Key Selling Points In this early chapter book, Jolene travels to Los Angeles with her long-haul trucker father who recently came out as gay. The pair come face to face with homophobia but find a way to forgive and behave with kindness. Genius Jolene includes themes of critical thinking, travel, family, acceptance and confronting homophobia. The author’s middle-grade novel A Boy Named Queen was a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Book Award, the Silver Birch Express Award, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award and the Diamond Willow Award. This book features several black-and-white illustrations, which add to this engaging chapter book.

In The Aesthetics of Qiyun and Genius: Spirit Consonance in Chinese Landscape Painting and Some Kantian Echoes, Xiaoyan Hu provides an interpretation of the notion of qiyun, or spirit consonance, in Chinese painting, and considers why creating a painting—especially a landscape painting—replete with qiyun is regarded as an art of genius, where genius is an innate mental talent. Through a comparison of the role of this innate mental disposition in the aesthetics of qiyun and Kant’s account of artistic genius, the book addresses an important feature of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, one that evades the aesthetic universality assumed by a Kantian lens. Drawing on the views of influential sixth to fourteenth-century theorists and art historians and connoisseurs, the first part explains and discusses qiyun and its conceptual development from a notion mainly applied to figure painting to one that also plays an enduring role in the aesthetics of landscape painting. In the light of Kant’s account of genius, the second part examines a range of issues regarding the role of the mind in creating a painting replete with qiyun and the impossibility of teaching qiyun. Through this comparison with Kant, Hu demystifies the uniqueness of qiyun aesthetics and also illuminates some limitations in Kant’s aesthetics. The publication of this work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (project no: 3213042202A1).

The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first meal, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities on the edge of a war zone.

No study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has been published in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of this poetry the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an English readership to a major body of work; rather, the book delineates for the first time in any language an account of the symbolic network or organizing myth that underlies Goethe's individual poems. This marks a decisive break with the previous research on Goethe, which has tended to view his poetry as the expression of occasional experiences. The author shows, on the contrary, that Goethe's lyric work circles around a core set of problems and figures, that it evinces a systematic coherence unperceived until now.

Offering a new perspective on two major authors, Minear explores Shakespeare's and Milton's fascination with the idea of language infiltrated by music and reproducing not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects on minds and memories. She reveals that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics.