The tragic saga of a nineteenth-century fugitive, ne'er-do-well, and would-be savant that touches on themes as compelling today as they were in Victorian times

Sal Grimone is a GREAT DECEIVER! He gets paid to digitally implement his deceptions. Unfortunately for him, his neat world is about to be rocked by the unexpected intersection of other members of the reality he inhabits. And oh yeah, the line between reality and fiction has been made thin by the birth of a thing called the "Holonosphere". Everyone is struggling with metaphysical problems brought about by this. A few people might just change the world by how they answer and act...

The true story of a self-taught sleuth's quest to prove his eye-opening theory about the source of the world's most famous plays, taking readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England as well as the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives. What if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare . . . but someone else wrote him first? Acclaimed author of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of renegade scholar Dennis McCarthy and Elizabethan courtier Sir Thomas North. Unlike those who believe someone else secretly wrote Shakespeare, McCarthy argues that Shakespeare wrote the plays, but he adapted them from source plays written by North decades before. In Shakespeare's Shadow alternates between the enigmatic life of North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theater, and academic outsider McCarthy's attempts to air his provocative ideas in the clubby world of Shakespearean scholarship. Through it all, Blanding employs his keen journalistic eye to craft a captivating drama, upending our understanding of the beloved playwright and his "singular genius." Winner of the 2021 International Book Award in Narrative Non-Fiction

"Those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its center, and never more so than with the rogues of early modern England. Whether as social fact or literary fiction-or both, simultaneously-the marginal rogue became ideologically central and has remained so for historians, cultural critics, and literary critics alike. In this collection, early modern rogues represent the range, diversity, and tensions within early modern scholarship, making this quite simply the best overview of their significance then and now." -Jonathan Dollimore, York University "Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here." -Lawrence Manley, Yale University "A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students." -Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes. Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets. Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.

By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the Historia Augusta is an eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries. Historians of late antiquity have struggled to explain the fictional date and authorship of the work and its bizarre content (did the Emperor Carinus really swim in pools of floating apples and melons? did the usurper Proculus really deflower a hundred virgins in fifteen days?). David Rohrbacher offers, instead, a literary analysis of the work, focusing on its many playful allusions. Marshaling an array of interdisciplinary research and original analysis, he contends that the Historia Augusta originated in a circle of scholarly readers with an interest in biography, and that its allusions and parodies were meant as puzzles and jokes for a knowing and appreciative audience.

Discover the magic of Trudi Canavan with her brand new novel in the Traitor Spy Trilogy. . . Living among the Sachakan rebels, Lorkin does his best to learn about their unique magic. But the Traitors are reluctant to trade their secrets for the Healing they so desperately want. Meanwhile, Sonea searches for the rogue, knowing that Cery cannot avoid assassination forever -- -- but the rogue's influence over the city's underworld, however, is far greater than she feared. And in the University, two female novices are about to remind the Guild that sometimes their greatest enemy is found within. . .

This edition of Ben Jonson's four middle comedies places the works in the popular history and culture of the times, 1605-1614, and surveys the influences, both classical and contemporary, on Jonson as a playwright. On-the-page annotations recreate the audiences perception of the plays as performances by commenting on the stage-directions, the self-conscious theatricality of characters and scenes, and the vivid colloquialisms of early modern London that give the dialogue a heightened dimension of realism. Brief introductions to each play discuss the local settings, sources, theatre history and further readings. The general introduction includes a biography of Jonson, a chronology of the plays and masques, and separate essays on each play, dealing particularly with Jonson's satirical treatments of trends and shams of the day, whether political, social, commercial, or spiritual.

Written by Feng Menglong 冯梦龙, the Complete Works of Brainpower (智囊全集, Zhi Nang Quan Ji) was first compiled in 1626 or the Sixth Year of Tianqi in Ming Dynasty. It contains more than 1200 stories of brainpower and intelligence from the Pre-Qin Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty. There are twenty-eight sub-categories of wisdom, sagacity, courage, tact, wisdom, language, military, boudoir and so on. This book records the history of creation and practice of Chinese wisdom. The characters in the book are all using wisdom and strategy to create history. It is not only a magic book reflecting the ancient people's ingenious use of wisdom to solve problems and overcome enemies, but also a huge intellectual treasure in the history of Chinese culture.

This self-help book for cult leaders is ideal for anyone with a sense of humor! Dark and provocative humor… In a satirical twist, it uses short stories about 40 different cults as case studies to teach the vital steps for starting your own cult. The lessons will ensure that your cult becomes a vibrant, flourishing network of submissive lemmings and extension of God’s will, interpretable by no one but you!