Stephen Fender

Intelligence reports have begun to filter in from the former Outer Sphere: the Kafaran hordes are rearming, aligning themselves and their past allies into a new force known as The Army of Light. Half a decade ago, the Unified Collaboration of Systems barely managed to defeat them, and the cost had been grievously high. With Unified Sector Command fleet strength down to perilous levels, it is anyone's guess who will come out the victor this time. Shawn Kestrel, former civilian cargo pilot, has been mysteriously recruited back into Sector Command. Even more baffling is that he is ordered to take command of an elite squadron of advanced starfighters, incorporating technological improvements beyond anything he's ever seen before. However, before Shawn has a chance to immerse himself into his new role, a derelict ship from a missing fleet suddenly appears, and the questions it raises have dire consequences that will reverberate throughout the entire galaxy. Working alongside the striking intelligence agent Melissa Graves, Shawn must uncover the truth behind the fate of the Icarus before it's too late.

Icarus

John Sutherland

Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheaval - the history of literature offers a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries. In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends Stephen Fender and John Sutherland turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer. Find out why 16 June 1904 mattered so much to Joyce, which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963 and why Roy Campbell punched Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949 in this sumptuous voyage through the highs and lows of literature's bejewelled past.

Surprising Tales From a Year in Literature

Love, Sex, Death and Words

Manjit Kumar

Jim Baggott

Patricia Fara

Cordelia Fine

Greg Grandin

John Waller

Michael Steen

Mark Hughes

James Hannam

Tommy Byrne

Maryanne Woolf

Icon Books is an independent British publisher which publishes popular and engaging non-fiction for adults. We’re proud to be part of the Independent Alliance in the UK, publishing companies who share a common vision of editorial excellence and original, diverse publishing. This ebook sampler – available free on Kindle, in EPUB and as a PDF download from our website – covers subjects from popular science to sports biography to philosophy. The sampler includes extracts from: Atomic by Jim Baggott; Crashed & Byrned by Tommy Byrne; Fordlandia by Greg Grandin; God’s Philosophers by James Hannam; The Lives and Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen; Love, Sex, Death and Words by John Sutherland and Stephen Fender; A Mind of Its Own by Cordelia Fine; Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Woolf; Quantum by Manjit Kumar; Sex, Botany and Empire by Patricia Fara; The Real Oliver Twist and A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller. From Proust and the Squid, a fascinating exploration of the science of the reading brain – ‘We were never born to read,’ begins Maryanne Wolf – to Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia, the riveting story of the American town Henry Ford tried to build in the Brazilian Amazon and Manjit Kumar’s BBC Samuel Johnson prizewinning Quantum, these books represent the best of over 20 years of non‐fiction publishing from Icon Books.

FREE Icon Books eBook Sampler

Are Americans being told the full story about what’s going on in the United States today? In this book, you’ll learn hard facts that will open your eyes and minds to a very different reality than the official versions. Following the popular 50 Facts That Should Change The World, this new book puts our nation under the microscope, telling us that: The United States of America is a country with fifty capital cities, few of which anyone can name/ a nation with 65 million gun owners and 35,000 gun deaths each year/ a place where there’s one car for every adult/ and where twice as many people claim to go to church as actually do.One town in Kentucky elected a black Labrador as its mayor.The United States produces a quarter of global CO2 emissions, and has a population rising twice as fast as that of the European Union.German could have been the national language.Republican states are the most generous givers to charity.The United States boasts the largest welfare state in the world—our military. Stephen Fender presents a vibrant, proud, and yet critical portrait of the world’s most powerful but least understood nation.

50 Facts That Should Change The USA

An Annotated Selection

The American Long Poem

Shakespeare: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'

Within two years of coming out in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird had been translated into ten languages, won the Pulitzer Prize, and been made into an Oscar-winning film. It spent an astonishing 88 weeks on the American bestseller lists. But while acclaimed by critics it also attracted attention of a different kind. Like The Catcher in the Rye (1951), that other bestseller about childhood, Mockingbird was widely banned from local libraries and school curricula from the 1960s through to the 1980s. One early reviewer called To Kill a Mockingbird “a wholesome book on an unwholesome theme”. Those charged with the care of the youth were hypersensitive about what the fictional young should be made to see and hear in novels: words like “damn”, “piss”, “whore lady” – and (as with Huckleberry Finn) “nigger” – even though in the context of a critique of racial prejudice. But the objections went beyond words alone. The story of children being confronted by a rape case seemed inappropriate in a book to be read by real-life children. So did the book’s portrayal of “institutionalized racism”, as one group of protestors in Indiana put it, “under the guise of ‘good literature’”. In this compelling guide, Stephen Fender looks at why a novel which has been called a “period piece” remains so popular – and examines what it tells us about racism and indeed about the nature of humanity.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Connell Short Guide to John Steinbeck's of Mice and Men

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

The Country Poor in the Great Depression

Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

Stephen Fender

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