The art of clear thinking

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Amos Oz

Reality and fiction blend in an ingenious Rothian short novel from the celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness - witty but elegiac, playful and sexy but somehow deadly serious, it's about a bored writer who goes to a reading and has a brief sexual skirmish with a female reader. Or does he?The novel centres around 8 hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a literary celebrity in his forties, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. On the way he stops at a cafe where he 'bumps into' some of his own characters. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions ("Why do you write? Do you write with a pen or on a computer?) have come and gone — he weaves stories round the audience and the panel. Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader for a drink before walking her home. It turns out she lives just opposite, so she goes home and he wanders off into the night. But he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to the flat, where she lives alone with her cat - and they have a brief but steamy sexual skirmish. Or is this merely a middle-aged writer's fantasy? We never quite know where reality ends and invention begins. He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn. The Rhyming of the title refers to the popular couplets of a Hebrew poet, once a household name but now virtually forgotten, whose little rhymes about life punctuate the story. At dawn, the Author reads in yesterday's paper that the poet has just died, almost unnoticed.This is a gem of a work by a master, about writing, reading, growing old and the elusive chimera of literary posterity.

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Rocco J. Gennaro

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness. Following the lead of David Rosenthal, the author argues for the so-called 'higher-order thought theory of consciousness'. This theory holds that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. In addition, the somewhat controversial claim that "consciousness entails self-consciousness" is vigorously defended. The approach is mostly 'analytic' in style and draws on important recent work in cognitive science, perception, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and psychopathology. However, the book also makes extensive use of numerous Kantian insights in arguing for its main theses and, in turn, sheds historical light on Kant's theory of mind. A detailed analysis of the relationships between (self-)consciousness, behavior, memory, intentionality, and de se attitudes are examples of the central topics to be found in this work.

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Tina Sloan

After twenty-six years starring as nurse Lillian Raines on the hit soap opera Guiding Light, Tina Sloan knows a thing or two about surviving the pitfalls of growing older in front of the world. From depleted storylines, to transitioning from sizzling screen diva to a mature grandmother Changing Shoes shows that even TV grandmothers can have style and flair. Drawing from the lessons she has learned in her own life, Tina candidly shares her endearing, sensitive, and often funny, story of crossing into her next phase of her life. And, in doing so, she offers important tips on how to embrace womanhood with ease.

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Jill Campbell

Examining Henry Fielding's sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, Natural Masques breaks with old critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding's "masculinity" with Samuel Richardson's "feminine" sensibilities. It argues that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered identity appears throughout Fielding's writings, and that Fielding shared that preoccupation with his contemporaries. It therefore offers an argument about Fielding's period as well as about his major works, which are analyzed in connection with a variety of related texts - from satires on the castrati to educational treatises, Whig propaganda, and debates in political theory. Approaching gender as a complex system of relations, Campbell investigates Fielding's treatments of masculine and feminine identities across the arenas of eighteenth-century political, social, and literary conflict and change. The plays with which Fielding began his literary career are particularly explicit concerning his interest in problems of gender. Some of their most recurrent satiric targets - domineering women, castrato singers, beaux - disrupt the expected economy of sexual roles, and Fielding's productions of his own plays often featured the dramatic spectacle of this disruption, with men cast in women's roles, and women in men's. In the opening scenes of Joseph Andrews, Fielding frames his parodic response to Pamela by reversing the sexes of the two participants in Richardson's scenario of embattled chastity. Campbell shows how throughout Fielding's writings, the suspicion that sexual roles are merely assumed - and therefore subject to alteration and appropriation - intimates a more general possibility that personal identity is always in some sense impersonated, incoherent, mutable. . Campbell draws on recent work that sees the eighteenth century as a crucial moment in the history of sexuality and gender, and she critiques new treatments of the novel's function in defining domestic femininity.