Michael Stewart Bücher

Bold, gritty and blackly comic, Michael Stewart's new collection of short fiction, Four Letter Words, explores twin contemporary urban dystopias: work and home. A book in two halves: Work explores what paid employment is for many people now: deadening, grinding and underpaid. A barmaid who has to put up with being sexually abused as part of her job, a sex worker who finds out just how far she will go to raise the money she needs to see her son, a painter and decorator who only sees white, a beggar who goes too far, and an office worker who discovers his boss has a skeleton in his closet. Home explores dysfunctional domestic settings. A single mum who has to hand over her child to a violent ex-boyfriend, a woman driven through loneliness to form a relationship with her vacuum cleaner, and an unusual coupling between an advertising exec and a homeless girl. For some home offers little respite from the toil and tyranny of work. Stylish and unsettling with a seam of black comedy running throughout the collection, Four Letter Words is a baker's dozen of modern urban noir that offers responses to a number of contemporary concerns such as homelessness, addiction and sexual exploitation.

See through the eyes of the Brontes as you immerse yourself in their lives and landscapes, wandering the very same paths they each would have walked in search of the inspiration behind their novels and poetry. An 'imaginative and elegant trek through the landscape of the Brontes' Grazia

Keynes's ideas have revolutionized our lives. Before the publication of the General Theory, economists were on the touchline, passively watching the economy perform; now they are on the field as players, manipulating the conditions of economic life. Yet Keynes was not merely a theoretical economist. During both wars he was probably the most important figure at the Treasury, and the modern International Monetary Fund is partly his creation. Since the 1930s millions of people who have never heard of Keynes's work have owed their livelihood to his ideas and policies. But if we are all Keynesians now, are our problems the by-products of the Keynesian system? Can his ideas, which have banished the spectre of international recession, cope with the difficulties of an inflationary world? Is full employment threatened by a shortage of international liquidity, and is persistent unemployment in the U.S. an indication that Keynesian theory cannot answer the problems of automation? Are rising prices inevitable, and why is Britain constantly running into balance-of-payments crises? These questions are posed and answered this this new Pelican by Michael Stewart, whose clear and straightforward account of Keynes's life and ideas and of their status in the modern world should be a boon to intelligent people of any age and educational level.