![]() ![]() My thoughts: This is the first in the Domestic Diva Mystery series and it was a quick read. ![]() Sophie will have to set her trussing aside to solve the murder or she’ll be serving up prison grub – and that definitely wouldn’t be a good thing. And when the police find her name and photo inside the victim’s car, they think she has some explaining to do. However, Sophie’s search for the perfect turkey takes a basting when she stumbles across a corpse. Natasha may have stolen the spotlight – and Sophie’s husband – but Sophie is determined to take home the prize at the Stupendous Stuffing Shakedown. ![]() While Natasha is known for her intricate centerpieces and painstakingly prepared gourmet meals, Sophie likes to keep things simple…real simple. First line: “My very favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.”įrom the back cover: Few can compete with the Natasha Smith when it comes to entertaining, but her childhood rival, Sophie Winston, certainly tries. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() You can hear Dylan Thomas reading ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ here. The rhymes, too, cleverly reflect Thomas’s desire that his father allow a little daylight into his darkest final hours: ‘night’ plays off ‘light’ in terms of rhyme and meaning, but ‘day’, sandwiched between them, semantically opposes ‘night’ (just as Thomas’s father is being asked to oppose its oppressions) before giving way to ‘light’. Such emphatic words convey the disordered rage which Thomas wants his father to allow to overcome him. ‘Rage, rage’ offers a nice example of the spondee (or heavy iamb, depending on your perspective on spondees), where two syllables are sounded with a similar amount of emphasis. It is that first stanza which shows Dylan Thomas’s way with vowels (and, for that matter, consonants) so wonderfully: ‘age’ and ‘rave’ play against each other with their long ‘a’ sounds, only to coalesce into ‘rage’ in the next line – decidedly apt, since the rage Thomas describes is a result of old age and, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘the only end of age’. ![]() This shifts the poem between the two modes, between asking his father to put up one last fight against the terror of death, and talking of how ‘wise men’ and ‘wild men’ (among others) have provided an example to follow by their defiant actions, using their last breaths to contest their own annihilation. ![]() ![]() ![]() **This is a standalone contemporary romance. Then again, I thought that was the case until he called me late last night with an emergency proposition. ![]() That letter was rejected with his sexy, trademark smirk and an “I highly suggest you read the fine print of your contract.”Īnd now I've realized that unless I fake my death, poison him, or find a way to renegotiate my impossible contract, I’m stuck working under one of the cockiest and most ruthless bosses in New York. That’s the version of my two weeks’ notice I should’ve sent to my boss, because the more professional version - the one where I said I was "grateful for all the opportunities," and "honored by all the rewarding experiences" over the years? ![]() I wish his next executive assistant all the luck in the world (she'll need it) and if my boss should need me to do anything over the next two weeks, kindly tell him that he can do it goddamn self. This was a VERY EASY decision to make, as the past two years have been utterly miserable. two-weeks-notice-by-whitney-g.epub Original Title: TWO WEEKS' NOTICE Creator: G., Whitney Language: en Identifier: 4166291507 Publisher: WGW Books, LLC. I am writing this letter to formally announce my resignation from Parker International (& the arrogant, condescending CEO) effective two weeks from today. ![]() ![]() ![]() Red in Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, Different Seasons 751 likes Like theres no harm in hoping for the best as long as youre prepared for the worst. Thus, King and his editor conceived the idea of publishing the novellas together as "something different", hence the title of the book. 9339 likes Like Let me tell you something my friend. Conversely, the novellas, which did not deal (primarily) with the supernatural, were very difficult to publish as there was not a mass market for "straight" fiction stories in the 25,000- to 35,000-word format. ![]() However, his horror novels turned out to be quite popular and made him much in demand as a novelist. Early in his career, his agents and editors expressed concern that he would be "written off" as someone who only wrote horror. ![]() In it, he explains why he had not previously submitted the novellas (each written at a different time) for publication. ![]() The collection is notable for having nearly all of its novellas turned into Hollywood films, one of which, The Shawshank Redemption, was nominated for the 1994 Academy Award for Best Picture.Īt the ending of the book, there is also a brief afterword, which King wrote on January 4, 1982. The four novellas are tied together via subtitles that relate to each of the four seasons. Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four Stephen King novellas with a more dramatic bent, rather than the horror fiction for which King is famous. This gripping collection begins with Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling. ![]() ![]() With nods to Charles Portis and Frank Norris, DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving. ![]() As more of the brothers' story is teased out, Charlie and Eli explore the human implications of many of the clichés of the old west and come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men. Eli's deadpan narration is at times strangely funny (as when he discovers dental hygiene, thanks to a frontier dentist dispensing free samples of "tooth powder that produced a minty foam") but maintains the power to stir heartbreak, as with Eli's infatuation with a consumptive hotel bookkeeper. When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011. Though Eli has never shared his brother’s penchant for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. ![]() ![]() ![]() Dewitt's bang-up second novel (after Ablutions) is a quirky and stylish revisionist western. Now a major motion picture starring Joaquin Phoeinix, John C. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Israel, Colorado, South Africa, the Chesapeake Bay, Texas and Alaska all have served as grist for Michener’s relentless mill. Gradually, he gave up conventional novels and came to specialize in long (1,000 pages more or less), intricate, sometimes plodding fictionalized histories centered around an intriguing locale. The pattern was established by Hawaii, published in 1959, Michener’s first best seller. Sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s, James Michener ceased to be a serious writer, at least in the literary sense, and became something else - an industry, his typewriter a factory upon which, with two fingers pecking, he took history and processed it into best-selling novels that also could be used as doorstops and further processed into movies or better yet TV miniseries. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() These were tomes when being a woman and working alone, living alone where suspicious, so when things start to happen in the village, it must be her, right?Įvents in the village start to happen which are very spookily similar to those in the magazine stories. People find her odd and aloof so the rumours of witchcraft soon start to circulate. But life on your own is lonely when you cut others out of your life. Her husband is dead and has left her a magazine so she spends her time doing that with her maid. Sophronia is the widow of the title and she’s hidden herself away in the mansion with her maid and friend Helen. ![]() Gabriel Stone is desperate to escape the ghosts that haunt him in. This remote town with few inhabitants is full of spooky places – a derelict church, a ramshackle mansion where a widow lives on her own and that’s before you get to the new minister and his role of outsider into this place of strange people. Who can save Pale Harbor from itself Maine, 1846. Always dark and chilling at night – just take note of that girl with a lamp on the front cover. This is luckily a fictional place as you probably would be a bit nervous going there after reading this. Read 594 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. ![]() Travel Guide Travel down BookTrail style to Pale Harbor, Maine ![]() ![]() Becky has since featured in seven further bestselling books, Shopaholic Abroad (also published as Shopaholic Takes Manhattan), Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Shopaholic & Sister, Shopaholic & Baby, Mini Shopaholic, Shopaholic to the Stars and Shopaholic to the Rescue. The book’s heroine, Becky Bloomwood – a fun and feisty financial journalist who loves shopping but is hopeless with money – captured the hearts of readers worldwide. Sophie Kinsella first hit the UK bestseller lists in September 2000 with her first novel in the Shopaholic series – The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (also published as Confessions of a Shopaholic). Sophie Kinsella has sold over 40 million copies of her books in more than 60 countries, and she has been translated into over 40 languages. ![]() ![]() Through these moving reflections, we see one life laid bare-joys, sorrows, regrets, and all. It begins in late autumn 1992 as an elderly Italian woman, prompted by the knowledge of her encroaching death, sits down to write a letter to her granddaughter now grown and living in far-off America. Now North American readers can enjoy the novel that has won over the world. Originally published in Italy,Follow Your Heartwon the coveted Premio Donna Citta di Roma and sold over 800,000 copies in that country alone before hitting bestseller lists throughout the rest of Europe. ![]() An international bestseller with tremendous word-of-mouth appeal,Follow Your Heartis a bittersweet, heartwarming novel spanning generations and teaching the universal truths about life, love, and what lies within each of us. ![]() ![]() The initial edition was titled in full: The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Walpole was fascinated with medieval history, in 1749 building a fake gothic castle, Strawberry Hill House. The Castle of Otranto was written in 1764 during Horace Walpole's tenure as MP for King's Lynn. ![]() ![]() The novel was inspired by a nightmare Walpole had at Strawberry Hill House (18th-century engraving of the gothic villa pictured). The novel initiated a literary genre that would become extremely popular in the later 18th and early 19th century, with authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and George du Maurier. Claiming he saw a ghost in the nightmare-which featured a "gigantic hand in armour"-Walpole incorporated imagery from this into the novel, and also drew on his knowledge of medieval history. Walpole was inspired to write the story after a nightmare he had at his Gothic Revival home, Strawberry Hill House, in Twickenham, southwest London. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music, and the goth subculture. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. ![]() In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. ![]() The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. ![]() |