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A blend of literary history, memoir, and self-help that shows how French literature can bring humor, happiness, and romance to our lives   Like many people the world over, Viv Groskop wishes she was a little more French. A writer and comedian, Groskop studied the language obsessively starting at age 11 and spent every vacation in France, desperate to escape her Englishness and to have some French chic rub off on her. In Au Revoir, Tristesse, Groskop mixes literary history and memoir t...

Winner of the 2016 Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award In God Mocks, Terry Lindvall ventures into the muddy and dangerous realm of religious satire, chronicling its evolution from the biblical wit and humor of the Hebrew prophets through the Roman Era and the Middle Ages all the way up to the present. He takes the reader on a journey through the work of Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain, and ending with the mediated entertainment...

Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante's masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives-polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution- that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scho...

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of ‘comedy studies’ that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship betw...

Samuel L. Clemens lost the 1882 lawsuit declaring his exclusive right to use ""Mark Twain"" as a commercial trademark, but he succeeded in the marketplace, where synergy among his comic journalism, live performances, authorship, and entrepreneurship made ""Mark Twain"" the premier national and international brand of American humor in his day. And so it remains in ours, because Mark Twain's humor not only expressed views of self and society well ahead of its time, but also anticipated ways in wh...

Being single again can be a daunting experience. The new edition to the 'Things to do' series provides inspiration, tips and encouragement on rebuilding a happy, healthy and fulfilling life. The book helps readers to plan their new journey as a single person, suggesting positive ways to move forward with their lives and is packed with positive ideas to remind you of all the great opportunities that are out there waiting to be explored. Being single frees up your time and allows you to be more ad...

An Everyman who expressed the defiant spirit of freedom, Charlie Chaplin was first lauded and later reviled in the America that made him Hollywood's richest man. He was a figure of multiple paradoxes, and many studies have sought to unveil 'the man behind the mask.' Louvish charts the tale of the Tramp himself through his films - from the early Mack Sennett shorts through the major features (The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator et al.) He weighs the relationship between t...

She is eighty. Facing death, she becomes 'a cruising mind', lost in sequences of unabstract comic detail, in - as the title implies - a kind of index, rigid, arbitrary, pointing backwards into the lived text. The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. She is getting worse day by day, and yet she goes on, deeper into meaning, into non-meaning, with a kind of wry eagerness. She is not disappointed with her life. In order to distract herself, t...

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION Juvenal, Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis (ca. AD 60140), master of satirical hexameter poetry, was born at Aquinum. He used his powers in the composition first of scathing satires on Roman life, with special reference to ineptitude in poetry (Satire 1); vices of fake philosophers (2); grievances of the worthy poor (3); and of clients (5); a council-meeting under Emperor Domitian (4); vicious women (6); prospects of letters and learning under a new emper...

Sellevision is America's premier shop-at-home channel - until disaster strikes each of its frighteningly telegenic hosts. Tune in as Peggy Jean Smythe goes from poised, popular personality to pill-popping lush haunted by a stalker; watch handsome Max Andrews accidentally expose himself on the air, branding himself unemployable; see Leigh Bushmoore take her true tales of the casting couch in front of the cameras during family hour. SELLEVISION offers all this - plus Princess Diana Key Fobs, fabul...