Set in Vancouver's Japan Town in 1942 and following two close friends, a Jewish 10-year-old girl named Esther and a Japanese Canadian 10-year-old girl named Michiko who fall in love with two dolls - Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth. Needless to say there are tears and drama, involving the forced resettlement of Michiko and her family and the disappearance of Esther's great-aunt Anna, who remains in Germany.

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In the back pages there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute found dumped on a roadside. For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords, it's the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart he searches his bombed city for answers, finding that these two stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to others - those willing to profit from guns, human trafficking and a Manchester in decay.

To serve the doll-collecting community, particularly avid Black-doll enthusiasts, Ms. Garrett continues to write about the dolls she loves. In this, her third doll publication, dolls, both old and new, blog their experiences over a two-year period as chosen dolls in Garrett's extensive and quite eclectic Black-doll collection.If you love dolls, possess a vivid imagination, and enjoy combining the two, you will derive great pleasure reading The Doll Blogs, another first for Debbie Behan Garrett. Garrett takes the reader on an imaginative voyage in doll-collecting world where she meets and greets new dolls, reacquaints herself with old ones, and continues the passion for all as a doll whisperer, allowing the dolls to speak through her. The dolls (some more vocal than others, with personalities all their own) find delight in telling their unique stories, sharing their experiences, and relaying how they entered Garrett's collection.This first book devoted to dolls that speak in blog form is masterfully engaging, a sure delight.

Expanding the definition and use of literacies beyond verbal and written communication, this book examines contemporary literacies through action-focused analysis of bodies, places, and media. Nexus analysis examines how people enact and mobilize meanings that are largely unspoken. Wohlwend demonstrates how nexus analysis can be used as a tool to critically analyze and understand action in everyday settings, to provide a deeper understanding of how meanings are produced from a mix of modes in daily social and cultural contexts. Organized in three sections—Engaging Nexus, Navigating Nexus, and Changing Nexus—this book provides a roadmap to applying nexus analysis to literacy research, and offers tools to enable readers to compare methods across contexts. Designed to help readers understand the theoretical and methodological assumptions and goals of nexus analysis in classroom and literacy research, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of the theory, framework, and foundations of nexus analysis, by using multimodal examples such as films and media, artifacts, live action performances, and more. Each chapter features consistent sections on key ideas and methods, and a description of procedures for replication and application.

Richly imagined portraits celebrating three historical women—including Goya’s muse—by an “outstanding writer” (Vaclav Havel). In “a unique voice that owes as much to Kundera as to Flaubert, to Hasek as to Tolstoy,” Czech writer Monika Zgustova brings to life the stories of three remarkable women in different countries and eras who defied the social restrictions of their day to find freedom of creative and personal expression (Juan Goytisolo, author of Exiled from Almost Everywhere). On her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid, the Duchess of Alba, lover and portrait subject of Spanish painter Francisco Goya, recalls the passions of her youth. Living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century, Bozena Nemcova defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society. In 1922, writer Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris with poet Vladislav Khodasevich, where the intelligentsia naively covet the promise of the Soviet Union. Each woman attempts to pursue a life of passion, intimacy, and creativity in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire and ambition. In praising Goya’s Glass, Vaclav Havel said: “Monika Zgustova’s concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history.”

The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature explores transnational perspectives of modern city life in Europe by engaging with the fantastic tropes and metaphors used by writers of short fiction. Focusing on the literary city and literary representations of urban experience throughout the nineteenth century, the works discussed incorporate supernatural occurrences in a European city and the supernatural of these stories stems from and belongs to the city. The argument is structured around three primary themes. “Architectures”, “Encounters” and “Rhythms” make reference to three axes of city life: material space, human encounters, and movement. This thematic approach highlights cultural continuities and thus supports the use of the label of “urban fantastic” within and across the European traditions studied here.