Find out why ZIN was seen on CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC, etc! 11 year-old genius Chef Zin Mignon is in a horrific pickle. He’s been kidnapped from Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris by the mysterious Mustard Monks and spirited away to their ultra-remote mountaintop abbey. In time, he’ll be able to take their daunting Test. If he passes, he may join their secret Order and achieve the culinary success he’s always dreamed of. If he fails…. The tale of Zin Mignon begins at the bottom of a jar of pickled pigs’ feet in his father’s pathetic Brooklyn deli. A secret note sets him on a world-spinning quest, an adventure that takes him through the alleys of the homeless to the tables of billionaires, to discover who he really is and the greatness for which he's destined. As the young mastermind sets the culinary world on fire, a mix of treacherous rivals feast on the chance to make his dreams go up in smoke. In the wildly appetizing first book of the Zin Mignon series, Zin has become the greatest chef on the planet, shocking the cooking world. But he’s distracted and must honor the solemn promise he made to his dad, and to learn the incredible secret of his family legacy. It’s a true original. With humor, amazing exploits and heartfelt compassion, Zin uses food and his kitchen to build a recipe that will lead him to his true identity. Can he cut the mustard? Could Artemis Fowl meet MasterChef? Author MICHAEL DASWICK is the winner of both of Columbia's prestigious literary awards for fiction. He's the author of the heartwarming epic novel CHIP ROCK and the FAT OLD FART, and HALLBOYS, a collection of inspiring connected short stories. Always mixing humor and drama, friends and treacherous rivals, with ZIN MIGNON, Michael has cooked up a stirring series of Kitchen Fiction.

In these three novels of romantic suspense, the Edgar Award winner proves once again that she “can weave an almost flawless mystery” (The New Yorker). In a prolific career that spanned seven decades, Mignon G. Eberhart made a name for herself as “America’s Agatha Christie.” Praised by fellow writers ranging from Gertrude Stein, who called her “one of the best mystifiers in America,” to Mary Higgins Clark, who hailed her as “one of America’s favorite writers,” Eberhart penned classic mystery novels of romantic suspense, usually with female leads and often set in exotic locales. The three novels collected here—written in 1949, 1955, and 1964—offer further evidence that “Eberhart’s name on mysteries is like sterling on silver” (Miami News). House of Storm: On a Caribbean island in the path of a hurricane, Nonie is torn between the older man she’s engaged to and the man she’s truly in love with—a suspected murderer. “Mounting tension . . . one of [Eberhart’s] most successful glamour romances yet.” —The New York Times Postmark Murder: Following the death of a wealthy Chicago businessman, his ward Laura March must protect her fellow heir—an orphaned girl from Poland—and clear herself of a murder after a mysterious stranger is stabbed. “A nice example of [Eberhart’s] powers . . . Intelligently complicated.” —The New Yorker Call After Midnight: A late-night phone call from Jenny Vleedam’s ex-husband revealing that his girlfriend has been shot places the divorcée in danger. “Eberhart tells one of her better mystery-romances in Call After Midnight.” —The New York Times

The traditional approach to the study of Goethe and Schubert is to place them in opposition to one another, both in terms of their life experiences and in relation to the nineteenth-century Lied. In her introduction to this book, Lorraine Byrne examines the myths that have evolved around these artists and challenges the view that Goethe was unmusical and conservative in his musical tastes. She also considers Schubert's life in relation to his obvious affinity with the poet and links the composer's Goethe settings with the poet's perception of the Lied. Goethe judged the success of a setting by whether the meaning of the text had been realised in musical form. In his Goethe settings Schubert translates the poet's meaning into musical terms and his rendition attains the classical unity of words and music that Goethe sought. The core of this volume is the series of individual analyses of all of Schubert's solo, dramatic and multi-voice settings of Goethe texts. These explore in detail both the literary and the musical dimensions of each work, and Schubert's reading and interpretation of Goethe's writings. This is the first study in English to treat both artists with equal attention and insight. This, together with its encyclopaedic coverage of this important corpus of works, makes this volume an essential reference tool for all those who study Schubert and Goethe.

When old friend Arnold Chater Q.C. sends retired Norwegian Judge Christofferson a yellowing manuscript with the mysterious initials G.B. on the first page, the latter starts a quest to seek the truth about British composer Sir Edward Elgar’s secret muse in his masterpiece, the Enigma Variations, and whether he fathered an illegitimate child. Fascinated with riddles and puzzles, the composer was in the habit of leaving a series of codes denoting the inspiration for his timeless compositions. But in the Enigma Variations, Elgar forsook his usual practice of inserting initials to honour his muse, explicitly refusing to name his great love by using a mysterious ellipsis. Cheekily, he gives a clue about his inspiration in the violin concerto with the words, ‘Here is enshrined the soul of ...’ Chris Nicholson’s seminal musical thriller weaves an amazing tale with enigmas piled on riddles. He flagrantly delights in leading readers on a breathless chase of the women who were extraordinarily important in Elgar’s life. At the same time, he also unmasks Elgar as a man who hid himself and his intimate affairs behind a mask of respectability. Nicholson is merciless in the details of Elgar’s life, loves and music, deciphering all the clues and delivering the final judgment as only he can. Chris Nicholson is a retired judge and author of seven books.

Terence Cave traces the afterlives of Mignon, an apparently minor character in Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the European cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries. The enigmatic and fascinating Mignon reappears in wide range of different works, mainly narrative fiction but also poetry, song, opera, and film.

Military Men of Feeling considers the popularity of the figure of the gentle soldier in the Victorian period. It traces a persistent narrative swerve from tales of war violence to reparative accounts of soldiers as moral exemplars, homemakers, adopters of children on the battlefield and nurses. This material invites us to think afresh about Victorian masculinity and Victorian militarism. It challenges ideas about the separation of military and domestic life, and about the incommunicability of war experience. Focusing on representations of soldiers' experiences of touch and emotion, the book combines the work of well known writers—including Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Yonge—with previously unstudied writing and craft produced by British soldiers in the Crimean War, 1854-56. The Crimean War was pivotal in shaping British attitudes to military masculinity. A range of media enabled unprecedented public engagement with the progress and infamous 'blunders' of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians reflected on appropriate behaviour across ranks, forms of heroism, the physical suffering of the troops, administrative management and the need for army reform. The book considers how the military man of feeling contributes to the rethinking of gender roles, class and military hierarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, and how this figure was used in campaigns for reform. The gentle soldier could also do more bellicose social and political work, disarming anti-war critiques and helping people to feel better about war. This book looks at the difficult mixed politics of this figure. It considers questions, debated in the nineteenth century and which remain urgent today, about the relationship between feeling and action, and the ethics of an emotional response to war. It makes a case for the importance of emotional and tactile military history, bringing the Victorian military man of feeling into contemporary debates about liberal warriors and soldiers as social workers.