Backward Glances

Focusing upon gay street life in London and New York, Mark Turner presents this gay urban history of male street cruising.

The texts discussed here are James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo (1831), Henry T. Tuckerman's The Italian Sketch Book (1835), Margaret Fuller's travel letters for The New York Tribune (1847-49), Julia Ward Howe's Passion Flowers (1854), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), Henry P. Leland's Americans in Rome (1863), and William Dean Howells's Venetian Life (1866).

Backward Glances reveals that the passionate love one woman feels for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in contemporary Chinese mass cultures. By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Attentive to both transnational cultural flows and local particularities, Martin shows how loving relations between women in mass culture are usually represented as past experiences. Adult protagonists revel in the repeated, mournful narration of their memories. Yet these portrayals do not simply or finally consign the same-sex loving woman to the past—they also cause her to reappear ceaselessly in the present. As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her investigation of representations of same-sex love between women sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex, love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human life.

From the preeminent columnist, historian, and bestselling author writing at the top of his game comes an essential collection of writing on politics, economics, culture, religion, and more. Conrad Black is one of our best known writers, historians, and businessmen. This never-before-published collection of Conrad's finest journalism, selected from many of the most prestigious publications in the English-speaking world, spans his full career. Included here are Conrad's best columns on Canada, its history and future; the U.S. as superpower; the Middle East; the Catholic Church; Wall Street; and journalism. Also, influential columns on everything from free trade to prison reform; and unexpected delights, including a much-read column on rescued kittens. On all of these subjects, Conrad Black is an intellectual force and these are the reflections of a masterful stylist, whose opinions defy expectation and whose wit and brilliance is on display in everything he writes.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Backward Glances is volume six in the Lynch’s Corner Series. These short stories veer from the preceding five in that they focus on protagonists other than the Lynch-Carr family though there are a few lurking in the list of stories. Previous readers will find “The Fall of Jessup” an interesting conclusion to that flawed person. Others will delight in stories dealing with nuns in the Appalachians, archaeology in Egypt, young lovers groping for the rite of passage, University of Kentucky sports, illegal moonshine, and desperate people facing impossible situations. Some recurring characters visit once more, but for the most part, newer folks emerge and join the LC series. Enjoy.

Available on its own for the first time: a second-chance romance from the #1 bestselling author of the Virgin River books—now a Netflix original series. Leigh Brackon is back home to look after her “ailing” mother. But she suspects maternal meddling when she finds her old flame John McElroy knee-deep in landscaping in her mom’s backyard. Leigh and John’s summer affair five years ago ended badly, and they’re both leery of relationships after their own failed marriages. But John has always been drawn to Leigh, even though the handyman doubts he’s good enough for the brilliant scientist and her twin boys. And Leigh has a secret that could change everything. Could they possibly have a real chance this time around? With a little help from the neighborhood matchmakers, they might see that it isn’t too late to find a way forward together. Originally published May 2001 in the Silhouette anthology To Mother with Love and November 2014 in the MIRA anthology ‘Tis the Season. Praise for Robyn Carr and her novels “For great storytelling and beautifully drawn characters, enter the world of Robyn Carr.” —Susan Elizabeth Phillips, New York Times–bestselling author “The Virgin River books are so compelling—I connected instantly with the characters and just wanted more and more and more.” —Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times–bestselling author “No one can do small-town life like Carr.” —RT Book Reviews