A Very British Christmas Twelve Days Of Discomfort And Joy

Imagine if all your Christmases did actually "come at once". That idiom is supposed to evoke an image of delight, happiness and nothing going wrong, but the British Christmas doesn't always turn out that way. Yes, sometimes all the gifts are perfect, everyone's on great form and no one chokes on a mince pie. But on other occasions you'll fall through a glass cabinet or set your cardigan on fire. A Very British Christmas pays tribute to all the peculiar ways we choose to celebrate; it tells stories of our propensity to behave badly, our uselessness under pressure and our unquenchable joie de vivre. Join us as we salute cultural icons, dissect national customs and hear from people who've eaten all the turkey and lived to tell the tale. Tidings of discomfort, tidings of joy.

Organizing Christmas is an exploration of the organizational character of Christmas. Taking as its starting point the view that Christmas initially achieved popularity due to its potential to promote social cohesion and political stability, this book both charts and scrutinizes its global emergence as the year's preeminent economic and organizational event. Combining historical narrative, original interviews, and social scientific research and theories, it tells the story of how Christmas has come to dominate the festival landscape and how it emerged as an integral component of the global evolution of contemporary social and economic relations. From the pre-Christian celebrations and politics of the turning of the calendar year, through the power games of Elizabethan England and the wily reinvention of the season by industrious Victorians, to today’s huge economic and logistical exercise that relies on everything from global supply chains to the domestic division of labour, Organizing Christmas demonstrates how the season exemplifies the spirit and practices of industrial, and now post-industrial, modernity. As well as documenting this fact, however, Organizing Christmas also critically interrogates what has become a vast festive-industrial complex. From low-paid factory workers in Yiwu to Santa Claus performers in Kingston, readers are given a chance to consider what the cost of this global festival might be and whether it is a price worth paying. Drawing on intellectual resources ranging from Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic critique of the culture industry, thorough Böhme’s analysis of the sociomaterial production of atmospheres, to Bloch’s ‘principle of hope’, it paints a picture of Christmas as a profoundly important, if deeply contested historical, cultural and, most significantly, organizational phenomenon. Aimed at students and academics in Organization Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Sociology of Work and Employment, as well as the general reader interested in the festive season, Organizing Christmas offers a differing perspective on a subject so familiar and yet so often overlooked.

‘Funny, touching and ludicrously British.’ India Knight ‘Makes Christmas slightly less awful’ Al Murray

A good date can be exhilarating: a shared joke, an improbable spark, long moments of gazing fondly into each other's eyes. Not so for the dating disasters featured in this collection of laugh-out-loud actual tweets about the most terrible evenings imaginable. From seriously unwelcome confessions, to dousing dates in wine, to bringing them back to creepy apartments to meet favorite stuffed animals, here are the funniest and most alarming reports from dating's front lines. Along the way, author Rhodri Marsden offers tips on how to identify and avoid the worst of the bad daters, including married men, blatant liars, deluded optimists, and more. This harrowing collection of real nightmare dates will amuse anyone who's suffered through one of cupid's off nights.

The publication of Robinson Crusoe in London in 1719 marked the arrival of a revolutionary art form: the novel. British writers were prominent in shaping the new type of storytelling - one which reflected the experiences of ordinary people, with characters in whom readers could find not only an escape, but a deeper understanding of their own lives. But the novel was more than just a reflection of British life. As Sebastian Faulks explains in this engaging literary and social history, it also helped invent the British. By focusing not on writers but on the people they gave us, Faulks not only celebrates the recently neglected act of novelistic creation but shows how the most enduring fictional characters over the centuries have helped map the British psyche - through heroes from Tom Jones to Sherlock Holmes, lovers from Mr Darcy to Lady Chatterley, villains from Fagin to Barbara Covett and snobs from Emma Woodhouse to James Bond. Also included in this fantastic ebook package are four free classic novels: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: The legendary story of a marine adventurer shipwrecked on a desert island. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Accomplished Elizabeth Bennett must navigate a web of familial obligations and social expectations in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity and love. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: Pip's life as an ordinary country boy is destined to be unexceptional until a chain of mysterious events lead him away from his humble origins and up the social ladder. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins: Marian and her sister Laura live a quiet life under their uncle's guardianship until Laura marries Sir Percival Glyde, a man of many secrets. Can she be protected from a mysterious and potentially fatal plot?

In her New York Times bestsellers Going Rogue and America by Heart, Sarah Palin revealed the strong Christian faith that has guided her life and family. In Good Tidings and Great Joy she calls for bringing back the freedom to express the Christian values of the season. She asserts the importance of preserving Jesus Christ in Christmas—in public displays, school concerts, pageants, and our expressions to one another other—and laments the over-commercialization and homogenization of Christmas in today's society. Interwoven throughout are personal memories and family traditions, as well as more than a dozen family photos, which illustrate the reasons why the celebration of Jesus Christ's nativity is the centerpiece of her faith. Palin believes it is imperative that we stand up for our beliefs before the element of faith in a glorious and traditional holiday like Christmas is marginalized and ignored. She also encourages readers to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our religious convictions and ignore the politically correct Scrooges seeking to take Christ out of Christmas. Good Tidings and Great Joy is a call to action to openly celebrate the joys of Christianity, and say Merry Christmas to one another.

As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series. Among Walton's many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by "mainstream"; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The two-volume Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition provides an attractive alternative to the full six-volume anthology. Though much more compact, the concise edition nevertheless provides a thoughtful balance between well-established canonical authors and a diverse array of lesser-known works. Guided by the latest scholarship in British literary studies, the anthology is committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and contextualization. With an unparalleled number of illustrations and contextual materials, accessible and engaging introductions, and full explanatory annotations, the concise edition of this acclaimed Broadview anthology provides focused yet wide-ranging coverage for British literature survey courses. Among the works now included for the first time in the bound book of the Concise Edition, Volume A are poems by Gwerful Mechain, selections from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Samson Occom’s autobiography, and selections from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Frances Burney’s Evelina. There are also new omnibus sections, including an expanded “Culture: A Portfolio” section with material on early modern theater and crossdressing, a revised section on “Other Lands, Other Cultures” in the early modern period, and sections addressing “The Enlightenment,” “Slavery and Resistance,” and “Empire and Enterprise.”