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On Saturday, 23 October 2010, Sonia Oatley waved off her 15-year-old daughter, Becca, to meet Joshua Davies, a former boyfriend. Becca's hope was that the two of them would get back together, but it was not to be. By 3pm, oddly, she stopped answering her mobile. By 7.30 she was officially declared missing. And at 10am the following morning, while Sonia and the family were out searching, came the call that is every parent's worst nightmare. The police had found the body of a young girl in local woodland: she'd been bludgeoned to death with a rock.Bye Mam, I Love You is the story of Rebecca Aylward's murder - a slaying that was described by an incredulous media as having been committed for 'the price of a breakfast'. But, as soon became clear, this was no crime of passion. Becca's death had apparently been many months in the planning, by a calculating, cold-blooded killer.From the immediate arrest of 16-year-old Joshua Davies, to the lengthy investigation and harrowing five week trial that convicted him, this book is both an expression of a mother's love and her pride in a daughter who had so much to live for, as well as an insight into the mind of a brutal murderer.
Directions in Empirical Literary Studies is on the cutting edge of empirical studies and is a much needed volume. It both widens the scope of empirical studies and looks at them from an intercultural perspective by bringing together renowned scholars from the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics and literature, all focusing on how empirical studies have impacted these different areas. Theoretical issues are discussed and solid methods are presented. Some chapters also show the relation between empirical studies and new technology, examining developments in computer science and corpus linguistics. This book takes a global perspective, with contributors from many different countries, both senior and junior researchers. Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in nature, it contributes with the state-of-the-art developments in the field.
Mirroring Romania's drastic transition from totalitarianism to Western-style freedom in the late 1980s, Mr. K Released captures the disturbingly surreal feeling that many newly liberated prisoners face when they leave captivity. Employing his trademark playful absurdity, Mat i Visniec introduces us to Mr. K, a Kafkaesque figure who has been imprisoned for years for an undisclosed crime in a penitentiary with mysterious tunnels. One day, Mr. K finds himself unexpectedly released. Unable to comprehend his sudden liberation, he becomes traumatized by the realities of freedom--more so than the familiar trauma of captivity or imprisonment. In the hope of obtaining some clarification, Mr. K keeps waiting for an appointment with the prison governor, however, their meeting is constantly being delayed. During this endless process of waiting, Mr. K gets caught up in a clinical exploration of his physical surroundings. He does not have the courage or indeed inclination to leave, but can move unrestricted within the prison compound, charting endless series of absurd circles in which readers might paradoxically recognize themselves.
German author Friedrich Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in his latest crime novel. Happiness is extinguished completely one cold November night when eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani's previous novel The Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of grief among family and friends. As the special task force is unable to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal with the loss, Franck--driven by the need to bring...
Introduces readers to the modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century A Companion to Literary Theory is a collection of 36 original essays, all by noted scholars in their field, designed to introduce the modes and ideas of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, in order to highlight the relationships between earlier and most recent theoretical developments, the book groups its chapters into seven convenient sections: I. Literary Form: Narrative and Poetry; II. The Task of Reading; III. Literary Locations and Cultural Studies; IV. The Politics of Literature; V. Identities; VI. Bodies and Their Minds; and VII. Scientific Infle...
Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Tóth's book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual's life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways--sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.
Some tragedies become part of our national history. On August 4, 2002 Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing in Soham. The police searched, the girls' families searched, the local community searched, Kevin Wells, Holly's father, became a familiar figure on TV as he prayed for good news - the good news that never came. After 13 days, the bodies of Holly and Jessica were found. Within 48 hours, Ian Huntley was charged with their murder. There is nothing more dreadful than losing a child. Kevin had no idea what had happened to the daughter he loved and had such high hopes for in the terrible days after Holly went missing, Kevin found himself overwhelmed with emotion. He cried and was often embarrassed to cry. He faced situations he never imagined in his worst nightmares. Under stress, he feared he might forget important details of the worst days of his life. So he started to make notes. He didn't think of it as being therapeutic. At first his wife Nicola didn't see the point but she soon changed her mind. Kevin's diary couldn't alter anything but it did feel as if their lives were a little less out of their control. Huntley and Maxine Carr was over.
In Catastrophe in Indonesia, Lane probes this massive and complicated collapse of communism, providing a thorough and knowledgeable explanation of how the movement's leadership trapped itself in such a disastrous situation. He then brings the story up to the present, analysing the overall impact on Indonesian politics and the re-emergence of a new Indonesian Left. --Book Jacket.
Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical perspectives in the fields of comparative literature, theater, performance, and culture studies, the book explores key artistic movements and phenomena that have emerged in China's major cultural centers in the last several decades. It surveys the work of China's most influential dramatists, directors and performance groups, with a special focus on Beijing-based playwright, director and filmmaker Meng Jinghui--the former enfant terrible of Beijing theater, who is now one of Asia's foremost theater personalities. Through an extensive critique of theories of modernism and the avant-garde, the author reassesses the meanings, functions and socio-historical significance of this work in non-Western contexts by proposing a new theoretical construct--the pop avant-garde--and exploring new ways to understand and conceptualize aesthetic practices beyond Euro-American cultures and critical discourses.
A novel by a Swiss writer that features figures from all over Europe from different walks of life coming together in secret to talk through their experiences, hopes, and dreams. Somewhere deep in the European forest, they meet. Frontier workers, smugglers, refugees, workers, asylum seekers, inspectors, artists, musicians, actors, journalists, scholarship holders, logisticians, students, and ghosts. They come from everywhere. They are all representatives of our time, and they have conversations about origins and justice; body and state; import and export; homeland and migration. They talk together about happiness, music, and death. In Shift Sleepers, Swiss writer Dorothee Elmiger has produced a novel that sheds light on the controversial issues of our time, finding a new language for this conversation previously unheard in contemporary German literature.