A craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical object. Why were these bizarre jumbles of artifacts so popular? Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the Tradescant family; the development of English natural history; narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum.
This outtake from Marcel Proust's SWANN'S WAY is an account of the long, obsessive affair between Swann, the Parisian man about town, and Odette, the cocotte to whom he is enslaved. Can you imagine Mrs R laughing so hard that she dislocates her jaw? Swann takes a long time to rearrange Odette's corsage of orchids. Thereafter they do not call it making love, they "do orchids". If you're nervous of Proust, this is a good standalone extract to start with. - Sue Arnold, Classic Sounds
A novel of Elizabethan England that could only have come from the pen of the Newbery medalist Karen Cushman. Fans of Cushman’s witty, satisfying novels will welcome Meggy Swann, newly come to London with her only friend, a goose named Louise. Meggy is appalled by London; it’s dirty, noisy, full of rogues and thieves, and difficult to get around in—not that getting around is ever easy for someone who walks with the help of two sticks. But just as her alchemist father pursues his Great Work, Meggy finds herself pursuing her own transformation, and in the end, discovers Elizabethan London also has gifts in store for her.
In this first in a trilogy Ross is developing on ex–Special Forces men reacclimating to civilian life, ex-SEAL Zach Tremayne returns to his South Carolina small town to try to forget the horrors of the Iraq War. Sabrina Swann has returned to recover from a terrorist attack on the Italian hotel where she was waitressing.
