Lost in the Crowd
There is so much controversy surrounding this book that the author has found it difficult to promote. In fact, seeing people cheer the book being burned on a stove at the Bolton Food Festival is the epitome of itself. Don't be put off by the naysayers. Just look at the reviews. This book has a big part to play in todays's world, and in making you not take it too seriously, but making you laugh your socks of at it. M.J. Santley is an Englishman (from Bolton) whose problems stem half from unlucky twists of fate and half from his own truly, intensely, absurdly inexplicable knack for wandering into trouble - trouble that he generally somehow ends up getting out of. In this, his first novel, he travels the world in search of love, the meaning of life, and his drunk and disorderly brother. Lost in the Crowd is an engaging, humorous, and sometimes poignant autobiographical story that will make you feel as though you are right there with Matt - laughing, crying, and stumbling through all the ups and downs of his amazing, hard-to-believe, often hilarious, emotive, heartwarming journey through life - a journey that recurrently seems to be influenced by mysterious forces beyond Matt's control and understanding. The book is defined by events that occurred in the author's life during the two years that it was being written - events that bring the book to life and give it a whole new meaning; a meaning that could never have been envisaged when Matt started to write in October 2015. It has been described as a brilliantly compelling quirky book of inspiration, coincidence, love, luck, loss, life, chance, opportunism, emotion, comedy, stupidity, amazement, danger, worry, survival, happiness, laughter, and WTF! See www.litcbook.com to learn more. Contains original artwork by chrisriversart.com.
Lost in the Crowd
Faces in the Crowd
Electric Literature 25 Best Novels of 2014 Largehearted Boy Favorite Novels of 2014 "An extraordinary new literary talent."--The Daily Telegraph "In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes over all your senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening your eyes and heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage--and then, in the book's second half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it—has rarely been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a masterful, entirely original writer."--Francisco Goldman In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction. "Luiselli's haunting debut novel, about a young mother living in Mexico City who writes a novel looking back on her time spent working as a translator of obscure works at a small independent press in Harlem, erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of disappearance. . . . Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition." —Publishers Weekly
The Crowd
Between 1800 and 1850, political demonstrations and the tumult of a ballooning street life not only brought novel kinds of crowds onto the streets of London, but also fundamentally changed British ideas about public and private space. The Crowd sets out to demonstrate the influence of these new crowds, riots, and demonstrations on the period's literature. John Plotz offers compelling readings of works by Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Bronte, arguing that new "representative" crowds became a potent rival for the representational claims of literary texts themselves. As rivals in representation, these crowds triggered important changes not simply in how these authors depicted crowds, but in their notions of public life and privacy in general. The Crowd is the first book devoted to an analysis of crowds in British literature. In addition to this being a noteworthy and innovative contribution to literary criticism, it addresses ongoing debates in political theory on the nature of the public-political realm and offers a new reading of the contested public discourses of class, nation, and gender. In the end, it provides a sophisticated and rich analysis of an important facet of the beginning of the modern age.
