Love shared, love in secret, celebrated, exploded. Unrequited longing and love that's mellowed through the years. Love at long distance, across continents, so close there's no space to breathe, or never quite close enough. Love lost and love found. Love from the inside out and love from the outside in. Love Notes has it all: a collection of poetry as diverse as the experience of falling in love itself. A shared candied apple, a farewell at Paddington Station, a name scribbled in a notebook, a face that leaves us breathless, a single word that changes our life forever. Love Notes is a rich tapestry of verse woven from fragments of life and those moments that make falling in love so irresistible. And so inevitable. Love is unique, love is universal. Love is everywhere.

The Winter 2010 Issue of Arts and Literary Journal The Battered Suitcase; intelligent and imaginative prose, poetry and art that explores the human experience. Edited by Fawn Neun, Maggie Ward, and N. Apythia Morges.

You'll be entranced by these twenty-four stories as Nath Jones finds her way into this fun and biting life. She conducts you from the kaleidoscopic moment when a toddler loses her innocence to the last breath an old man takes in a rowboat at sunrise.

This is the first systematic study of networks of performance collaboration in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world and of their interactions with the artistic communities of the wider East Asian region. It investigates the aesthetics and politics of collaboration to propose a new transnational model for the analysis of Sinophone theatre cultures and to foreground the mobility and relationality of intercultural performance in East Asia. The research draws on extensive fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, and direct observation of performances, rehearsals, and festivals in Asia and Europe. It offers provocative close readings and discourse analysis of an extensive corpus of hitherto untapped sources, including unreleased video materials and unpublished scripts, production notes, and archival documentation.

The author of The Outcast Oracle delivers 23 stories dealing with the metaphorical concept of fog as a state produced by grief, mental illness, love, anger, religious fanaticism, dementia, pain, prejudice, or dreams and how the human being refracts reality through these diffused prisms. Protagonists struggle with physical and psychological distortions that lead them down problematic paths, whether due to jealousy or desire in the case of lovers or hypothermia experienced by a fallen mountain climber. Shortlisted for the prestigious UK Saboteur prize.

Some objects seem especially personal and important to us - be it a quickly packed suitcase, an inherited vase, or a photograph. In Sensitive Objects the authors discuss when, how, and why particular objects appear as 'sensitive'. They do so by analyzing the objects' affective charging in the context of historically embedded practices. Sensitive Objects is a contribution to the upcoming field of 'affect research' that has so far been dominated by psychology and cultural studies, and the authors examine the potential for epistemic gain by connecting the studies of affect with the studies of material culture. The contributors, predominantly ethnologists and anthropologists, use fieldwork to examine how people project affects onto material objects and explore how objects embody or trigger affects and produce affective atmospheres.

Noir has always been one of the most popular—and darkest—sub-genres of the mystery field. Following in the footsteps of such masters of the form as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, some of the top writers of gay mystery explore this territory of amoral tough guys with a cynical view of the world by giving classic noir a gay twist. Edited by award winning author/editors Greg Herren and J.M. Redmann, Men of the Mean Streets changes the face of gay mystery—and the reader may never look at gay life and culture in the same way again.

“There are those who think that Paul Theroux is the finest travel writer working in English. This collection can only enhance that reputation.”—The New York Times Book Review Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else can: he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler's guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know. Praise for To the Ends of the Earth “Reads like a wonderful novel.”—The Pittsburgh Press “Powerful . . . This compendium unequivocally offers insight into the mind of a foremost American fiction writer who became an accidental tourist.”—The Christian Science Monitor “Theroux is a wonderful traveling companion. . . . To the Ends of the Earth combines the best of his travel writing. . . . With him the reader shares a conversation with a sultan on a polo ground in Malaysia; hears people ‘mourn with firecrackers, scattering cherrybombs on the tombstone’ in a Chinese cemetery in Singapore; feels overdressed around nudists in Corsica; sees sandbagged houses and bombcraters left in Vietnam on a cold December day in 1973.”—The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star “Travel writing at its best . . . As you travel voyeuristically with Theroux, across the vast wastelands of interior China, the convoluted cultures of Latin America or campy seacoast towns of England, you're struck with his slightly jaundiced eye for the overlooked but telling detail, his skeptic's ear for the offhand but important comment.”—The Houston Post

How acute are your powers of perception? Do they begin to match those of Gervase Fen, Oxford don and sleuth supreme? First published in 1953, Beware of the Trains is a collection of sixteen short mysteries. Fen must link a missing train conductor to the murder of a thief, decipher cryptograms to solve the death of a cipher expert and puzzle out a locked-room mystery on Boxing Day. Erudite and complex, these Gervase Fen cases are classic crime at its finest: plot, atmosphere and anecdote, bound together by Edmund Crispin's inimitable wit and charm.