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What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn
by Shonna Trinch Edward SnajdrAlthough we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than two thousand storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, the study charts two very different types of local Brooklyn retail signage. The unique and consistent features of many words, large lettering, and repetition that make up Old School signage both mark and produce an inclusive and open place. In contrast, the linguistic elements of New School signage, such as brevity and wordplay, signal not only the arrival of gentrification, but also the remaking of Brooklyn as distinctive and exclusive. Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, a sociolinguist and an anthropologist respectively, show how the beliefs and ideas that people take as truths about language and its speakers are deployed in these different sign types. They also present in-depth ethnographic case studies that reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are intimately connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of privilege. Far from peripheral or irrelevant, shop signs say loud and clear that language displayed in public always matters.
What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern
by Jed RasulaOn the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land’s creation, explosive impact, and enduring influenceWhen T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern.” In What the Thunder Said, Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music.From its famous opening, “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” to its closing Sanskrit mantra, “Shantih shantih shantih,” The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot’s storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the “men of 1914.”Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century’s most influential poem.
What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History
by Tom MoleThis insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media.Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers.Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.
What They Didn't Teach You in French Class: Slang Phrases for the Café, Club, Bar, Bedroom, Ball Game and More (Dirty Everyday Slang)
by Adrien Clautrier Henry RoweDrop the textbook formality and chat with the locals in France’s everyday language—from common words for meeting and greeting to colorful insults. Sipping a café au lait at a sidewalk bistro . . . Getting down at Paris’s hottest club . . . Cheering on Les Bleus at the stadium . . . Packed with slang words, phrases and expressions not found in any textbook, this fun-to-read handbook teaches the casual, everyday language heard in the cafes, bars, and streets of France. No one actually speaks the formal French taught in school, which makes this book a must-have for anyone looking to chat with the locals without sounding like a robot. This handy phrasebook is perfect for travelers and students who want to fill the gap between the French they are learning in class and what is really spoken in France.What’s up? Ça va?She’s totally hot. Elle est bandante.This party is lit! Cette bringue est enflammée!That brie smells funky. Ce brie sent putain de drôle.Wanna French kiss? On se roule une pelle?That ref is a moron. L’arbitre est un abruti.
What They Didn't Teach You in German Class: Slang Phrases for the Café, Club, Bar, Bedroom, Ball Game and More (Dirty Everyday Slang)
by Daniel ChaffeyThe down and dirty phrases you need to speak German like a local—from tech speak to talking smack with fellow sports fans.Drinking a Hefeweizen at a Biergarten . . . Dancing at Berlin’s hottest club . . . Cheering for the local soccer team at the Stadion . . . Ditch the textbook dialogues and learn to really engage in meaningful (and sometimes meaningless) conversations with lifelong German speakers. From getting a date to hailing an Uber driver, you’ll learn helpful phrases and info to break down the language and cultural barrier. What’s up? Wie geht’s?He/She is a real hottie. Er/Sie ist eine ganz heiße Nummer.What’s on tap? Was gibt’s vom Fass?I ordered the Currywurst. Ich bin den Currywurst.Do you wanna cuddle? Willst Du kuscheln?Gooooooal! Toooooor!
What They Saw in America
by James L. Nolan Jr.Grounded in the stories of their actual visits, What They Saw in America takes the reader through the journeys of four distinguished, yet very different foreign visitors - Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton and Sayyid Qutb - who traveled to the United States between 1830 and 1950. The comparative insights of these important outside observers (from both European and Middle Eastern countries) encourage sober reflection on a number of features of American culture that have persisted over time - individualism and conformism, the unique relationship between religion and capitalism, indifference toward nature, voluntarism, attitudes toward race, and imperialistic tendencies. Listening to these travelers' views, both the ambivalent and even the more unequivocal, can help Americans better understand themselves, more fully empathize with the values of other cultures, and more deeply comprehend how the United States is perceived from the outside.
What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village
by Janet D. SpectorWhat This Awl Means is the first book to show how feminist criticism and methods can be brought to the practice and writing of archaeology. Focusing on Little Rapids, a 19th-century Eastern Dakota (Sioux) planting village near present-day Minneapolis, the author brings together information from archaeological, documentary, oral, and pictorial sources to highlight the activities and accomplishments of Dakota women and to show the significance of gender in shaping history.
What to Count (Made in Michigan Writers Series)
by Alise AlousiWith heart and insight, the poems in Alise Alousi’s What to Count speak to what it means to come of age as an Iraqi American during the first Gulf War and its continuing aftermath, but also to the joy and complexity of motherhood, daughterhood, and what it means to live a creative life. More than a description of the world, Alousi’s poetry actively lives in and of the world. These poems explore the nuances of memory through the changes wrought by time, conflict, and distance. In "The Ocularist" and "Art," and others, Alousi’s extraordinary verbal deftness precisely locates the still-tender pains and triumphs of collective being while trying to be an individual in the world. What to Count is a remarkable collection of contemporary poetry—both a lyrical splendor and a contemplative account of lineage, silenced history, and identity.
What to Read (and Not)
by Tom LeclairThese essays and reviews are mostly about literary fiction published in the last ten years and are written from the perspective of a fan of the McElroy/Coover/DeLillo axis or, more recently, the Powers/Vollmann/Wallace axis. The review-essays include pieces on all of the National Book Award fiction finalists of the last five years. Reviews selected here first appeared in Electronic Book Review, Barnes and Noble Review, New York Times Book Review, Atlantic, BookForum, The Nation, American Book Review, Daily Beast, and other national periodicals. Taken together, the essays and reviews comment on the state of literary culture--the fiction division--in America. Also included are several personal essays about the development of the author from a Vermont woodsman to a Brooklyn wordsman.
What to Read and Why
by Francine ProseIn this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño.In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story."Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.
What to Read Next: How to Make Books Part of Your Life
by Stig AbellAn audiobook to help make books part of your life.For a whole year on his train to work, Stig Abell read books from across genres and time periods. Then he wrote about them, and their impact on our culture and his own life.The result is a work of many things: a brisk guide to the canon of Western literature; an intimate engagement with writers from Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Marcel Proust to Zora Neale Hurston; a wise and funny celebration of the power of words; and a meditation on mental unrest and how to tackle it. It will help you discover new books to love, give you the confidence to give up on those that you don't, and remind you of ones that you already do.What to Read Next: How to Make Books Part of Your Life has been written for the reader in all of us.(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
What to Talk About: On a Plane, at a Cocktail Party, in a Tiny Elevator with Your Boss's Boss
by Rob Baedeker Chris Colin Tony MillionaireHomo sapiens have been speaking for hundreds of years--and yet basic communication still stymies us. We freeze up in elevators, on dates, at parties, under Dumpsters. We stagger through our exchanges merely hoping not to crash, never considering that we might soar. We go home sweaty and eat a birthday cake in the shower.But no more. With What to Talk About you'll learn to speak--fluently, intelligently, charmingly--to family, friends, coworkers, lovers, future lovers, horse trainers, children, even yourself. This hilarious manual, written by two award-winning authors and illustrated by legendary cartoonist Tony Millionaire, is tailor-made for anyone who might one day attend a dinner party, start a job, celebrate a birthday, graduate from school, date a human, or otherwise use words.What to Talk About is not rocket science, but it is a lot like brain surgery, in the sense that is terrifying, risky--and could change you forever.
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
by James Paul GeeJames Paul Gee talks about his experience of learning and using video games. He looks at major specific cognitive activities - to develop a sense of identity, to grasp meanings, to pick a role model and to perceive the world.
What W. H. Auden Can Do for You (Writers on Writers #5)
by Alexander McCall SmithBestselling novelist Alexander McCall Smith's charming account of how the poet W. H. Auden has helped guide his life—and how he might guide yours, tooWhen facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie—Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith—often refers to the great twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him—and what he just might do for you.Part self-portrait, part literary appreciation, the book tells how McCall Smith first came across the poet's work in the 1970s, while teaching law in Belfast, a violently divided city where Auden's "September 1, 1939," a poem about the outbreak of World War II, strongly resonated. McCall Smith goes on to reveal how his life has related to and been inspired by other Auden poems ever since. For example, he describes how he has found an invaluable reflection on life's transience in "As I Walked Out One Evening," while "The More Loving One" has provided an instructive meditation on unrequited love. McCall Smith shows how Auden can speak to us throughout life, suggesting how, despite difficulties and change, we can celebrate understanding, acceptance, and love for others.An enchanting story about how art can help us live, this book will appeal to McCall Smith's fans and anyone curious about Auden.
What Was Literary Impressionism?
by Michael Fried“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision. But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends. What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.
What Was Literature: Class, Culture, and Mass Society
by Leslie A. FiedlerEssays on the evolution of American Literature.
What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
by Stanley WellsSir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteries of how Shakespeare lived, whom and how he loved, how he worked, how he produced some of the greatest and most abidingly popular works in the history of world literature and drama, have fascinated readers for centuries. This concise, crystalline book conjures illuminating insights to reveal Shakespeare as he was. Wells brings the writer and dramatist alive, in all his fascinating humanity, for readers of today.
What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing
by Bob BroadWhat We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then holds rubrics up for critical scrutiny in the context of contemporary developments in the field. As an alternative to the generic character and decontextualized function of scoring guides, he offers dynamic criteria mapping, a form of qualitative inquiry by which writing programs (as well as individual instructors) can portray their rhetorical values with more ethical integrity and more pedagogical utility than rubrics allow. To illustrate the complex and indispensable insights this method can provide, Broad details findings from his study of eighty-nine distinct and substantial criteria for evaluation at work in the introductory composition program at "City University." These chapters are filled with the voices of composition instructors debating and reflecting on the nature, interplay, and relative importance of the many criteria by which they judged students' texts. Broad concludes his book with specific strategies that can help writing instructors and programs to discover, negotiate, map, and express a more robust truth about what they value in their students' rhetorical performances.
What We Say Matters
by Judith Hanson Lasater Ike K. LasaterFor yoga teacher Judith Hanson Lasater and her husband, mediator Ike K. Lasater, language is a spiritual practice based on giving and receiving with compassion. In What We Say Matters, they offer new and nurturing ways of communicating. Long-term students of yoga and Buddhism, the authors here blend the yoga principle of satya (truth) and the Buddhist precept of right speech with Marshall Rosenberg's groundbreaking techniques of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in a fresh formula for promoting peace at home, at work, and in the world. The authors offer practical exercises to help readers in any field learn to diffuse anger; make requests rather than demands or assign blame; understand the difference between feelings and needs; recognize how they strategize to get needs met; choose connection over conflict; and extend empathy to themselves and others.
What We Say Matters
by Judith Hanson Lasater Ike K. LasaterFor yoga teacher Judith Hanson Lasater and her husband, mediator Ike K. Lasater, language is a spiritual practice based on giving and receiving with compassion. In What We Say Matters, they offer new and nurturing ways of communicating. Long-term students of yoga and Buddhism, the authors here blend the yoga principle of satya (truth) and the Buddhist precept of right speech with Marshall Rosenberg's groundbreaking techniques of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in a fresh formula for promoting peace at home, at work, and in the world. The authors offer practical exercises to help readers in any field learn to diffuse anger; make requests rather than demands or assign blame; understand the difference between feelings and needs; recognize how they strategize to get needs met; choose connection over conflict; and extend empathy to themselves and others.
What We See When We Read
by Peter MendelsundA gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading--how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page--a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so--and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved--or reviled--literary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature--he considers himself first and foremost as a reader--into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading
by Leah PriceReports of the death of reading are greatly exaggeratedDo you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. <P><P>Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. <P><P>The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. <P><P> Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed. From the dawn of mass literacy to the invention of the paperback, most readers already skimmed and multitasked. <P><P>Print-era doctors even forbade the very same silent absorption now recommended as a cure for electronic addictions. The evidence that books are dying proves even scarcer. <P><P>In encounters with librarians, booksellers and activists who are reinventing old ways of reading, Price offers fresh hope to bibliophiles and literature lovers alike.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing
by Anna LeahyMarking the tenth anniversary of the New Writing Viewpoints series, this new book takes the concept of an edited collection to its extreme, pushing the possibilities of scholarship and collaboration. All authors in this book, including those who contributed to Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, which launched the series ten years ago, are proof that creative writing matters, that it can be rewarding over the long haul and that there exist many ways to do what we do as writers and as teachers. This book captures a wide swathe of ideas on pedagogy, on programs, on the profession and on careers.
What We Talk about when We Talk about Faith
by Peter StanfordInterviews with people of faith including: Sara Maitland | Sister Wendy Beckett | Delia Smith | The Revd Richard Coles | Dermot O'Leary | Cherie Blair | Archbishop Desmond Tutu | Bronwen Astor | Amos Oz | Nick CavePeter Stanford has been interviewing people of faith during his thirty-five years as a journalist at national papers including the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and The Guardian, as well as for the church press. What fascinates him in such conversations is how creating a space to talk unguardedly about faith unlocks so much more: what shaped and continues to shape the public and private lives of high-profile names; how those values connect with the work they are best known for; and why they believe the search for faith makes them who they are. This collection of the best of his interviews - some with household names, others with those not so immediately familiar, but all people of achievement with a resonant story to tell - aims to lift the lid on a topic that has become increasingly marginalised in the public square of our increasingly secular and sceptical society, where to 'do God' can feel like breaking a taboo. Put together, the 44 subjects collectively demonstrate that, rather than being all about doctrine and dogma, there are as many ways of exploring faith as there are individuals currently doing it. These intriguing interviews with activists, writers and artists, politicians, rebels and those who have taken vows will appeal to committed believers, those on the fringes of faith, and those who look in from the outside with curiosity.
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era
by Carlos LozadaIn this &“crisp, engaging, and very smart&” (The New York Times Book Review) work, The Washington Post&’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic digs into books of the Trump era and finds that our response to this presidency often reflects the same polarization, contradictions, and resentments that made it possible.It is an irony of our age that a man who rarely reads has unleashed an onslaught of books about his tenure and his time. Dissections of the white working class. Manifestos of political resistance. Works on identity, gender, and migration. Memoirs on race and protest. Revelations of White House mayhem. Warnings over the future of conservatism, progressivism, and of American democracy itself. As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read just about all of them. In What Were We Thinking, he draws on some 150 recent volumes to explore how we understand ourselves in the Trump era. Lozada&’s characters are not the president, his advisers, or his antagonists but the political and cultural ideas at play—and at stake—in America. Just as Trump&’s election upended the country&’s political establishment, it shocked its intellectual class. Though some of the books of the Trump era skillfully illuminate the challenges and transformations the nation faces, too many works are more defensive than incisive, more righteous than right. Lozada offers a provocative argument: Whether written by liberals or conservatives, activists or academics, true believers or harsh critics, the books of Trump&’s America are vulnerable to the same failures of imagination that gave us this presidency in the first place. In What Were We Thinking, Lozada&’s selections range from bestselling titles to little-known works, from thoroughly reported accounts of the administration to partisan polemics, from meditations on the fate of truth to memoirs about enduring—or enabling—the Trump presidency. He also identifies books that challenge entrenched assumptions and shift our vantage points, the books that best help us make sense of this era. The result is an &“elegant yet lacerating&” (The Guardian) intellectual history of our time, a work that transcends daily headlines to discern how we got here and how we thought here. What Were We Thinking will help today&’s readers understand America, and will help tomorrow&’s readers look back and understand us.