Steven Earnshaw traces the many roles of the drinking house in literature from Chaucer's time to the end of the 20th century, taking in the better-known hostelries, such as Hal's and Falstaff's Boar's Head in Henry IV, and the inns of Dickens.

Features 65 drink recipes inspired by history's most loved novels.

An examination of taverns in the Romantic period, with a particular focus on architecture and the culture of conviviality.

With charming original illustrations, this book celebrates fifty of the Big Apple’s storied taverns, legendary dives, and bars and the drink recipes that will inspire you to become a regular. For cocktail enthusiasts and those seeking the most real New York watering holes, this is a comprehensive guide to the city’s legendary bars, taverns, and dives across all five boroughs, featuring stories, insider tips, and delicious cocktail recipes. From McSorley’s in the East Village and the West Village’s Ear Inn, to Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens, and Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, this book spans New York’s five boroughs, each entry combining an intoxicating mix of history, local color, and city lore. It includes tips like the best times of day to visit, or whether to choose bar or table, along with signature cocktail recipes, and witty sidebars on topics such as day drinking versus night drinking. Painting an intimate picture of each featured place accompanied by charming illustrations, this book stands out from typical New York City guidebooks on the market and will interest New York City tourists and natives alike, as well as cocktail enthusiasts and general bons vivants.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction—from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME). “Lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." —The New York Times First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.

The stylistic and cultural discourse concerning the narratives of mental disorder is the main focus of Symptoms of Disorder: Reading Madness in British Literature 1744-1845. This collection offers new insights into the representation of madness in British literature between two landmark dates for the social, philosophical and medical history of mental deviance: 1744 and 1845. In 1744, the Vagrancy Act first mentions 'lunatics' as a specific category, which is itself a social 'symptom' of an emerging need for isolation and confinement of the insane. A more sophisticated and attentive care of the 'fool' is testified only by the 1845 Lunatic Asylums Act, which established specific processes safeguarding against the wrongful detention of patients in public and private facilities. In stressing for the first time the momentous change the notion of madness underwent between these years, this book provides a fresh and absolutely unique perspective on some of the major works connected with mental disorder. The chronological boundaries also provide the collection with a definite and unifying frame, which comprises social, cultural, legal and medical aspects of madness as an historical phenomenon. It is within this frame that the eight essays composing the body of the book discuss how madness is recounted, or even experienced, by authors such as Christopher Smart and William Cowper, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thomas Perceval, Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Haywood, and Alfred Tennyson. Symptoms of Disorder draws a wide-ranging map of different representations of madness and their historic functioning between the 18th and 19th centuries. The organizational principle of this collection is a double perspective, which allows to suitably articulate the characterizations of insanity into themes and genres. Reflecting the two main ways in which literary madness can be employed as a critical device in literature, the chapters are grouped into theme-oriented and writer-oriented analyses. Other collections dealing with literature and madness have already coped, to a certain degree, with works that represent insane characters and authors who adopt 'deviant' voices as a fictional or rhetoric expedient. Fewer studies of the same kind, instead, have offered a more comprehensive picture by also looking at the alleged insanity of the writer, and at those linguistic, stylistic and semantic elements which at some stage were commonly believed to be an expression of insanity. This is one of the first studies which addresses the representation of madness from both these intertwined perspectives. See www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604979251.cfm for more information.