A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile's perfumery, to a London drummer stepping over spent, naked bodies.

This is a love story and, like all Winterson's novels, a philosophical meditation, this time on the body: as the repository for our emotions and souls. The object is a married woman, Louise, and the narrator is her lover, gender undeclared. The affair intensifies beyond anything either of the lovers has ever known or hoped for. And as they dissect their passion and longing, Jeanette Winterson traces the topography of desire.

A triumphant debut novel and follow-up to Karen Russell’s universally acclaimed short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline— think Buddenbrooks set in the Florida Everglades—and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as the World of Darkness. Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief. Her mother, Swamp landia!’s legendary headliner, has just died; her sister is having an affair with a ghost called the Dredgeman; her brother has secretly defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their sinking family afloat; and her father, Chief Bigtree, is AWOL. To save her family, Ava must journey on her own to a perilous part of the swamp called the Underworld, a harrowing odyssey from which she emerges a true heroine.
Selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, Karen Russell is an irrepressible new voice in contemporary fiction.

The highwire artist of the English novel redraws the romantic triangle for the post-Einsteinian universe, where gender is as elastic as matter, and any accurate Grand Unified Theory (GUT) must encompass desire alongside electromagnetism and gravity. One starry night on a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Alice, a brilliant English theoretical physicist, begins an affair with Jove, her remorselessly seductive American counterpart. But Jove is married. When Alice confronts his wife, Stella, she swiftly falls in love with her, with consequences that are by turns horrifying, comic, and arousing. Vaulting from Liverpool to New York, from alchemy to string theory, and from the spirit to the flesh, Gut Symmetries is a thrillingly original novel by England's most flamboyantly gifted young writer. "Winterson is unmatched among contemporary writers in her ability to conjure up new-world wonder...A beautiful, stirring and brilliant story."--Times Literary Supplement "Dazzling for [its] intelligence and inventiveness...[Winterson] is possessed of a masterly command of the language and a truly pliant imagination."--Elle "One of our most brilliant, visionary storytellers."--San Francisco Chronicle

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, was a bestseller both in Britain and the United States despite its departure from typical novelistic style. Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf's subsequent book, To the Lighthouse, have generated the most critical attention and are the most widely studied of Woolf's novels.

The action of Mrs. Dalloway takes place during a single day in June 1923 in London, England. This unusual organizational strategy creates a special problem for the novelist: how to craft characters deep enough to be realistic while treating only one day in their lives. Woolf solved this problem with what she called a "tunneling" technique, referring to the way her characters remember their pasts. In experiencing these characters' recollections, readers derive for themselves a sense of background and history to characters that, otherwise, a narrator would have had to provide.

In a sense, Mrs. Dalloway is a novel without a plot. Instead of creating major situations between characters to push the story forward, Woolf moved her narrative by following the passing hours of a day. The book is composed of movements from one character to another, or of movements from the internal thoughts of one character to the internal thoughts of another.

Mrs. Dalloway has been called a flâneur novel, which means it depicts people walking about a city. (Flâneur is the French word for a person who enjoys walking around a city often with no other purpose than to see the sights.) The book, as is typical of the Flâneur novel, makes the city, its parks, and its streets as interesting as the characters who inhabit them.

Clarissa Dalloway's party, which is the culminating event of the book, ties the narrative together by gathering the group of friends Clarissa thinks about throughout her day. It also concludes the secondary story of the book, the story of Septimus Warren Smith, by having Dr. Bradshaw arrive at the party and mention that one of his patients committed suicide that day.

The book's major competing themes are isolation and community, or the possibilities and limits of communicativeness, as evidenced by Clarissa's abiding sense of being alone and by her social skills, which bring people together at her parties.

《芒果街上的小屋》是一本优美纯净的小书，一本“诗小说”。它由几十个短篇组成，一个短篇讲述一个人、一件事、一个梦想、几朵云，几棵树、几种感觉，语言清澈如流水，点缀着零落的韵脚和新奇的譬喻，如一首首长歌短调，各自成韵，又彼此钩连，汇聚出一个清晰世界，各样杂沓人生。所有的讲述都归于一个叙述中心：居住在芝加哥拉美移民社区芒果街上的女孩埃斯佩朗莎（埃斯佩朗莎，是西班牙语里的希望）。生就对弱的同情心和对美的感觉力，她用清澈的眼打量周围的世界，用美丽稚嫩的语言讲述成长，讲述沧桑，讲述生命的美好与不易，讲述年轻的热望和梦想，梦想着有一所自己的房子，梦想着在写作中追寻自我，获得自由和帮助别人的能力。

当代译者，资料不详。

C. Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues. Leading sociologist Amitai Etzioni brings this fortieth anniversary edition up to date with a lucid introduction in which he considers the ways social analysis has progressed since Mills first published his study in 1959. A classic in the field, this book still provides rich food for our imagination.

This fully revised and updated version of Anthony Giddens's Sociology, now in its fifth edition, offers an unrivalled introduction for students new to the subject - lucid, lively, authoritative and original. Written by one of the world's leading sociologists, this comprehensive textbook manages to be clear, accessible and jargon-free, but without oversimplifying complex debates.Earlier editions of Sociology broke new ground by incorporating cutting-edge debates, such as the impact of globalisation, into an introductory text. This fifth edition remains a state of the art textbook, with fresh and engaging new material added throughout. While covering all of the core topics of sociology, the fifth edition also includes a great deal of substantive new material, ensuring that students are introduced to the most recent sociological debates. Throughout, the book weaves together classical and contemporary theory and data, and provides a wide range of everyday examples to which students can easily relate.The fifth edition also benefits from:¢ New discussions of global inequality, disability, ageing and the life course, risk, the network society, and terrorism, as well as many other additional and up-to-date topics.¢ Numerous learning aids in every chapter, such as summary points, questions for further thought, and additional reading suggestions, which help to reinforce students' knowledge.¢ Lots of extra photographs, diagrams, case studies and cartoons, to bring ideas to life and fire students' imaginations.¢ High-quality supplementary resources on a dedicated website, including a full instructors' manual and additional student aids, all specially designed to stimulate students' learning and critical thinking.The fifth edition of this classic textbook is an ideal teaching text for first-year university and college courses, and will be essential reading for all students who are looking for an exciting, authoritative and easy-to-follow introduction to sociology.

Table of Contents
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A TABLE OF CONTENTS
MY LAST FLAPPERS
1 THE JELLY-BEAN.
2 THE CAMEL’S BACK
3 MAY DAY
4 PORCELAIN AND PINK
FANTASIES
1 THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ
2 THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
3 TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE
4 THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY
5 “O RUSSET WITCH!”
UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES
1 THE LEES OF HAPPINESS
2 MR. ICKY
3 THE QUINTESSENCE OF QUAINTNESS IN ONE ACT
4 JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL

For disgraced TV presenter Martin Sharp the answer's pretty simple：he has，in his own words，‘issed his life away’.And on New Year's Eve he's going to end it all …But not，as it happens，alone.Because first single-mum Maureen，then eighteen-year-old Jess and lastly American rock-god JJ turn up and crash Martin's private party.They've stolen his idea-but brought their own reasons.
Yet it's hard to jump when you've got an audience queuing impatiently behind you.A few heated words and some slices of cold pizza later and these four strangers are suddenly allies.But is their unlikely friendship a good enough reason to carry on living？
‘Hornby pins down the age in which we live with precision and comic brilliance’.

An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge bookseller favorite, and then on to national bestellerdom.

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the 'roaring twenties' and a devastating expose of the 'Jazz Age'. Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore of the American seaboard in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, Jay Gatsby and the dark mystery which surrounds him. The Great Gatsby is an undisputed classic of American literature from the period following the First World War and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret
sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul’s death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family’s future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements—until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.
Love in its limitless forms—between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children—is the force that moves these characters’ lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart—how family ties, both those we’re born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways.
What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.

Too many marriages end when someone says "I've fallen out of love with you" or "I don't love you anymore." The Love Dare discusses how these statements reveal a lack of understanding about the fundamental nature of true love. As featured in the popular new movie Fireproof, from the team that brought us the #1 best selling DVD Facing the Giants, The Love Dare is a 40-day guided devotional experience that will lead your heart back to truly loving your spouse while learning more about the design, nature, and source of true love. Each reading includes Scripture, a statement of principle, the day's "dare," and a journaling area and check box to chart progress. Dare to take The Love Dare , and see your marriage change forever.