“Don’t sit on your stool, watching life go by,” insists Soutcho Lydie Touré. In this collection of reflections written over a decade, she explores insecurities and vulnerabilities, with which many a reader will relate. She shares about loneliness and feeling different and goes on to ponder everyday life in “Politicking” and “VDN” – a memorable highway in Dakar which pedestrians must cross “under the mocking smile of the sun.” Touré draws on experiences and insights from her life betwixt and between West Africa and North America. In her verses, spiced with nature, color, joy, humor and fantasy, questions and answers compete equally for the reader’s attention. A veritable source of confidence in the force of life and love. Confidence that makes one grow wings.

First Published in 1995. This series comprises nearly 300 romances and melodies, most of which were composed during the 40 years that saw a blossoming of the romantic spirit in all the arts in France. This volume looks at Romantic French song of the 1830s to the 1870s and includes the works of Reber, Hugo and Lalo.

The twelve essays presented in this volume are drawn from the Fifth International Conference on Word and Music Studies held at Santa Barbara, CA, in 2005. The conference was organized and sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and in its central section explored the theme of “Word/Music Adaptation”. In these wide-ranging papers, a great variety of cases of intermedial transposition between music, literature, drama and film are examined. The music of Berlioz, Biber, Chopin, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Franz, Bernard Herrmann, Liszt, Richard Strauss, Verdi, and pop singer Kate Bush confronts and commingles with the writings of Emily Brontë, Goethe, Nancy Huston, George Sand, and Shakespeare in these cutting-edge adaptation studies. In addition, four films are discussed: Wuthering Heights, Fedora, Otello, and The Notebook. The articles collected will be of interest not only to music and literary scholars, but also to those engaged in the study of adaptation theory, semiotics, literary criticism, narrative theory, art history, feminism or postmodernism.