It’s circa 1999 and the first sex chat rooms are in full swing. Late at night as his family sleeps, “Tag,” a lawyer trapped in the golden handcuffs of a loveless marriage, makes his inaugural visit to the newly launched Literoticus.com. He can’t believe what he’s stumbled into. This freewheeling world of lonely misfits engaged in unbridled sexual activity is both shocking and intriguing. When Tag encounters the witty, insightful, and occasionally scathing “Lisa33,” he feels a chemistry that has eluded him his entire marriage. Late-night honesty builds into sexual and emotional obsession, the kind that makes you think you are capable of changing your whole life. But what Dan Allan’s characters fail to anticipate is how hard it is to translate fantasy into reality. As personal discontents begin to intrude on this virtual erotic eden, Lisa’s longing for something better collides with Tag’s inability to step beyond the boundaries of his own very narrow life, and Lisa makes a heartbreaking choice. A heartfelt, profound, and highly original novel that both satirizes and utterly transcends the Internet craze, Lisa33 captures the longing for transformation through fantasy and brings to life the hilarious, weird community of self-invented characters who step into chat rooms in order to step out of the loneliness, fear, and sorrow of real life.

Winner of the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe. While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.

"A genius immortalized her. A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. No face has ever captivated so many for so long. Every year more than nine million visitors trek to her portrait in the Louvre. Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. This book rests on the premise that the woman in the Mona Lisa is indeed the person identified in its earliest description: Lisa Gherardini (1479-1542), wife of the Florence merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Dianne Hales has followed facts wherever she could find them -- from the Florence State Archives, to the squalid street where she was born, to the ruins of the convent where she died. Lisa Gherardini was a quintessential woman of her times, caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public scandals. Descended from ancient nobles, she gave birth to six children and died at age sixty-three. Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florence, decades of war, rebellion, invasion, siege, and conquest--and of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, inhabited by larger-than-legend figures such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered takes readers beyond the frame of Leonardo's masterpiece and introduces them to a fully dimensional human being"--

Essential ASP.NET with Examples in Visual Basic .NET is the Visual Basic programmer's definitive reference for ASP.NET through version 1.1. Intended for students with advanced programming experience, this book provides them with the information needed to fully understand the technology, and is a clear guide to using ASP.NET to build robust and well-architected Web applications. This book begins with a discussion of the rationale behind the design of ASP.NET and an introduction to how it builds on top of the .NET framework. Subsequent chapters explore the host of new features in ASP.NET, including the server-side compilation model, code-behind classes, server-side controls, form validation, the data binding model, and custom control development. Throughout the book, working examples illustrate best practices for building Web-based applications in VB.NET.

The number one bestseller and Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year by national treasure Bob Mortimer. ‘The most life-affirming, joyful read of the year’ - Sunday Times ‘Winningly heartfelt’ – The Guardian ‘A triumph’ – Daily Mail Bob Mortimer’s life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away… Although his childhood in Middlesbrough was normal on the surface, it was tinged by the loss of his dad, and his own various misadventures (now infamous from his appearances on Would I Lie to You?), from burning down the family home to starting a short-lived punk band called Dog Dirt. As an adult, he trained as a solicitor and moved to London. Though he was doing pretty well (the South London Press once crowned him ‘The Cockroach King’ after a successful verdict), a chance encounter in a pub in the 1980s with a young comedian going by the name Vic Reeves set his life on a different track. And now, six years on, the heart condition that once threatened his career has instead led to new success on BBC2’s Gone Fishing. Warm, profound, and irrepressibly funny, And Away… is Bob’s full life story (with a few lies thrown in for good measure.)

Like music, art is a universal language. Although looking at works of art is a pleasurable enough experience, to appreciate them fully requires certain skills and knowledge." --Carol Strickland, from the introduction to The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern * This heavily illustrated crash course in art history is revised and updated. This second edition of Carol Strickland's The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern offers an illustrated tutorial of prehistoric to post-modern art from cave paintings to video art installations to digital and Internet media. * Featuring succinct page-length essays, instructive sidebars, and more than 300 photographs, The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern takes art history out of the realm of dreary textbooks, demystifies jargon and theory, and makes art accessible-even at a cursory reading. * From Stonehenge to the Guggenheim and from Holbein to Warhol, more than 25,000 years of art is distilled into five sections covering a little more than 200 pages.

Winner of the Best Book of 2008 from The International Gender and Language Association In this ground-breaking ethnography of girls on a playground, Goodwin offers a window into their complex social worlds. Combats stereotypes that have dominated theories on female moral development by challenging the notion that girls are inherently supportive of each other Examines the stances that girls on a playground in a multicultural school setting assume and shows how they position themselves in their peer groups Documents the language practices and degradation rituals used to sanction friends and to bully others Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series