Chen Jiru (1558-1639)

Focussing on Chen Jiru's writings, this study explores the various ways that Chen advertised himself to prospective readers, and the way that commercial and political interests used his personae for their own ends, from the seventeenth century to the present.

How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the Roller Coaster of Suspense

Writing is all about creating an experience for the reader. Whether you're giving them a brain-teasing puzzle or an adrenaline-soaked emotional roller coaster-ride, this book helps you shape your fiction to create maximum enjoyment for your readers.Now you can learn the craft directly from one of the most respected contemporary writers in the field, Carolyn What, winner of multitudinous awards and nominations. What knows what editors want, and shows you how to achieve your writing an publishing goals. How To Write Killer Fiction is a handbook that no writer of mystery or suspense can afford to be without.

Abelard and Heloise - The Letters and Other Writings

The most comprehensive compilation of the works of Abelard and Heloise ever presented in a single volume in English, The Letters and Other Writings features an accurate and stylistically faithful new translation of both The Calamities of Peter Abelard and the remarkable letters it sparked between the ill-fated twelfth-century philosopher and his brilliant former student and lover -- an exchange whose intellectual passion, formal virtuosity, and psychological drama distinguish it as one of the most extraordinary correspondences in European history.

Albion - The Origins of the English Imagination

Nobody is better equipped to write a book about the roots of the English imagination than the award-winning novelist, biographer, poet and critic Peter Ackroyd, and in Albion he has distilled a lifetime's work into a book of monumental proportions. This is a dense, poetic book about the origins of the English literary imagination, stretching from Beowulf through Shakespeare to the novels of Virginia Woolf and the music of Vaughan Williams.

A History of Russia

In order to assure brevity and clarity without missing the spirit of Russia or losing a sense of the complexities of life (ever-present complexities which can be unraveled only in retrospect by historians), particular care has been taken to supplement the text with appropriate appendices. The chronological table, for instance, divulges by the very sequence of events the logical and sometimes illogical course of his- tory and its influence on our lives. The maps reveal better than any description the causes and results of major trends. The index provides a biographical dictionary and a glossary of foreign terms, particularly useful.