When "Hard Times" appeared as a serial in Household Words in 1854, Dickens was about midway in his literary career. In the same year this novel appeared in an octavo volume with a dedication to Thomas Carlyle. Its purpose, according to Dickens himself, was to satirize "those who see figures and averages and nothing else—the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time — the men who through long years to come will do more to damage the really useful facts of Political Economy than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life." The satire, however, like much that Dickens attempted in the same vein, was not very bitter. The characters in "Hard Times" are not numerous; and the plot itself is less intricate than others by the same author. The chief figures are Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, "a man of realities," with his unbounded faith in statistics; Louisa, his eldest daughter; and Josiah Bounderby, as practical as Mr. Gradgrind, but less kind-hearted. Louisa, though many years younger than Mr. Bounderby, is persuaded by her father to marry him. She is also influenced in making this marriage by her desire to smooth the path of her brother Tom, a clerk in Mr. Bounderby's office. Though not happy, she resists the blandishments of James Harthouse, a professed friend of her husband's. To escape him she has to go home to her father; and this leads to a permanent estrangement between husband and wife. In the mean time Tom Gradgrind has stolen money from Bounderby, and to avoid punishment runs away from England ...

Widely hailed as one of the finest humorist of the twentieth century, James Thurber looks back at his own life growing up in Columbus, Ohio, with the same humor and sharp wit that defined his famous sketches and writings. In My Life and Hard times, first published in 1933, he recounts the delightful chaos and frustrations of family, boyhood, youth odd dogs, recalcitrant machinery, and the foibles of human nature.

WINNER OF THE 2022 HUGO AWARD FOR BEST RELATED WORK From Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author of novels such as All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, this is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever read. The world is on fire. So tell your story. Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible. Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Contains twelve short Christmas stories about reunited families, fellowship, and restored faith including 'I Remember,' a story about the author's childhood in Iowa.

Classic from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, language: English, abstract: Chapter I: The One Thing Needful "NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!" The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, - nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, - all helped the emphasis. "In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!" The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the

The PEN Award-winning essay collection about queer lives: “Gorgeously punk-rock rebellious.”—The A.V. Club The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas; a doomed lesbian biker gang; recovering alcoholics; and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life, yet all-too-human figures populating America’s fringes. Rife with never-ending fights and failures, theirs are the stories we too often try to forget. But in the process of excavating and documenting these queer lives, Michelle Tea also reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is the first-ever collection of journalistic writing by the author of How to Grow Up and Valencia. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life. “Eclectic and wide-ranging…A palpable pain animates many of these essays, as well as a raucous joy and bright curiosity.” —The New York Times “Queer counterculture beats loud and proud in Tea’s stellar collection.” —Publishers Weekly (starred) “The best essay collection I've read in years.”—The New Republic Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

A dazzling collection of short stories by Mark Helprin, bestselling author of Winter's Tale, which is now a major motion picture starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, William Hurt, and Jennifer Connelly The Pacific and Other Stories is a collection of sixteen stories that display the remarkable scope, incomparable wit, and deft prose that have come to be Mark Helprin's signature. A British paratrooper jumps into occupied territory; the 1958 New York Yankees gain an unexpected teammate in a puny, teenaged Hasidic Jew; a September 11th widow receives an astonishing gift from the contractor working on her new apartment—these and other stories exhibit the constantly changing variety of the ocean itself, the peaks and troughs of life. Lighthearted, glittering fables are met with starker tales that sound the depths of sacrifice and duty. The Pacific and Other Stories is a resplendent, powerful collection of lasting substance and emotional import.