In A Dark Room With A Stranger

Listen to the Silence is a compilation of my recent poetry, latest artwork, and some of my nature photography. In this book I continue to express myself through writing poetry and the use of artistic media. My work expresses my coping with life’s difficulties and also enjoying the pleasures of life. Listen to the silence and never stop dreaming!

Living with Strangers examines the history and cultural representation of bed-sitting rooms and boarding houses in England from the early twentieth century to the present. Providing a historical overview, the authors explore how these alternative domestic spaces came to provide shelter for a diverse demographic of working women and men, retired army officers, gay people, students, bohemians, writers, artists, performers, migrants and asylum seekers, as well as shady figures and criminals. Drawing on historical records, case studies, and examples from literature, art, and film, the book examines how the prevalence and significance of bedsits and boarding houses in novels, plays, detective stories, Ealing comedies, and contemporary fiction and film produced its own genre of narrative. The nine chapters are written by an international range of established and emerging scholars in the fields of literary studies, art and film history, political theory, queer studies and cultural studies. A lively, highly original study, Living with Strangers makes a significant contribution to the cross-disciplinary field of home studies and provides insight into a crucial aspect of British cultural history. It is essential reading for students and researchers in anthropology, history, literary studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, film studies and cultural studies.

By the acclaimed Dutch author of Beyond Sleep: a thriller set in Nazi occupied Holland: “fast-moving, frighteningly real yet verging on the incredible” (Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being). During the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by a mysterious man named Dorbeck—a man who bears a strangely striking resemblance to Osewoudt himself. Dorbeck recruits him to perform simple, but top-secret missions on orders from London. But as the assignments keep coming, they get increasingly dangerous. Soon Osewoudt is being asked to commit murder in the name of Gestapo resistance. After the war, Osewoudt is taken for a traitor and captured. To prove his sacrifices for the Resistance, he must find the untraceable doppelgänger in an existential thriller “crackling with tension . . . bringing to mind Camus and the Sartre of Les Chemins de la Liberté” (The Telegraph). “Striking, suspenseful . . . Brilliant.” —The Observer

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash, comes In the Darkroom, an astonishing confrontation with the enigma of her father and the larger riddle of identity consuming our age. “In the summer of 2004 I set out to investigate someone I scarcely knew, my father. The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.” So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who identified as “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known, the photographer who’d built his career on the alteration of images? Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful—and virulent—nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals. Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s metamorphosis takes her across borders—historical, political, religious, sexual--to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you “choose,” or is it the very thing you can’t escape?