This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge.Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth cen...

The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature provides readers with a comprehensive reassessment of the value of humanism in an intellectual landscape. Offering contributions by leading international scholars, this volume seeks to define literature as a core expressive form and an essential constitutive element of newly reformulated understandings of humanism.While the value of humanism has recently been dominated by anti-humanist and post-humanist perspectives which ...

The exciting new book argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism--contrary to the trend of post-humanism, or what Neema Parvini calls "the anti-humanism" of the last several decades of literary and theoretical scholarship. In this trail-blazing study, Michael Bryson argues for this renewal of perspective by covering literature written in different languages, times, and places, calling for a return to a humanism, which focuses on literary characters and their psychological and existential st...

Toronto in the twenty-first century: At night, a beacon on a lonely ancient lake, a drainage pond from the last ice age. In the daytime, a bulwark of glass, glinting in the radiant sun. Joe, Mary, and her cat, Sam, sit in a lakeside condo, trapped by a crazed, mysterious sniper. What has become of their lives? What has become of their city? What has become of their century? As the situation begins to unravel, Mary finds herself wondering, “What would Margaret Atwood do?”

In Michael Bryson's Survival, a couple sit in a lakeside Toronto condo, trapped by a crazed, mysterious sniper. The Lesson presents a self-absorbed wedding DJ as the newest addition to Jessica Westheads trademark cast of offbeat protagonists. In Laure Baudot's In the Afternoon, a babysitter's envy and its fallout come to the fore when a former client is accused of a crime, and she must decide whether to help exonerate him. In Mui'n by Nancy Branch, a Mig...

The Lesson presents a self-absorbed wedding DJ as the newest addition to Jessica Westhead’s trademark cast of offbeat protagonists. This posturing narrator is showing a new recruit the ropes, but what begins as a monologue full of blue-collar bravado grows more menacing over the course of the night. He becomes fixated on a female wedding guest—you know the type, spiky hair and feathers on her dress. As he dwells on the woman he feels is using dance-floor requests ...

In the rugged Nepisiguit River region of northern New Brunswick, two hunters face off. One is local sports lodge employee Danny Knockwood, a Mi’gmaw guide with a withered hand. The other is Mui’n, a one-eared black bear battling his inexorable hunger. When Danny is charged by the lodge owner to hunt down the bear that is frightening guests at the salmon pools, his personal values come into sharp conflict with his commitment to the task. The resulting confrontation tests both his physical s...

Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to disco...

The inspiration for the film Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale, and directed by Len Wiseman. This ebook-only edition of Philip K. Dick’s classic short story tells the story of Douglas Quail, an unfulfilled bureaucrat who dreams of visiting Mars, but can't afford the trip. Luckily, there is Rekal Incorporated, a company that lets everyday stiffs believe they’ve been on incredible adventures. The only problem is that when technicians attempt a memory implant o...

“Great talent, great imagination, and real been-there done-that authenticity make this one of the year’s best thriller debuts.”—Lee Child“Not since Fleming charged Bond with the safety of the world has the international secret agent mystique been so anchored with an insider’s reality.”—Noah Boyd, New York Times bestselling author of Agent X and The Bricklayer“A real spy proves he is a real writer—and a truly deft and inventive one.

When Daniel Miller wakes up one morning, something has gone terribly wrong. The power is out. The phones are dead. The house is silent. The street is shrouded in fog. Both his partner and their adopted daughter are missing. So are their neighbors. And so is everyone else in the world. Daniel Miller is the last person left on Earth… or is he?From award-winning, best-selling horror author Brian Keene comes an all-new, short novella of quiet, supernatural horror.

Julie Kagawa’s bestselling series The Iron Fey captivated the imagination—and hearts—of readers of all ages with its mix of magic, fantasy and romance. Discover what happened to Meghan and Ash following The Iron Knight in this novella…Meghan Chase is finally getting used to being the Iron Queen, ruler of the Iron Fey. Her life may be strange, but with former Winter prince Ash by her side at last, she wouldn’t have it any other way.But when they travel to th...