A gift book to savour. Let the Bard into your lounge and have him whip up some sharp cocktails and soothing snacks for the comedy or tragedy in your life. From ‘Get Thee to a Winery: girls’ night out’ to ‘Exit, Pursued by a Beer: drowning your sorrows’, this stage-sensitive, merrily blended book brings a Shakespearean swirl to life’s everyday highs and lows. Readers who downed Tequila Mockingbird and felt the force of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars will thrill to its intoxicating mix of literary nerdery and cheeky wordplay. Caroline Bicks and Michelle Ephraim are eminent English professors and eminent merry punsters. While poking a little fond fun at the man who gave them their careers, they dish up a delightful high-low mash of food, drink, and drama. Shakespeare, Not Stirred pops all the corks. Remember, with Falstaff: ‘thin drink doth so over-cool their blood…’ PRAISE FOR CAROLINE BICKS AND MICHELLE EPHRAIM ‘The perfect present for lovers of liquor and literature.’ The Guardian ‘Witty and fun.’ The Sunday Age

"Essays discuss food and drink in Shakespeare's plays, reframing questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama and emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food; many issues in Shakespeare studies are thus considered in terms of the cultural marker of culinary dynamics"--

Scholarly addiction in Doctor Faustus -- Addicted love in Twelfth Night -- Addicted fellowship in Henry IV -- Addiction and possession in Othello -- Addictive pledging from Shakespeare and Jonson to cavalier verse

Cleaning woman and karate expert Lily Bard is back in Charlaine Harris's latest cozy-but-noirish mystery about the dark secrets of a small Southern town In Shakespeare’s Christmas, Lily heads home to Bartley, Arkansas--always an uncomfortable scenario for the introverted Lily--for her sister Varena’s Christmas wedding. But Lily has more to worry about than being a bridesmaid for a sister to whom she’s no longer close. Soon after she arrives in Bartley, Lily’s private-detective boyfriend shows up too, and not just for moral support: He’s investigating a four-year-old unsolved kidnapping. Try as she might, Lily can’t help but get involved when she discovers that the case hits dangerously close to home--for Varena’s new husband is the widowed father of a girl bearing a remarkable resemblance to the vanished child.

SHAKESPEARE SHAPIRO HAS ALWAYS hated his name. His parents bestowed it on him as some kind of sick joke when he was born, and his life has gone downhill from there, one embarrassing incident after another. Entering his senior year of high school, Shakespeare has never had a girlfriend, his younger brother is cooler than he is, and his best friend's favorite topic of conversation is his bowel movements.But Shakespeare will have the last laugh. He is chronicling every mortifying detail in his memoir, the writing project each senior at Shakespeare's high school must complete. And he is doing it brilliantly. And, just maybe, a prize-winning memoir will bring him respect, admiration, and a girlfriend . . . or at least a prom date.

One of the New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land. “In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London) The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned. From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.