Unexpected Pleasures

Unexpected Pleasures PDF

Author: Lauryl Tucker

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-01-15

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1949979695

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What are the sources—and the effects—of the pleasurable feeling of power that genre gives us? What happens to that power when conventionality tips into parody? In this book, Lauryl Tucker explores the connection between genre parody and queerness in twentieth-century British fiction. Teasing out the parodic sensibility of writers including Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Dorothy Sayers, Stella Gibbons, and Zadie Smith, Unexpected Pleasures offers an innovative reading of works that seem to excessively obey the rules of genre. By oversupplying the pleasurable sense of knowledge and the illusion of predictive power that genre confers, these works play with readerly expectation in order to expose and queer a broader set of assumptions about desire, resolution, and futurity. Unexpected Pleasures expands on a burgeoning critical interest in genre as an interpretive tool, and further diversifies the archive and methodology of queer critique. Gathering a surprising group of writers together, it reveals new throughlines between middlebrow and highbrow, and among modernist, mid-century, and contemporary literature. This book will interest scholars of modernist and contemporary British literature, as well as readers interested in narrative and queer theory.

Unexpected Pleasures

Unexpected Pleasures PDF

Author: Penny Jordan

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0373249845

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Secrets from the past emerge in the present--and the consequences are unexpected for these two couples. YESTERDAY'S ECHOES Tragedy had befallen Rosie when she was a vulnerable sixteen-year-old--and Jake Lucas had witnessed the entire thing. Since then Rosie has built a successful career, not allowing anyone near the woman behind the cheerful face she shows to the world. But Jake has entered her life again, and he isn't about to let her forget the past. MASTER OF PLEASURE Sasha walked away from handsome millionaire Gabriel Calbrini to marry another--and he's never forgiven her. Now widowed, Sasha is shocked when Gabriel is named heir to her late husband's wealth and guardian to her two sons. But Sasha won't surrender. There's far too much at stake--especially the one thing that Gabriel must never know....

Unexpected Pleasures

Unexpected Pleasures PDF

Author: Tamsin Wilton

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781873741726

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Why do women become lesbians in later life? After interviewing almost a hundred women for an academic project, Dr. Tamsin Wilton realised their extraordinary stories should be shared with the real world. In this title, she brings together the most moving and fascinating of her interviews, together with essays on the conclusions she reached from her study.

Life Gets Better

Life Gets Better PDF

Author: Wendy Lustbader

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-08-18

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1101547677

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The acclaimed author of What's Worth Knowing reveals the truth about aging: Old age often offers a richer, better, and more self-assured life than youth. From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, "Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical." Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people. Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader's own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone's life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, "For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life's pathway." The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don't dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.

The Smell of Fresh Rain

The Smell of Fresh Rain PDF

Author: Barney Shaw

Publisher: Icon Books

Published: 2017-09-07

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1785781146

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Smell is the most emotional and evocative of our senses: it can bring back memories faster and with more immediacy than a photograph – so why is it so little understood? Armed with a hungry curiosity and a willingness to self-experiment, author Barney Shaw goes in search of the hidden meanings of smells. Using plain words to describe what he finds, he investigates the chemistry, psychology, history and future of this underappreciated sense. Journeying around boatyards, perfume shops and memories, Shaw opens your nose to the world, breaking down "chords" of smells into their component notes and through them revealing new ways of understanding the spaces through which we move. An investigation into the biology, psychology and history of smell, and a search for effective ways to put into words scents that we instantly relate to, but find strangely ineffable, THE SMELL OF FRESH RAIN includes a 200-entry thesaurus of succinct descriptions of common smells.

The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary PDF

Author: Catherine Gray

Publisher: Aster

Published: 2019-12-26

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1783253649

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

**From the Sunday Times Bestselling Author** Life-affirming - THE TELEGRAPH Wonderful - INDEPENDENT She made it her mission to learn how to be default happy rather than default disgruntled - RADIO 4 - WOMAN'S HOUR Take a leaf out of Gray's book and be kinder to yourself by appreciating life just as it is - IRISH TIMES This book came to me in an hour of need - during lockdown when I had to focus on the positive, appreciate simple things, not lose my shit, and value each day. It was a pure joy for me and held my hand - SADIE FROST Interesting and joyful. Lights a path that could help us to build resilience against society's urging to compare life milestones with peers - LANCET PSYCHIATRY Underwhelmed by your ordinary existence? Disillusioned with your middlin' wage, average body, 'bijou' living situation and imperfect loved ones? Welcome to the club. There are billions of us. The 'default disenchanted'. But, it's not us being brats. Two deeply inconvenient psychological phenomenons conspire against our satisfaction. We have negatively-biased brains, which zoom like doom-drones in on what's wrong with our day, rather than what's right. (Back in the mists of time, this negative bias saved our skins, but now it just makes us anxious). Also, something called the 'hedonic treadmill' means we eternally quest for better, faster, more, like someone stuck on a dystopian, never-ending treadmill. Thankfully, there are scientifically-proven ways in which we can train our brains to be more positive-seeking. And to take a rest from this tireless pursuit. Whew. Catherine Gray knits together illuminating science and hilarious storytelling, unveiling captivating research showing that big bucks don't mean big happiness, extraordinary experiences have a 'comedown' and budget weddings predict a lower chance of divorce. She reminds us what an average body actually is, reveals that exercising for weight loss means we do less exercise, and explores the modern tendency to not just try to keep up with the Murphys, but keep up with the Mega-Murphies (see: the social media elite). Come on in to this soulful and life-affirming read, to discover why an ordinary life may well be the most satisfying one of all.

Unexpected Pleasures

Unexpected Pleasures PDF

Author: Deyan Sudjic

Publisher: Skira

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780847838141

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

'Unexpected Pleasures' is an important exhibition catalogue on the latest in contemporary jewellery from around the world.

Unexpected Pleasures

Unexpected Pleasures PDF

Author: Penny Jordan

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1459249658

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Secrets from the past emerge in the present—and the consequences are unexpected for these two couples. YESTERDAY'S ECHOES Tragedy had befallen Rosie when she was a vulnerable sixteen-year-old—and Jake Lucas had witnessed the entire thing. Since then Rosie has built a successful career, not allowing anyone near the woman behind the cheerful face she shows to the world. But Jake has entered her life again, and he isn't about to let her forget the past. MASTER OF PLEASURE Sasha walked away from handsome millionaire Gabriel Calbrini to marry another—and he's never forgiven her. Now widowed, Sasha is shocked when Gabriel is named heir to her late husband's wealth and guardian to her two sons. But Sasha won't surrender. There's far too much at stake—especially the one thing that Gabriel must never know.…