" Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor, an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913, where he gets a job at a rifle factory. At the house where he rents a room, he falls in love with a woman named Julia, who becomes his wife and the mother to his two children. When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee; retreating with...

In this fascinating exploration of murder in nineteenth century England, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction. Murder in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama-even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts....

"Invention Is a Mother is a sharp, wickedly funny look at science, fiction, life, death, pitch meetings, insane flights of fancy, and technology that will either kill you or save you. It made me laugh in despair and laugh in joy. I loved it." -Will Leitch, author of How Lucky RESPONSIBILITY IS OVERRATED As a recently graduated and happily unemployed engineer, Shaughnessy shirks responsibility whenever possible. He coasts through life, sidestepping...

Invention in Rhetoric and Composition examines issues that have surrounded historical and contemporary theories and pedagogies of rhetorical invention, citing a wide array of positions on these issues in both primary rhetorical texts and secondary interpretations. It presents theoretical disagreements over the nature, purpose, and epistemology of invention and pedagogical debates over such issues as the relative importance of art, talent, imitation,...

Susan Neville combines a gift for language with a subtle eye and a fine instinct for character. Her characters-and her settings-are, most of them, midwestern. There is the staunchly midwestern wife in the story "Kentucky People," for instance. She was born in this house in this Indiana town, a world far removed from people like Mrs. Lovelace, next door, transient people "who have followed the industrial revolution from Kentucky to Indiana and most...

Looks at the history of fashion, from rawhide to the synthetic fabrics of the future.

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today. This is a book about the French revolution in taste-about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing...

Formerly prosperous cities across the United States, struggling to keep up with an increasingly global economy and the continued decline of post-war industries like manufacturing, face the issue of how to adapt to today's knowledge economy. In Invention and Reinvention, authors Mary Walshok and Abraham Shragge chronicle San Diego's transformation from a small West Coast settlement to a booming military metropolis and then to a successful innovation...

This extraordinary trove of previously unpublished early works includes drafts of poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as well as ribald verse and other youthful curios. "Perhaps the most significant event in Eliot scholarship in the past twenty-five years" (New York Times Book Review). Edited by Christopher Ricks.