NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

The novel tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to Russia after thirty years in the Gulag. After short and unsatisfying visits to familiar places and persons in Moscow and Leningrad, the hero settles in a southern provincial town where he briefly establishes a new life with a war widow. Ivan Grigoryevich eventually returns to his boyhood home on the Black Sea, where he is finally able to come to terms with the inhumanity of the new Russian regime.

Through case studies and classroom vignettes Barbieri reveals the power of literacy to change students' perspectives and give them hope.

Burning ambition, brutal setbacks, meteoric rises, and unbelievable coincidences. Teetering on the edge of the abyss, risking everything, and reaching multi-national stardom. Not to mention life choices that could have sent the whole story in an entirely different direction. The life of Samu Haber – front man of Finnish rock band Sunrise Avenue ("Hollywood Hills", "Fairytale Gone Bad") and celebrity judge on The Voice of Germany – has been one stupendous roller-coaster ride. His passion for music has been the constant that kept him sane throughout. Written in a brisk, engaging – and characteristically charming – style, this exclusive autobiography is Samu's true story: from shady encounters, narrow escapes, and a barrage of record-company rejections to muscling his own way into pan-European music stardom. With vivid recall and total candour, Samu charts his determined path to success – but also the price he and loved ones paid along the way: burnout, broken relationships, artistic crises, and one close call after another. At turns tender, hilarious, and incredible, this thrilling full-disclosure read is a must for all Sunrise Avenue fans and for anyone that dreams of something other than the ordinary.

The journal Civil Lines was conceived in the 1990s to publish the best new Indian writing in English. The first issue (1994) soon garnered a cult readership with works by writers like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Ramachandra Guha and I. Allan Sealy. Claiming the magazine?s irregularity itself as a guarantee of quality, Civil Lines continued issues erratically. It encouraged a new wave of Indian English writers and laid the ground for, among others, Ruchir Joshi, Siddhartha Deb, Suketu Mehta, Amitava Kumar, and Manjula Padmanabhan, who went on to become established writers Ramachandra Guha?s first brilliant essay, a five-finger exercise in literary anthropology which appeared in the inaugural issue, and Amitav Ghosh?s reflective essay on the Indian practice of the short story as well as a wonderfully fluent translation of one of Tagore?s most famous tales, Kshudhita Pashan (The Hunger of Stones). This volume, edited by Rukun Advani (one of the four original editors), brings together the finest essays, stories, and poems in the first five issues of Civil Lines, all of which are now out of print and hard to come by. For anyone interested in the finest recent Indian writing in English, this is the book to possess.

A sixteen-year old illiterate woman cares for the elderly rector of a tumbledown church in a mountain hamlet, but when the town hall across from the church is converted into a dance hall, the narrator is recruited for some of the hall's finer clientele

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars. From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces the making of a conservative national temperament which could be defensive and protective, yet modernising in outlook. In a series of literary anaylses, the author suggests some of the tones and accents of this new version of Englishness; in particular she looks at new kinds of readership and fiction, at the historical and emotional significance of the `whodunit', the burgeoning of historical romance, and the creation of a middlebrow culture in the period. Forever England evokes a powerful sense of period and of the pleasures of reading, providing an intimate picture of interwar life from inside the English middle classes. As a feminist inquiry, it argues from a different kind of social and political history; one which makes connections between the interior structures of private life and their more public national forms. Controversially, it also urges that feminism deal with conservative, as well as radical, desires and their place in women's lives.