Are you fed up with pantywaist affirmations that ignore the pleasures of resentment and mean-spiritedness? Put away the chicken soup. What your soul really needs is a helping of acrid stew. Authors Sarah Wells and Ann Thornhill have gathered 365 splendidly bitter meditations that will appeal to the cynic in everyone. This book says, "Life's a pain; I'm a victim and proud of it".

Claims of ideology's end are, on the one hand, performative denials of ideology's inability to end; while, on the other hand, paradoxically, they also reiterate an idea that 'ending' is simply what all ideologies eventually do. Situating her work around the intersecting publications of Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology (1960) and J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (1961), Laurie Rodrigues argues that American novels express this paradox through nuanced applications of non-realist strategies, distorting realism in manners similar to ideology's distortions of reality, history, and belief. Reflecting the astonishing cultural variety of this period, The American Novel After Ideology, 1961 - 2000 examines Franny and Zooey, Carlene Hatcher Polite's The Flagellants (1967), Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2001) alongside the various discussions around ideology with which they intersect. Each novel's plotless narratives, dissolving subjectivities, and cultural codes organize the texts' peculiar relations to the post-ideological age, suggesting an aesthetic return of the repressed.

A succession of annoyances causes Santa to wish he were at home rather than on his Christmas Eve journey.

The increasing popularity of bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip, means that it is being established on university syllabuses worldwide. Reading Bande Dessinee provides a thorough introduction to the medium and in-depth critical analysis with focus on contemporary examples of the art form, historical context, key artists, and themes such as gender, autobiography and postcolonial culture. Miller's groundbreaking book demonstrates exactly why bande dessinee is considered to be a visual narrative art form and encourages the reader to appreciate and understand it to the best of their abilities. Miller also provides the terminology, framework and tools necessary for study, highly relevant to current curriculum and she creates a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive approach to the subject matter. Reading Bande Dessinee draws from analytical viewpoints such as narratology, cultural studies and gender studies to illuminate the form fully, examining how it can be seen to undermine mythologies of national and cultural identity, investigating the satirical possibilities and looking at how the comic strip may contest normative representations of the body according to gender theories. This volume explores the controversy surrounding the comic strips in contemporary French society and traces the historical and cultural implications surrounding the legitimization of bande dessinee. With the growing academic readership of bande dessinee this book proves to be an invaluable analysis for scholars of the postmodern narrative art. Reading Bande Dessinee is also an essential resource for anyone interested in the cultural context, visual and narrative meaning and intricacies of the art form.