Taking Down Evelyn Tait Large Print 16pt

The door creaks open and standing in the entrance is my absolute worst nightmare. Perfect hair, perfect teeth, perfect brain. Perfect sneer. Evelyn Tait. Impulsive Lottie - heavy-metal fan, expert tomato-grower and frequent visitor to the principal's office - is in even more trouble than usual. Her best friend Grace has dropped an unlikely bombshell: she's dating Lottie's mortal enemy, good-girl Evelyn Tait. Studious Jude, the boy next door, has the perfect war plan. Lottie will beat Evelyn at her own good-girl game, unveiling Miss Perfect's sinister side in the process. Taking life more seriously starts as fun, but soon offers its own rewards â ] so long as Lottie can manage gorgeous Sebastian's sudden interest, Jude acting weird, and the discovery that she might actually be good at something. Taking Down Evelyn Tait is a story about family, friends and embracing who you are. Even if that person is kind of weird.

We are to believe there was a time when The Birmingham Quean was just a poem: a mock-epic burlesque in which a fake pound coin told how she was won in a game of darts by a drag-queen called Britannia Spears. It parodied Pope ́s The Rape of the Lock, Byron ́s Don Juan and an anonymous eighteenth century novel, The Birmingham Counterfeit. The transformation of this bit of picaresque doggerel into the sprawling work barely contained by this cover is the central mystery of a ludic novel. It mirrors the unlikely story of a dirty little settlement of nailers and cutlers becoming the principle city of the Industrial Revolution by flooding the Restoration economy with counterfeit coins. What remains is an absurd scholarly edition of a poem recast as a futuristic dystopia in which nothing is authentic. It is also the tale of an impossible love affair that uncovers an impossible text by an impossible author. It is as strange, ironic, sombre, flashy and anarchic as the city to which it owes its existence.

This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies. Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement. Adeptly locating aerial performance within the wider cultural history of bodies and their identities, Circus Bodies explores this subject through a range of films such as Trapeze (1956) and Wings of Desire (1987) and Tait also examines live performances including: * the first trapeze performers: Léotard and the Hanlon Brothers * female celebrities; Azella, Sanyeah, black French aerialist LaLa, the infamous Leona Dare, and the female human cannonballs * twentieth-century gender benders; Barbette and Luisita Leers * the Codonas, Concellos, Gaonas, Vazquez and Pages troupes * imaginative aerial acts in Cirque de Soleil and Circus Oz productions. This book will prove an invaluable resource for all students and scholars interested in this fascinating field.

In 1915, The Grolier Club published New York with color wood engravings by Rudolph Ruzicka. That book evoked the city in a period of rapid, remarkable change. In New York Revisited, Ken Auchincloss traces the evolution of New York in the twentieth century. Along with the city's enormous physical and social transformations, up to and including the events of September 11, 2001, Ken conveys the continuity of spirit and character of the "New York accent." Two-and-a half in the making, New York Revisited is illustrated by the foremost contemporary artist in color wood engraving. The engravings include the Empire State building, Chrysler Building from Lexington Avenue, 230 Park Avenue, Grand Central subway station, White Horse Tavern, Times Square, the World Trade Center (vignette), and Strawberry fields. One of 250 signed and numbered copies, designed and printed by the artist at his press, Midnight Paper Sales.