Laurie Taylor

Deviance and Society

Stanley Cohen

From sexual fantasies to holidays this marvellous book charts our escape attempts. In a series of dazzling commentaries the authors reveal the ordinary and extraordinary ways in which we seek to defy the despair of the breakfast table and the office But the book is much more than a first-rate cartography of everyday life. It crackles with important theoretical insights about how `normality' is managed. This fully revised edition contains a superb new introduction, `Life After Postmodernism', which exposes the conceits of the postmodernist adventure and which should be required reading for anyone interested in making sense of everyday life.

The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life

Escape Attempts

On a remote Spanish island near the African coast, a young scientist, Epiphany Jerome, is looking for a rare beetle. Instead, she finds a body on an empty beach with a knife sticking out from its back. It's not just another tourist. It's the daughter of Epiphany's landlady and the single mother of an 11-year old girl devoted to Epiphany's small dog, Mostly. As a forensic entomologist trained in the language of insects, Epiphany can tell the police more about the baffling murder than, apparently, they care to know. Epiphany, a Mexican American married to an Italian, still struggles with her Catholic upbringing and is drawn deeper into the secrets of the small harbor town, where traditional values are eroding under the pressures of tourism and Spain's growing economic crisis. A second body turns up: a beautiful hooker from Berlin that Epiphany's husband knows just a little too well. The Medical Examiner requests the entomologist's expertise once more, and this time, the police are very interested in what she has to say. But Epiphany has gone off alone into the island's rugged interior tracking nature's clues, unaware that her life is about to be irrevocably changed.

Said the Fly

Psychological survival

A study of celebrity based on the seventy odd interviews featured in the Sky Arts television series, In Confidence. Informants include David Schwimmer, Stephen Fry, Harry Belafonte, Alan Ayckbourn, Kathie Burke, Michael Frayn, Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sheila Hancock, Richard Dawkins, Miriam Margolys, Tracey Emin, and Nigel Kennedy. Here you will find everyone from politicians to artists, film-makers to novelists, talking frankly about fame and reputation.

Laurie Taylor

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