Ollie and Moritz are two teenagers who will never meet. Each of them lives with a life-affecting illness. Contact with electricity sends Ollie into debilitating seizures, while Moritz has a heart defect and is kept alive by an electronic pacemaker. If they did meet, Ollie would seize, but turning off the pacemaker would kill Moritz. Through an exchange of letters, the two boys develop a strong bond of friendship which becomes a lifeline during dark times – until Moritz reveals that he holds the key to their shared, sinister past, and has been keeping it from Ollie all along.

The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.

Business & management.

"This hilarious collection of letters from Michael to his new teacher comes packed with alligators, pirates and rocket ships, and much, much more. Can Michael's imagination save him from the first day of school?"--Page 4 of cover.

Alphabetic letters are ubiquitous, multivalent, and largely ignored. Playful Letters reveals their important cultural contributions through Alphabetics—a new interpretive model for understanding artistic production that attends to the signifying interplay of the graphemic, phonemic, lexical, and material capacities of letters. A key period for examining this interplay is the century and a half after the invention of printing, with its unique media ecology of print, manuscript, sound, and image. Drawing on Shakespeare, anthropomorphic typography, figured letters, and Cyrillic pedagogy and politics, this book explores the ways in which alphabetic thinking and writing inform literature and the visual arts, and it develops reading strategies for the “letterature” that underwrites such cultural production. Playful Letters begins with early modern engagements with the alphabet and the human body—an intersection where letterature emerges with startling force. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy. In turn, educational habits that shaped letter learning and writing permeated the interrelated practices of typography, orthography, and poetry. These mutually informing processes render visible the persistent crumbling of words into letters and their reconstitution into narrative, poetry, and image. In addition to providing a rich history of literary and artistic alphabetic interrogation in early modern Western Europe and Russia, Playful Letters contributes to the continuous story of how people use new technologies and media to reflect on older forms, including the alphabet itself.

The right piece of direct mail can produce excellent response rates and have an extraordinary effect on business. But why do some sale letters achieve spectacular results whilst others are instantly consigned to the bin? This book reveals the secrets of creating successful sales letters. Containing examples of real sales letters, it includes plenty of advice on what to avoid as well as what to include. Key topics are covered such as: the secrets of persuasion; planning a letter which will get replies; creating offers that get responses and timing mailings for maximum effect.