The Seven Stars Of Strand

Sasha, a closeted British celebrity, seeks out the help of a detective named Kiran who is known for discretion in order to find his missing ex-boyfriend, Oliver. Sasha is forced to share very personal information that reveals more about himself than he would have ever admitted to under any other circumstance, and despite rocky introductions, Sasha and Kiran become friends. Fortunately, Kiran is not only understanding of Sasha’s sexual preferences but encourages him to keep doing what he loves ... perhaps with Kiran himself. The complicated nature of their relationship prevents them from being together until Kiran is able to complete the job he was hired for, but their patience wears thin and they grow close as the search for Oliver continues. The police get involved when Oliver is found, upending a secret that might ruin Kiran and Sasha’s new-found relationship. Will they stay together in spite of their formidable circumstances?

Early modern books were not stable or settled outputs of the press but dynamic shape-changers, subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision, and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected, and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. Processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation, and posthumous publication resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author's name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book's identity or contents. This collection brings together original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history that explore these various kinds of textual inconstancy and variability. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical, and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy, and of authors including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, John Dryden, Thomas Burnet, John Tillotson, Henry Maundrell, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Wesley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The result is a richly diverse collection that demonstrates the embeddedness of the book trade in the cultural dynamics of early modernity.

Cash Peter thought he had struck gold when he got the call asking if he would front a reality-adventure travel programme. There was one slight drawback: Cash is not an adventurous sort and the show involves taking a man and dumping him in an unfamiliar faraway culture. In this book Cash recalls his hair-raising travels.

The old Taoist priest, who was exposed by people and was struck by lightning, smiled wryly, and his wrinkled old face showed a trace of sincerity: "Anan, I am doing this for your own good. Recently, I see that your face is a bit wrong, with a black cage and an ominous eyebrow. My mysterious people pay attention to getting lucky and avoiding evil. Even if I am a liar, I have never thought of cheating you. For the sake of a colleague, I am kind ... Speaking of faces, the old man nagged endlessly