Hannah And The Homunculus

Homunculus, a rag doll brought to life by a word, steals Hannah's ability to say "no," which leaves her unable to stop her family from giving her oatmeal for breakfast or piling on unpleasant chores.

AV2 Fiction Readalong by Weigl brings you timeless tales of mystery, suspense, adventure, and the lessons learned while growing up. These celebrated children’s stories are sure to entertain and educate while captivating even the most reluctant readers. Log on to www.av2books.com, and enter the unique book code found on page 2 of this book to unlock an extra dimension to these beloved tales. Hear the story come to life as you read along in your own book.

Harking back to the turn of the last century, this early reader is sure to charm students, teachers, and parents alike. In a compact format, The Michigan Reader features poems, short stories, and word games to involve students while educating and encouraging them about their state. Delicate, full-color pencil illustrations by K.L. (Kate) Darnell highlight author Kathy-jo Wargin's enchanting tales of Michigan's heroes (from the fur traders to Sojourner Truth), familiar sights (lighthouses and ships on the great waters), animals and products, with plenty of fun and nonsense in-between to engage young readers!

"I am convinced, " says Jake Silkstone, the hypochondriac narrator of Clive Sinclair's still provocative novel, "that if Rabbi Nathan hadn't tried to rape Helga, our German au pair, during the course of my barmitzvah celebrations at the Café Royal on the evening of 21 May 1961, things would have turned out very differently...." In the event, "things", as far as Jake is concerned, have been turning out differently since long before the night of Rabbi Nathan's folly. Sharing a birthday with a the modern State of Israel, son of the man whose deep-penetration passes on the football field are rumoured to have inspired the guerrilla warfare tactics of Orde Wingate, chief fan and chronicler of the all-Jewish Wingate Football Club, adolescent blackmailer of the desirable Helga, and latterly literary editor of the Jewish Voice -Jake Silkstone's life has been marked by the finger of destiny, if not by the finger of the Lord. As things progress from worse to terrible in a world only slightly madder than our own, Jake Silkstone becomes the unwitting cause of the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon and finally victim of a blood libel -the accusation of ritual murder, England's special contribution to antisemitism. Clive Sinclair's dazzling, funny and ultimately serious novel reaches a climax that launches the reader into vertiginous orbit spinning between the twin suns of fiction and reality. "In Blood Libels, Clive Sinclair has assembled the Jewish anomaly: at odds with the Old Judaism, ambivalent towards the new Zionism. The old and new mythologies about Jewishness produce an irreconcilable conflict: within Jacob Silkstone, in the State of Israel and throughout the world. More funny than sad, more ironic than tragic, the novel presents the story, rather than the history, of statelessness." TLS "The blurred sense of where reality begins and fantasy stops (or vice versa) gives Blood Libels an immediacy and an edge that stimulates the reader's imagination... The novel cracks with fast, funny, farcical incidents, accidents, coincidences, and inconsequential events which nevertheless, hang together monstrously to change the world." The Scotsman

On art and high tech.

In Leaves from the Garden of Eden, Howard Schwartz, a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award, has gathered together one hundred of the most astonishing and luminous stories from Jewish folk tradition. Just as Schwartz's award-winning book Tree of Souls collected the essential myths of Jewish tradition, Leaves from the Garden of Eden collects one hundred essential Jewish tales. As imaginative as the Arabian Nights, these stories invoke enchanted worlds, demonic realms, and mystical experiences. The four most popular types of Jewish tales are gathered here--fairy tales, folktales, supernatural tales, and mystical tales--taking readers on heavenly journeys, lifelong quests, and descents to the underworld. There is a dybbuk lurking in a well, a book that comes to life, and a world where Lilith, the Queen of Demons, seduces the unsuspecting. Here too are Jewish versions of many of the best-known tales, including "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "Rapunzel." Schwartz's retelling of one of these stories, "The Finger," inspired Tim Burton's film Corpse Bride.

From celebrated South African novelist and playwright Craig Higginson, an international literary tale of loss and love. South African playwright Hannah Meade arrives in London for the opening night of her new play. She has arranged to meet Pierre, the student she was in love with when she taught English in Paris. During their time together, they lied their way towards truths they were too young and inexperienced to endure. Perhaps this time they will have a second chance. As the reader is drawn from contemporary London back to Paris on the eve of the war in Iraq, the mystery of past events is brought to vivid life in a series of dramatic, intriguing and deeply moving encounters. Written in layered, stark prose, The White Room lays bare many of our assumptions about language, identity, memory, loss and love.

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility’s ‘Man of Feeling’, the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters.