John Yau engages visual art, social theory, and syntactical dexterity to push the limits of language toward an expansive counter-poetics

The magical adventures of an eccentric Mary Poppins-esque heroine and her flying feline charges, sure to charm readers big and small. The first book for children by an internationally acclaimed novelist and poet. Miss Petitfour enjoys having adventures that are "just the right size - fitting into a single, magical day." She is an expert at baking and eating fancy iced cakes, and her favorite mode of travel is par avion. On windy days, she takes her sixteen cats out for an airing: Minky, Misty, Taffy, Purrsia, Pirate, Mustard, Moutarde, Hemdela, Earring, Grigorovitch, Clasby, Captain Captain, Captain Catkin, Captain Cothespin, Your Shyness and Sizzles. With the aid of her favorite tea party tablecloth as a makeshift balloon, Miss Petitfour and her charges fly over her village, having many little adventures along the way. Join Miss Petitfour and her equally eccentric felines on five magical outings -- a search for marmalade, to a spring jumble sale, on a quest for "birthday cheddar", the retrieval of a lost rare stamp and as they compete in the village's annual Festooning Festival. A whimsical, beautifully illustrated collection of tales that celebrates language, storytelling and small pleasures, especially the edible kind!

What do Postman Pat, Tommy Cooper, Norman Wisdom and George Best have in common with being abandoned in a Costa Rican jungle after a severe bout of flatulence? Indeed, how are they also connected to trying to buy an Australian brewery just to get a beer, owning twenty-two cars, an American soccer team and a Swiss mail-order pornography company? The common feature is of course a certain Richard Wakeman. The Further Adventures of a Grumpy Old Rock Star takes you, the privileged reader, on a trip of absurd excess, a cultural car crash of side-splitting hilarity and an unforgettable glimpse (again) into the life of one of Britain's most legendary showmen, rock stars and all-time great raconteurs.

Black holes have turned out to be the cornerstone of both physics and popular belief. But what if we were to realize that exact black holes cannot exist, even though their existence is apparently suggested by exact general relativistic solutions, and Roger Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics ‘for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity’? While it might seem far-fetched to claim so, it will be worth remembering that the finest theoretical physicists like Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac did not believe in black holes, and Stephen Hawking finally thought that there are no exact black holes. While the black hole paradigm has become commonplace in popular consciousness, in the last decade, noise has consistently grown about the many physical effects which can inhibit the formation of exact mathematical black holes. In The Rise and Fall of the Black Hole Paradigm, Abhas Mitra shows us how, much before these developments, he had proven why the so-called black holes must only be black hole pretenders. He identified these black hole candidates to be Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Objects (MECOs) and, along with Darryl J. Leiter and Stanley L. Robertson, generalized them. Recent evidence for the existence of strong magnetic fields around so-called black holes may provide confirmations of his claim.

This volume contains George Bernard Shaw's collection of short stories entitled "The Black Girl in Search of God, and Some Lesser Tales". It was first published in 1934. "The Black Girl In Search Of God" is a short story that follows a young girl who is newly converted to Christianity - and who embarks on a literal search for God. On her way, she comes into contact with a number of religious figures, each trying to convert her to their own faiths. This wonderfully sardonic allegory highlights Shaw's unorthodox ideas on faith and race, and was highly controversial when first published. George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950) was an Irish playwright who co-founded of the London School of Economics. Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now, in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.

A violent storm at sea destroys Robinson Crusoe's ship. He alone survives and is cast ashore on a deserted island. Crusoe must summon all his strength and intelligence to survive and flourish against impossible odds. This is an amazing tale of a young man who overcomes loneliness, tames wild animals, battles ferocious cannibals and dangerous mutineers in a twenty-four year struggle to stay alive!

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. At the conclusion of BIJOUX IN THE DARK, John Yau states, "I did not write a hauntingly beautiful book." A line that contrasts with the book's introductory poem, in which hauntings and beauty abound. With all of BIJOUX IN THE DARK, the answer is multifaceted as Yau disavows pretension and expectation and instead heeds a candor beyond categorization. Sonnets and pantoums abound alongside graffiti and Top Ten lists. Yau's work veers from satire, ekphrasis, and homage to imagined histories, surreal dimensions, and Egyptology. The book's list of characters includes Albrecht Durer, Hieronymus Bosch, Francis Bacon, Mark Wahlberg, Donald Trump, Dante, and Meng Chiao. Yet, from this miscellany there comes an ingenious whole deft in its wit and bite. Here John Yau is at home with the quirky and the profound, and any combination thereof.

Collects comic books featuring archaeologist Indiana Jones and his adventures around the world.

When will American poetry and poetics stop viewing poetry by racialized persons as a secondary subject within the field? Dorothy J. Wang makes an impassioned case that now is the time. Thinking Its Presence calls for a radical rethinking of how American poetry is being read today, offering its own reading as a roadmap. While focusing on the work of five contemporary Asian American poets—Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Pamela Lu—the book contends that aesthetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts in the writing and reception of all poetry. Wang questions the tendency of critics and academics alike to occlude the role of race in their discussions of the American poetic tradition and casts a harsh light on the double standard they apply in reading poems by poets who are racial minorities. This is the first sustained study of the formal properties in Asian American poetry across a range of aesthetic styles, from traditional lyric to avant-garde. Wang argues with conviction that critics should read minority poetry with the same attention to language and form that they bring to their analyses of writing by white poets.

A new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.