie. Shena Mackay is a generous and keen-eyed chronicler of the everyday; she deftly brings wisdom and humour to the worlds she creates, worlds that we suddenly, excitingly see anew. She is an utterly original writer.
Old Crow (Virago Modern Classics #261)
by Shena MackayThe transition of Coral Fairweather from village beauty to village outcast begins in the short golden days of autumn with the fathering of her first child by a vagrant painter. Soon, fuelled by the suspicion and gossip of those who see, in Coral's hand-to-mouth existence and crumbling cottage, a rejection of all that is respectable, rather than the fierce pride that prevents her from seeking help from the Authorities or from the man who would love her. Spurred on by a malicious widow, the Parish Council agree to purge their neat village of this 'pariah' and her children. This bitter witch hunt speeds towards a terrifying climax in a distinctive novel enriched by crystalline images of the natural world.
An Advent Calendar (Virago Modern Classics #255)
by Shena MackayThe story begins as an ambulance pulls away from the butcher's shop, taking Mick to the hospital after he has carelessly hacked off a finger while preparing John's order. John's wife, Marguerite, and two young children are forced to live with his uncle until he can find work. Marguerite has a brief affair, an escape from the poverty and boredom of day-to-day life - and John, attempting to make amends for Mick's lost finger, is chased down by the butcher's buddies. These tumultuous events all take place during the first twenty-five days of December, leaving each character facing a Christmas of poverty, impossible love and loneliness.
A Bowl of Cherries (Virago Modern Classics #254)
by Shena MackayIn A Bowl of Cherries Shena Mackay tells the story of twin brothers whose lives are inexorably intertwined: Rex, a self-absorbed and successful writer, and Stanley, a minor poet who works as a dishwasher. Rex lives on the family estate being the older of the twins by one minute with his unhappy wife, Daphne, who writes children's books. Their overweight daughter, Daisy, lives nearby, and as a result of a guilty secret of her own, has married an overbearing, misogynist, and skinflint husband, Julian. Rex's illegitimate son, Seamus, 14, discovers Daisy quite by accident and their relationship blossoms despite the many flawed characters that surround them. He carries a family secret that proves to be devastating, but which ultimately releases his half-sister Daisy from her torments.
Babies in Rhinestones and Other Stories (Virago Modern Classics #256)
by Shena MackayIn 'Babies in Rhinestones', the Alfred Ellis School of Fine Art and the Araidne School Elliot School of Dance and Drama stand side by side, much to their proprietors' dismay. The two trade insults daily as they exchange the mail that so often ends up in the wrong letterbox. The tension increases when the owners find that they have adopted the same stray cat.Here is a wonderful collection of short stories by the writer known for 'the Mackay vision, suburban - as kitsch, as unexceptional, and yet as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house, its threshold radiant with tiling and stained-glass birds of paradise, encased in leaded lights' Guardian.
Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags: Collected Stories (Virago Modern Classics #257)
by Shena MackayIn stories as intriguing as their titles - 'Pink Cigarettes', 'Electric Blue Damsels', 'Other People's Bathrobes' - Shena Mackay demonstrates her uncanny ability to expose the menace of everyday life with humour and haunting accuracy. Harnessing Mackay's darkly comic vision, an astonishing originality and vibrant prose, these remarkable short works provide 'novel-worthy dimensions in a few pages' (New York Times Book Review).
The World's Smallest Unicorn and Other Stories (Virago Modern Classics #267)
by Shena MackayHere is a wonderful collection of short stories by the writer known for 'the Mackay vision, suburban - as kitsch, as unexceptional, and yet as rich in history and wonder as a plain Victorian terrace house, its threshold radiant with tiling and stained-glass birds of paradise, encased in leaded lights' Guardian.
The Atmospheric Railway (Virago Modern Classics #264)
by Shena MackayShena Mackay is one of the very best short-story writers in the world. The Atmospheric Railway contains not only thirteen brilliant new stories, but a selection of twenty-three more from her previous collections, making it a delight for her existing admirers and the perfect introduction to her work for newcomers.
The Laughing Academy (Virago Modern Classics #265)
by Shena MackayThe Laughing Academy is as witty, black and compelling as anything Shena Mackay has written. From antiques fayres to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, geriatric wards to Crystal Palace, this collection offers a journey around the bizarre yet familiar characters and settings that Mackay has made her own. There are Roy and Muriel Rowley, the fun-running charity-junkies who give blood by the gallon (offending their daughter's religious principles); we meet Gerald Creedy who only loves three beings - his twin brother, Harold, and his two tortoises, Percy and Bysshe - and the mysterious lodger Madame Alphonsine who has the strange powers to make things (including tortoises) disappear; and then there is the rather arrogant bestselling novelist who gives a reading at a women's bookshop only to find, to her horror, that two of her old schoolfriends are in the audience.
Redhill Rococo (Virago Modern Classics #262)
by Shena MackayThe young Luke Ribbons, a vicar's son and lately a guest of Her Majesty, arrives into the rackety Slattery household as a lodger, and falls irrevocably in love with redoubtable and beautiful Pearl, mother of four and grandmother. Pearl, balanced between respectability and ruin and bruised by her baroque past, is unwilling, to his despair, to distinguish him from the throng of dispossessed youth trooping through her household. Luke enlists the services of the local, highly respectable and provincial witch doctor, but things don't go quite as he had planned . . .
Dunedin (Virago Modern Classics #258)
by Shena MackayNew Zealand, 1909. After weeks at sea the new minister, Jack Mackenzie, arrives from Scotland with his unhappy wife and children in tow. A keen naturalist, he is more enthralled by the botanical - and carnal - delights of Dunedin than in the wellbeing of his flock. In London, eighty years later, Jack Mackenzie's descendants are middle-aged, searching for a way out of their loneliness. Olive, embittered with her loveless life, steals a baby from a crowded tube; William, distraught at the death of a pupil, abandons his job as headmaster and struggles to fill his empty days. Jay Pascal, a young New Zealand vagrant of mysterious parentage arrives in London, looking for a place where he might belong.
The Orchard on Fire (Virago Modern Classics #266)
by Shena Mackay'What made the orchard miraculous was an abandoned railway carriage, set down as if by magic, its wheels gone, anchored by long grass and nettles. Ruby and I stared at it and each other . . . dark-windowed, out of place in a thicket of thorns, it was the perfect hide-out, house, the camp of our dreams'When April's parents move from London to rural Kent she makes her first best friend. With flame-haired, fearless Ruby, April shares secrets, dares and laughter. But Ruby has secrets of her own -bruises that she hides.Also seeking April's friendship is old Mr Greenidge, immaculate in his linen suit, with eyes like blue glass. He follows her around the village with his beguiling dachshund, and wants to learn everything about her.
The Artist's Widow (Virago Modern Classics #263)
by Shena MackayThe Artist's Widow is the story of the good, the bad and the untalented. It begins on a hot August evening in Mayfair, at a private viewing of the "Last Paintings" of John Crane. Among those present are Crane's widow, Lyris, also a painter; her friend Clovis Ingram, a middle-aged bookseller; Zoe, a beautiful young television filmmaker; and Lyris's great-nephew Nathan Pursey, a boorish young conceptual artist on the make.None of them realizes that the evening will change their lives forever.The Artist's Widow is a novel about the nature of the artistic impulse - about friendship, betrayal, courage and cowardice. It is also a London novel, exploring the mental and physical geography of the city in all its variety.
Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
by Barbara TaylorA new edition of Barbara Taylor's classic book, with a new introduction.In the early nineteenth century, radicals all over Europe and America began to conceive of a 'New Moral World', and struggled to create their own utopias, with collective family life, communal property, free love and birth control. In Britain, the visionary ideals of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, attracted thousands of followers, who for more than a quarter of a century attempted to put theory into practice in their own local societies, at rousing public meetings, in trade unions and in their new Communities of Mutual Association.Barbara Taylor's brilliant study of this visionary challenge recovers the crucial connections between socialist aims and feminist aspirations. In doing so, it opens the way to an important re-interpretation of the socialist tradition as a whole, and contributes to the reforging of some of those early links between feminism and socialism.
Eve & The New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
by Barbara TaylorA new edition of Barbara Taylor's classic book, with a new introduction.In the early nineteenth century, radicals all over Europe and America began to conceive of a 'New Moral World', and struggled to create their own utopias, with collective family life, communal property, free love and birth control. In Britain, the visionary ideals of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, attracted thousands of followers, who for more than a quarter of a century attempted to put theory into practice in their own local societies, at rousing public meetings, in trade unions and in their new Communities of Mutual Association.Barbara Taylor's brilliant study of this visionary challenge recovers the crucial connections between socialist aims and feminist aspirations. In doing so, it opens the way to an important re-interpretation of the socialist tradition as a whole, and contributes to the reforging of some of those early links between feminism and socialism.
The Heart Goes Last
by Margaret AtwoodBy the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias GraceStan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine's job at a dive bar, they're increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs and in a rather desperate state. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience - a 'social experiment' offering stable jobs and a home of their own - they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell. At first, all is well. But slowly, unknown to the other, Stan and Charmaine develop a passionate obsession with their counterparts, the couple that occupy their home when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire take over, and Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.