A young widow opens a chocolate shop in a French village, transforming its normally austere inhabitants into unabashed sensualists. The event coincides with Lent, and the villagers' rejection of traditional self-denial angers the parish priest who declares war. A first novel.

"This is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the American short story that includes an historical overview of the topic as well as discussion of notable American authors and individual stories, from Benjamin Franklin's "The Speech of Miss Polly Baker" in 1747 to "The Joy Luck Club". Includes a selection of writers chosen not only for their contributions of individual stories but for bodies of work that advanced the boundaries of short fiction,...

This book examines the contention that, in an era where the relevance of the literary novel is compromised, the novel remains an important means of exploring and interrogating societies and culture. It answers the question of what we lose with the loss of the novel as an important public space for discourse. It does so through readings of a selection of Don DeLillo's later novels, together with the political philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Alain...

It is widely accepted that the canon of African American literature has racial realism at its core: African American protagonists, social settings, cultural symbols, and racial-political discourse. As a result, writings that are not preoccupied with race have long been invisible-unpublished, out of print, absent from libraries, rarely discussed among scholars, and omitted from anthologies. However, some of our most celebrated African American authors-from...

"This book approaches persuasion in public discourse as a rhetorical phenomenon that enables the persuader to appeal to the addressee's intellectual and emotional capacities in a competing public environment. The aim is to investigate persuasive strategies from the overlapping perspectives of cognitive and functional linguistics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses of authentic data (including English, Czech, Spanish, Slovene, Russian, and...