Iron Shoes

From acclaimed short story writer Molly Giles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated collection Rough Translations, comes this splendid debut novel about one woman's spirited search for identity and meaning following her family's disintegration. Set amid the woodsy affluence of Northern California, Iron Shoes incisively chronicles the coming-of-middle-age story of Kay Sorensen, who has lived her entire life in the shadow of her glamorous parents. When Kay hits forty, she is suddenly smacked with the realization that she is not the woman she wants to be -- and certainly not the woman her family wants her to be. Her emotionally detached father will never forgive her for dropping out of Juilliard at eighteen; her dramatic, showstopping mother will never comprehend how she turned out so ordinary; and her fastidious, self-controlled second husband will never accept her weakness for red meat, cigarettes, and alcohol. Worst of all, Kay cannot forgive herself for giving up on her dreams and settling -- for a husband she doesn't love, for an amateurish church orchestra, for a dead-end job at a library bound to lose its funding. Unable to shake the feeling that she's somehow stuck, Kay lives vicariously through her free-spirited friend Zabeth and pins her hopes for the future on Charles Lichtman, a beguiling stranger with whom she feels destined to have an affair. But when her mother's illness -- seemingly feigned for as long as Kay can remember -- finally takes her life, Kay feels her ennui and stasis painfully give way to an unnerving helplessness. Losing a lifelong crutch, she is suddenly set adrift -- weightless, without a compass, and without hope. With her crystalline prose and seamless mixing of tender tragedy and laugh-out-loud humor, Molly Giles delivers a deeply moving exploration of a middle-aged woman who has never asked herself -- nor answered -- an honest question in her life. At once heartrending, hilarious, and wise, Iron Shoes is a mesmerizing debut novel.

In _Hellboy: The Corpse and the Iron Shoes_, the Monaghans have a problemfaeries have stolen their baby. Tam O'Clannie's problem is he wants a Christian burial, and he's already getting pretty ripe. Hellboy has more than his share of problems with border goblins, dead men, and war monsters, as he tries to make everyone happy in one night, roaming the Irish landscape looking for a Christian graveyard and finding only pagan monstrosities. In the backup "The Iron Shoes," Hellboy enters a battered medieval tower to take on a footnote from Irish folklore.

It's Sharon McCone's first case as staff investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative. She knows nothing about antiques, yet she has an affection for Salem Street with its charming mix of antique and curio shops. Now elderly dealer Joan Albritton has been found dead, stabbed with an antique dagger. Her neighbors are shocked. Recurring vandalism has them frightened. Ferreting out the facts will take Sharon from the chaotic jumble of the junk dealer's establishment to a museum where San Francisco's most elegant socialites gather.

"In part 1, Alexander-Frizer investigates the relationship between folk literature and group identity via the stories' connection to Hebrew canonical sources, their historical connection to the land of origin, their treatment of prominent family members and historical events, and their connection to the surrounding culture in the lands of the Spanish Diaspora. Part 2 contains an analysis of several important genres and subgenres present in the folktales, including legends, ethical tales, fairy tales, novellas, and humorous tales. Finally, in part 3, Alexander-Frizer discusses the art of storytelling, introducing the theatrical and rhetorical aspects of Sephardic folktales, such as the storyteller, the audience, and the circumstances of time and place."--BOOK JACKET.

This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another. The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.