È l’estate del 1993, Alice ha quindici anni ed è ancora acerba. E per lei essere acerba è diventata una colpa. Alice non ha le mestruazioni. Alice non può dire parolacce. Alice non può crescere. Alice non può amare, se non un volto in un poster, che non potrà mai deluderla. Il volto è quello di Gary Barlow: il “grasso” dei Take That. Tra la ritardata femminilità, una madre che indossa solo fuseaux leopardati e le verifiche a sorpresa della professoressa Sferzaferri, Alice si avventura come un personaggio di Mark Twain tra i pericoli di reggiseni imbottiti, gli improbabili inseguimenti ai Take That e la cotta per il compagno di scuola. Un romanzo che rappresenta un’epoca, passando attraverso la musica, l’amore e anche il cancro, abilmente raccontata dalla penna spontanea, tagliente-comica di Luisa Cartei, che dietro alla festosità del tutto ci fa intravedere sempre profonde verità. Luisa Cartei è una copywriter con diciassette anni di esperienza in pubblicità. Ha vissuto tra Londra, San Francisco, Milano e Sydney, lavorando per le maggiori agenzie pubblicitarie internazionali. È blogger, mamma e surfista accanita. Vive a Bondi, in Australia, il suo paese di adozione. È cresciuta negli anni Novanta ascoltando i Take That e il suo sogno segreto (ormai non più segreto) è quello di sposare Gary Barlow. Il suo consiglio per l’umanità è quello di non smettere di sognare.

'I Will Marry Gary Barlow' is a story of grief, joy, friendship and crazy love; music, cancer, obsession and, ultimately, self-discovery, set in the suggestive atmosphere of Northern Italy in the 90s.

At 15, Alice's period has not yet arrived. She feels like she will never be a woman. Her friends stuff her bra with cotton balls, her mother forces her to wear improbable outfits to look more womanly and her father uses her to promote his anti-smoking campaign outside school, which makes her the nerdiest girl in town. Alice isn't ready to love someone real, so falls in love with a man on a poster, a man she can't disappoint: Gary Barlow, the 'fat one' of Take That - because not even in her dreams could she be cool enough for Robbie. She will go to extreme lengths to meet him. On this journey, she will make new friends - fans and groupies of the 90s, the 'little people' whose jobs became relevant only during the Boy Band Era and other picturesque characters - until she manages to make her dreams come true - or does she?

-- Greg Bak, Early Modern Literary Studies

An oxymoron is a combination of contradictory or incongruous words. As fabric interpretations of oxymorons, the 40 quilts in a traveling exhibit opening at the Museum of the American quilter's Society in August 2001 are also contradictions - in title, technique, focus, and design. Quilts in the traveling exhibit were made by many respected and well-known designers. From a quilt named Clearly Deafening Silence, and more, each is a riddle in weave. Meet the designers, see their sketches, and learn the unique thought processes, approaches, and techniques used to create each quilt.

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism. It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surface towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen. A major re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism, Second Sight will be required reading for scholars interested in the literature of the late Victorian period.