Hey Yeah Right Get A Life

"A string of linked stories about millennial women at work, at home and on holiday. These ten stories display a multiplicity of London life glimpsed from buses, trains and the occasional taxi, with the Thames as a diamond-dusted ribbon seen from an aeroplane coming into Heathrow; also from behind buggyloads of babies, and from suburban back gardens with their barbecues and dawn revelations. There are wine-fuelled confidences between two teachers in a Polish cafe in South Kensington, waves of grief and rudeness during a performance of Orphee at Covent Garden, and a dreadful anniversary dinner for a timber merchant and his wife somewhere in south London. There is a corporate Burns Night in a Mayfair hotel where poetry and money collide catastrophically, and an enormous air disaster which starts by destroying the glasshouses at Kew and ends by obliterating the placid domestic streets for miles around. One woman passes on the secret of wurstigkeit to another in a shopping trip of unbridled sensuousness in the heart of Spitalfields. Seventeen-year-old Jade Beaumont walks towards the jewelled narrative of her future, fiercely resolved not to be like her mother Nicola, who has a succes

Hilarious, dark, and thoroughly entertaining, Getting a Life proves Helen Simpson to be one of the finest observers of women on the edge. Set in and around contemporary London, these nine stories explore both the blisses and irritations of domestic life. An ambitious teenager vows never to settle for any of the adult lives she sees around her. Two old friends get tipsy at a small cafe and end up revealing more than they intended. In a boutique so exclusive that entrance requires a password, a frazzled careerwoman explores the anesthetizing effect of highly impractical clothing. And in the mesmerizing title story, a mother of three takes life one day at a time, while pushing the ominous question of whether she wants to firmly to one side.

The short story is moving from relative neglect to a central position in the curriculum; as a teaching tool, it offers students a route into many complex areas, including critical theory, gender studies, postcolonialism and genre. This book offers a practical guide to the short story in the classroom, covering all these fields and more.

The story of how women's lives, loves, and dreams have been re-shaped since 1950, the year of Walt Disney's Cinderella and a time when teenage girls dreamed of marriage, Mr Right, and happy endings... Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control - and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale. This book is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013 - a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women?

The first major collection of essays on the contemporary British short story cycle, this volume offers in-depth explorations of the genre by comparing its strategies for creating coherence with those of the novel and the short story collection, inquiring after the ties that bind individual short stories into a cycle. A section on theory approaches the form from the point of view of genre theory, cognitive literary studies, and book studies. It is followed by investigations of hitherto neglected aspects of the generic tradition of the British short story cycle and how they relate to the contemporary outlook of the form. Readings of individual contemporary cycles, illustrating the form’s multifaceted uses from the presentation of sexual identities to politics and trauma, make up the third and most substantial part of the volume, placing its focus squarely on the past decades. Unique in its combination of a focus on the literary traditions, politics and markets of the UK with a thorough examination of the genre’s manifold formal and thematic potentials, the volume explores what is at the heart of the short story cycle as a literary form: the constant negotiation between unity and separateness, collective and individual, of coherence and autonomy.

This volume brings together a selection of the papers and round tables delivered at the 39th AEDEAN Conference, held at the University of Deusto in November 2015. The essays in On the Move: Glancing Backwards to Build a Future in English Studies often begin with typically-academic gestures such as retrieving a classic text and finding new ways of studying its genre or characterization; or remarking how certain ungrammatical constructions have gone frequently unnoticed —even in well-known texts— for various reasons; or entangling oneself in contentions about the adequacy of dissecting a literary text or linguistic problem by using innovative analytical tools. In all cases, though, there is the intention of putting forth certain views and notions that will help future scholars to deal in a better light with the dilemmas regularly encountered in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. The book opens with three essays by professors Bartholomae, Pullum and Río, who demonstrate not only their mastery in their respective subjects but also their ability to tailor their contents to multifarious audiences. The next two sections represent the main body of the e-book, with nearly forty contributions on both literature and cultural studies (Part II) and language and linguistics (Part III). These short academic pieces are a representative showcase of the research being done lately in the different areas of expertise. The last section of the volume gathers together the results of four research projects dealing with such engaging topics as postcolonial crime fiction or forgotten texts by Anglo writers about the Spanish Civil War. It is hard to think of any potential reader schooled in English Studies who will not find something suitable to their interests and tastes in this volume.

Essays tracing the evolving relationship between British women writers and the short story genre from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.

Ever since Dad died, Kelly and her sister, Sasha, have wished they could have him back again. One day, to their amazement, he does return--as a ghost! He does Kelly's homework, gets the new boy at school to sit next to her, and even helps in her soccer games. Kelly knows she should do these things for herself, but what's a girl to do when her dad's a ghost?

This selection of 45 stories, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Shaun Tan, shows the range of short fiction in the past 150 years. This third edition includes more works from the past 20 years and a greater representation of American authors; new to this edition are works by Katherine Anne Porter, Grace Paley, Donald Barthelme, Edward P. Jones, Gish Jen, and George Saunders, among others. Stories are organized chronologically, annotated, and prefaced by engaging short introductions. Also included is a glossary of basic critical terms.

Enjoy Helen Simpson’s sharply funny, humane take on the everyday joys and struggles of motherhood. Welcome to motherhood – a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Here is a land where men and women, once carefree and engrossed in work and sex, now try to solve age-old arguments and search fruitlessly for another hour in the day. Perhaps you know this land well, or perhaps you’re entering it for the first time – either way, you need these honest funny humane stories from an expert guide. Selected from Helen Simpson’s short story collections Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life and Constitutional. VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Language by Xiaolu Guo Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard Eating by Nigella Lawson Drinking by John Cheever