Bringing Home the Birkin

Bringing Home the Birkin PDF Author: Michael Tonello
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061473332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
An insider's hilarious, whirlwind account of his years spent globe-trotting in search of the holy grail of handbags: the Birkin For more than twenty years, the Hermès Birkin bag has been the iconic symbol of fashion, luxury, and wealth. Though the bag is often seen dangling from the arms of celebrities, there is a fabled waiting list of more than two years to buy one from Hermès, and the average fashionista has a better chance of climbing Mount Everest in Prada pumps than of possessing one of these coveted carryalls. Unless, of course, she happens to know Michael Tonello . . . Michael's newfound career started with an impulsive move to Barcelona, a vanished job assignment, no work visa, and an Hermès scarf sold on eBay to generate some quick cash. But soon the resourceful Michael discovered the truth about the waiting list and figured out the secret to getting Hermès to part with one of these precious bags. Millions of dollars worth of Birkins later, Michael had become one of eBay's most successful entrepreneurs—and a Robin Hood to thousands of desperate rich women. With down-to-earth wit, Michael chronicles the unusual ventures that took him to nearly every continent, from eBay to Paris auction house and into the lives of celebrities and poseurs. Flirting with danger, Michael recounts the heady rush of hand delivering his first big score to famed songwriter Carole Bayer Sager in Paris; how he had to hire thugs to rescue a bag that one of his "shoppers" held for ransom; and the story of the Oscar-worthy performances that allowed him to snag "reserved" bags from other, less dogged Birkin seekers. Whether he's relating his wining and dining, buying and selling, dodging and weaving, laughing and crying, or schmoozing and stammering, Michael is a master raconteur who weaves together tales of hunting Birkins in the world's most posh locales, memories of meals that would make any gastronome salivate, anecdotes of obsessed collectors with insatiable desires, and sweetly intimate stories about his family, friends, and finding true love. The result is a memoir that is distinctive, fun, page-turning, and as addictive as its namesake.

Bringing Home the Birkin

Bringing Home the Birkin PDF Author: Michael Tonello
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061473332
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
An insider's hilarious, whirlwind account of his years spent globe-trotting in search of the holy grail of handbags: the Birkin For more than twenty years, the Hermès Birkin bag has been the iconic symbol of fashion, luxury, and wealth. Though the bag is often seen dangling from the arms of celebrities, there is a fabled waiting list of more than two years to buy one from Hermès, and the average fashionista has a better chance of climbing Mount Everest in Prada pumps than of possessing one of these coveted carryalls. Unless, of course, she happens to know Michael Tonello . . . Michael's newfound career started with an impulsive move to Barcelona, a vanished job assignment, no work visa, and an Hermès scarf sold on eBay to generate some quick cash. But soon the resourceful Michael discovered the truth about the waiting list and figured out the secret to getting Hermès to part with one of these precious bags. Millions of dollars worth of Birkins later, Michael had become one of eBay's most successful entrepreneurs—and a Robin Hood to thousands of desperate rich women. With down-to-earth wit, Michael chronicles the unusual ventures that took him to nearly every continent, from eBay to Paris auction house and into the lives of celebrities and poseurs. Flirting with danger, Michael recounts the heady rush of hand delivering his first big score to famed songwriter Carole Bayer Sager in Paris; how he had to hire thugs to rescue a bag that one of his "shoppers" held for ransom; and the story of the Oscar-worthy performances that allowed him to snag "reserved" bags from other, less dogged Birkin seekers. Whether he's relating his wining and dining, buying and selling, dodging and weaving, laughing and crying, or schmoozing and stammering, Michael is a master raconteur who weaves together tales of hunting Birkins in the world's most posh locales, memories of meals that would make any gastronome salivate, anecdotes of obsessed collectors with insatiable desires, and sweetly intimate stories about his family, friends, and finding true love. The result is a memoir that is distinctive, fun, page-turning, and as addictive as its namesake.

Literary Modernism and Beyond

Literary Modernism and Beyond PDF Author: Richard Lehan
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Early modernists turned to theories of consciousness and aestheticism to combat what they saw as the hostility of naturalism and to find new ways of thinking about reality. This consciousness took various forms, including a Jamesian sense of moral ambiguity, Proustian time spots, and B ergsonian intuition, but the Nietzschean theory that reality depends on perception connected them all. This modernist movement reached a distinguished level of achievement with novelists Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, but a succession of counterinfluences transformed it after World War II, when elitism and a desire for a homogeneous culture gave way to diversity and elements of mass culture. In Literary Modernism and Beyond, Richard Lehan tracks the evolution of the movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth century to its recent incarnations. In this wide-ranging study, Lehan demonstrates how and why the "originary vision" of modernism changed radically after it gained prominence. With critical discussions on a wide variety of major modernist writers, intellectuals, and artists and their works -- including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Ian Fleming, and J. K. Rowling -- Lehan examines the large-scale changes that came as critical authority moved from one generation to another. Both popular culture and literary criticism -- especially "critical theory" -- acted as key agents of change, and structuralism, poststructuralism, and concerns with gender and race also greatly influenced the movement. Along with a process of decline and a nihilism that emerged from the modernist movement, these changes created a new literary reality and with it a new textuality. Literary Modernism and Beyond treats modernism's major innovations of myth, symbol, and structure not as individual pieces but as interrelated contributions to a historical process, the product of three generations of transformations. Lehan's analysis provides a more complete understanding than ever before of the movement itself.

Beyond the Heroic "I"

Beyond the Heroic Author: Stephen P. Clifford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Through narrative and gender theories, this study deconstructs the gender-based assumptions we make in reading narratives, and Clifford focuses by way of example on the critical responses that have narrowly defined the fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway during the past 60 years. Hemingway and Lawrence have been rigidly defined by formalists and feminists alike as overbearingly "masculine," and as a result, many critical readers dismiss their fiction as rather finite in its interpretive possibilities. In addressing the gender-based assumptions made by readers of these modernist writers, this study re-evaluates the narrative desire of characters like Brett Ashley and Frederic Henry, Ursula Brangwen and Connie Chatterley, as they respond to the heroic centers of their narratives - whether those centers are characters who inhabit the novel or critical readers who enforce limited reading strategies. By responding to the critical legacy surrounding these modernist texts, he reveals ways in which these novels and stories actually deny the limitations of a codified, heroic narrative.

Soft Power Beyond the Nation

Soft Power Beyond the Nation PDF Author: Sylvia Dummer Scheel
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1647124999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
"This edited volume takes a distinct approach to the study of soft power in history, moving beyond the framework of the nation-state. The editors of this volume use "soft power" as a broad label to refer to the processes through which persuasion, the search for influence and power, and public opinion as an actor in foreign affairs, converge in the international arena. The book has been organized around three central themes: the circulation of knowledge and strategies across borders; collaboration of intermediary actors who have their own agencies and interests; and non-national identities, such as gender and race. The book also broadens the typical temporal and geographic understanding of soft power, starting in the nineteenth century and including cases from the Global South. It argues that the pursuit of soft power has been a global phenomenon, including regions that have been neglected in the general debates on the subject, such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These arguments and themes are explored through ten chapters that offer a powerful new interdisciplinary perspective on soft power for scholars and students of history and international relations"--

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Lawrence Agonistes

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Lawrence Agonistes PDF Author: Barry J. Scherr
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527515451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This book is the first to examine the influence of Shakespeare—particularly Hamlet—on D. H. Lawrence. Using the Bloomian theory of the “anxiety of influence” to probe the startling depths of Lawrence’s agon with his towering precursor Shakespeare, it closely examines Lawrence’s crypto-Jewish identity, as well as that of many of his highly individual characters, who embody the characteristics of Old Testament figures, and in so doing infuse a patriarchal strength and divine “religious” sublimity into civilized life. Lawrence’s claims about the self-sacrificing influence of Christianity on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, on the other hand, demonstrate how this influence carries over into the submission of the subject and the decline of Western Civilization. The book extrapolates this decline into a critique of the modern-day left-wing ideology that appropriates the self-abnegating individual to its collectivist ends. In responding agonistically to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lawrence claims a far more complete, vital, and salubrious “consciousness” and a Weltanschauung that makes for greater, more fulfilling “life” thanks to the inner strength, psychic and sexual power of the Lawrentian “Self Supreme.” The book will appeal to Lawrence and Shakespeare scholars and enthusiasts who wish to appreciate Lawrence and Shakespeare as supremely profound writers and thinkers. Its unique demonstration of Bloomian literary theory makes it come poignantly alive for both graduate students and college professors.

Medicine and Literature, Volume Two

Medicine and Literature, Volume Two PDF Author: John Salinsky
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1315344785
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
‘When I want to know the real rock-bottom truth about what happens all the time in this doctoring life, what happens to us, and to the folks who bring us their hearts and worries to be heard, that’s when I turn, every time, to the novelists, the playwrights, the poets, the essayists, who have given us the sights and sounds, the feel, of all that goes on, minute by minute. What Tolstoy and Chekhov knew, we need to know for ourselves, for our own sakes, as we live out our medical lives.’ William Carlos Williams ‘The most fundamental of all consulting skills is genuine curiosity about other people, the constant urge to wonder ‘Why are they as they are?’ We should open our minds to the life of the imagination not just for its entertainment value, but for the mindset of curiosity it engenders in us. Such books as John Salinsky describes in this and his previous volume combine powerful opportunities for our own professional growth with pleasure and recreation too.’ Roger Neighbour in his Foreword ‘This carefully assembled, wonderfully telling book is a “companion,” for sure, a lasting and most helpful one, for the medical travelling that awaits us.’ Robert Coles in his Foreword.

Notions of the Feminine: Literary Essays from Dostoyevsky to Lacan

Notions of the Feminine: Literary Essays from Dostoyevsky to Lacan PDF Author: M. Axelrod
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137502932
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 105

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Book Description
Approaching the question of how male novelists perceive their female characters, this collection of creative yet analytic literary essays unwinds the complexities of male authorship versus narration. Mark Axelrod looks at a wide range of male authors including Fydor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Carlos Fuentes, and the theories of Jacques Lacan.

Forms of Life

Forms of Life PDF Author: Martin Price
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300028676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination--the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities--emerge fictional persons through whom we learn to read ourselves. This eloquent book, exploring fictional lives in crucial moments of choice and change, stresses both their difference from and their deep connections with life. Martin Price writes here about ways in which character has been conceived and presented in the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with chapters that cogently argue the artistic value of character, Price then deals with the different forms character has taken in individual novels. His first discussions center on authors--Jane Austen, Stendhal, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy--who define individuals by their adherence or opposition to social norms. The next chapters deal with novelists for whom the moral world is largely internalized. The characters of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster live in society and act upon it, but the authors are particularly concerned with the confusions, terrors, and heroism that lie within consciousness. The last chapter uses novels about the artist by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann in order to apprehend the process by which experience is transformed into art. Avoiding both formalistic and moralistic extremes, this new book by a distinguished critic helps us recover a fuller sense of literary form and the forms of life from which it emerges.

Beyond Postmodernism

Beyond Postmodernism PDF Author: Klaus Stierstorfer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110906813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
After the veritable hype concerning postmodernism in the 1980s and early 1990s, when questions about when it began, what it means and which texts it comprises were apt to trigger heated discussions, the excitement has notably cooled down at the turn of the century. Voices are now beginning to be heard which seem to suggest a new episteme in the making which points beyond postmodernism, while it remains at the same time very uncertain whether what appears as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises, and authorial practices. Contributors to this volume propose to explore new openings and recent developments in anglophone literatures and cultural theories which engage with issues seen to be central in the construction of a postmodern paradigm, but deal with them in ways that promise new openings or a new Zeitgeist.

D.H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence PDF Author: John Worthen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521254205
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 1034

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Book Description