A Finalist for the Orange Prize It is the height of summer, and celebrated actor Molly Fox has loaned her house in Dublin to a friend while she is away performing in New York. Alone among all of Molly's possessions, struggling to finish her latest play, she looks back on the many years and many phases of her friendship with Molly and their college friend Andrew, and comes to wonder whether they really knew each other at all. She revisits the intense closeness of their early days, the transformations they each made in the name of success and security, the lies they told each other, and betrayals they never acknowledged. Set over a single midsummer's day, Molly Fox's Birthday is a mischievous, insightful novel about a turning point--a moment when past and future suddenly appear in a new light.

Ditch the storybook wedding, banish Bridezilla, and walk down the aisle in truth and in style: You are a Stone Fox Bride and this is your bridal guide. Molly Rosen Guy founded the brand Stone Fox Bride as an alternative to outdated, plastic-princess wedding culture. Her stylish and subversive approach is being embraced by creative, modern brides who believe in love and romance, but have no interest in running off into the sunset. In an inspiring mix of intimate storytelling, gorgeous visuals, and candid advice, with an aesthetic that channels Bianca Jagger in a white tux rather than Cinderella in a frilly gown, Molly Rosen Guy—your cool, hippie chic guide through the wilds of wedding planning—encourages brides-to-be, and their ladies in tow, to say no to all things phony, frilly, and silly. Featuring personal essays that explore the nuances of the process, including a raw, unairbrushed look at the realities of the early days of marriage, she tells us that a Stone Fox Bride should never sacrifice her style, her story, or her sanity to please others; she reassures us that weddings don't have to be free of confusion, shades of gray, or cellulite; and reminds us that marriage, like love, is equal parts complicated and beautiful. Praise for Molly Rosen Guy and the Stone Fox Bride phenomenon “The current wedding-wear darling of the jammin’ and Instagrammin’ set [offers] an insouciant, antiestablishment approach to weddings.”—The New York Times “[Molly Rosen Guy is] making waves in the bridal industry thanks to her eclectic eye and refusal to conform to clichéd traditions.”—W “Molly Rosen Guy built a business filling the needs of women who long for something more than your run-of-the-mill, princess-y flou for their big day.”—Vogue

Molly and Beth are best friends and love spending time together. But when their two families move in together, maybe they are a little too close for comfort! Out shopping one day they need to avoid the most embarrassing encounter ever with Molly's mum, and hide in a shop they had never noticed before. When they leave by the side door, they realise immediately that something is not right! Transported back to the past, where mobile phones don't work and the world feels very different, they realise that they have a chance to see the world through their parents' eyes. Before finding their way home, can they see what their own pasts looked like?

This collection focuses on texts that address the other arts – from painting to photography, from the stage to the screen, and from avant-garde experiments to mass culture. Despite their diversity of object and approach, the essays in Relational Designs coalesce around the argument that representations are defined by relations and dynamics, rather than intrinsic features. This rationale is supported by the discourses and methodologies favoured by the book’s contributors: their approaches offer a cross section of the intellectual and critical environment of our time. The book illustrates the critical possibilities that derive from the broad range of modes of inquiry - poststructuralist criticism, gender studies, postcolonial studies, new historicism – that the book’s four sections bring to bear on a wealth of intermedial practices. But Relational Designs compounds such critical emphases with the voice of the practitioner: the book is rounded off by an interview in which a contemporary novelist discusses her attraction to the other arts in terms that extend the book’s insights and bridge the gap between academic discourse and artistic practice.

The Orange Prize-shortlisted novel, repackaged to tie in with the publication of Time Present and Time Past.

How can English and American Studies be instrumental to conceptualizing the deep instability we are presently facing? How can they address the coordinates of this instability, such as war, terrorism, the current economic and financial crisis, and the consequent myriad forms of deprivation and fear? How can they tackle the strategies of de-humanization, invisibility, and the naturalization of inequality and injustice entailed in contemporary discourses? This anthology grew out of an awareness of the need to debate the role of English and American Studies both in the present context and in relation to the so-called demise of the Humanities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s rethinking of materiality as the effect of power, in her study Bodies That Matter (1993), we locate this collection of essays at the crossroads of discourse and power, while we expect the work collected here to highlight the ability of discourses to materialize in, or as, truth, and as such to support or decry particular constituencies. Discourses therefore matter to us as products and vehicles of power relations that can be subject to the analytical and interpretative tools of English and American Studies. Our idea was to challenge especially young scholars to position their research concerning the ability of their fields to be discourses that matter; in the case in point, to be critical practices that make an active intervention in current debates. By focusing on matters such as language as witness to the world, representations of gender, race, and ethnicity, performative discourses, exceptionalism and power, and interculturality, these essays pursue the chance to deepen, enlarge, and question both literary and cultural phenomena, their established critical readings, and the strategies deployed in representations. Finally, English and American Studies in the present collection demonstrate their affiliation to the Humanities by exploring the numerous possibilities offered by their discourses: their ability to foster critical thought, allowing us to think for (and outside) ourselves, their capacity to test, argue, and question, and their profound imaginative potential.

This is the first anthropological study of writers, writing and contemporary literary culture. Drawing on the flourishing literary scene in Ireland as the basis for her research, Helena Wulff explores the social world of contemporary Irish writers, examining fiction, novels, short stories as well as journalism. Discussing writers such as John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Frank McCourt, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Colum McCann, David Park, and Joseph O ́Connor, Wulff reveals how the making of a writer’s career is built on the ‘rhythms of writing’: long hours of writing in solitude alternate with public events such as book readings and media appearances. Destined to launch a new field of enquiry, Rhythms of Writing is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, literary studies, creative writing, cultural studies, and Irish studies.