This collection enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century by focusing on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays that comprise The Secret Life of Things thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee, from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to a consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology.

Wouldn't you like: - Products that don't damage the environment? - A better way of life without agonising about your 'footprint'? - To really know your stuff? Climate change? Biofuels? Nuclear power? Landfills? Recycling? Renewable energy? Environmental issues can feel overwhelming. But, in fact, it is simple; it all comes down to one thing - stuff. Our use of the Earth's resources - whether a crisp packet or a cargo ship, a T-shirt or a wind turbine - has an inescapable impact on our future. In The Secret Life of Stuff, Julie Hill uncovers the origins and the true cost of what we use. Her inventory of over-consumption may shock but it is the first step towards overcoming waste. The misuse of stuff is not your fault, it's a product of history. But it is only by understanding what has gone wrong, that everyone - politicians, business people and us as consumers - can create a new and better material world.

This volume takes you to the places and people you touch every day. - BOOK JACKET.

We think we know those who are close to us, and we want to believe that what we see is what we get. But we can never know for certain, because what really goes on inside another's head and heart is essentially a secret. How do you know if that secret is something that will hurt you? Your husband turns to face you in bed. Is he thinking about you or your closest friend? Your boss shows up in another new outfit. Did she get a raise or is she a compulsive shopper who is stealing money from the company? Your teenaged daughter is upstairs in her bedroom. Is she doing her homework or chatting online with a man twice her age? Anatomy of A Secret Life will take you inside the minds of secret-keepers and show you how secrets start, how they're kept, and how they exact their devastating emotional and social toll. Using contemporary case studies and historical examples, Dr. Gail Saltz shows you how to spot--through subtle behaviors and clues--and safely stop the potentially dangerous secrets that someone, even you, might be concealing from the world.

Trained as a photographer, Terry Border left the commercial world for story-telling. His complex vignettes are made of the simplest, everyday items: a jar of spices, a cigarette stub, a flower, a snack food. These sly photos range from whimsical scenes to sexy scenarios, the sad truths to the hilarious happenings in everyday life. In the tradition of bestselling humorous photography books like Chicks with Baggage, Play with Your Food, and Hello Cupcake!, this volume will surprise you with every viewing. A sunflower missing a petal becomes the tortured artist Van Gogh; an egg arrives to visit his mom only to discover roast chicken on the table; when confronted by a jar of peanut butter, peanuts hold a wake; and hot dogs leave behind their own brand of little presents. Marshmallows, wine corks, bread, soap, rocks, and tea bags—no common household item is safe from the twisted (wire) mind behind these uncommon creations!

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.