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Misery Lit
Misery porn (also called misery literature, misery memoirs and trauma porn) is a literary genre dwelling on trauma, mental and physical abuse, destitution, or other enervating trials suffered by the protagonists or, allegedly, the writer (in the case of memoirs). While in a broad sense the genre is as at least as old as mass-market fiction (e.g., ''Les Misérables''), the terms misery lit and misery porn are usually applied pejoratively to steamy potboilers, schlock horror, and lurid autobiographical wallows of often dubious authenticity, especially those without a happy ending. The genre Works in the genre typically—though not exclusively—begin in the subject's childhood, and very often involve suffering some wrong, physical or sexual abuse, or neglect, perpetrated by an adult authority figure, often a parent. These tales usually culminate in some sort of emotional catharsis, redemption or escape from the abuse or situation. They are often written in the first person. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tragic Life Stories
Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain hatawakens pleasure", for the audience. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term ''tragedy'' often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it. From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fractio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helen Forrester
Helen Forrester was the pen name of June Huband Bhatia (6 June 1919 – 24 November 2011), who was an Anglo-Canadian author known for her books about her youth in Liverpool, England, during the Great Depression and World II, as well as several works of fiction. Life and work June Huband was born in Hoylake, Cheshire, Wirral Peninsula, the eldest of seven children of inept, socialite, middle-class parents who lived on credit. When her father went bankrupt during the Great Depression, the family was thrown into poverty. Evicted from their comfortable home in an English market town and with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in, the large family took the train to Liverpool, where they hoped to rebuild their lives. While Forrester's father searched unsuccessfully for work, the family were forced to live together in a single room. As the eldest child, the 12-year-old Helen was kept away from school to look after her six younger brothers and sisters. For the next few ye ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asda
Asda Stores Ltd. () (often styled as ASDA) is a British supermarket chain. It is headquartered in Leeds, England. The company was founded in 1949 when the Asquith family merged their retail business with the Associated Dairies company of Yorkshire. It expanded into Southern England during the 1970s and 1980s, and acquired Allied Carpets, 61 large Gateway Supermarkets and other businesses, such as MFI Group. It sold these acquisitions during the 1990s to concentrate on the supermarkets. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange until 1999 when it was acquired by Walmart for £6.7 billion. Asda was the second-largest supermarket chain in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2014 by market share, at which point it fell into third place. Besides its core supermarkets, the company also offers assistance for insurance and payment services and a mobile phone provider. In February 2021, the Issa brothers (Mohsin and Zuber) and TDR Capital acquired Asda. Walmart retains "an equi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
W H Smith
WHSmith (also written WH Smith, and known colloquially as Smith's and formerly as W. H. Smith & Son) is a British retailer, headquartered in Swindon, England, which operates a chain of high street, railway station, airport, port, hospital and motorway service station shops selling books, stationery, magazines, newspapers, entertainment products and confectionery. The company was formed by Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna in 1792 as a news vendor in London. It remained under the ownership of the Smith family for many years and saw large-scale expansion during the 1970s as the company began to diversify into other markets. Following a rejected private equity takeover in 2004, the company began to focus on its core retail business. It was responsible for the creation of the ISBN book identifier. WHSmith is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. History Formation In 1792, Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna established the business a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Borders Group
Borders Group, Inc. (former NYSE ticker symbol BGP) was an American multinational book and music retailer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. In its final year, the company employed about 19,500 people throughout the U.S., primarily in its Borders and Waldenbooks stores. At the beginning of 2010, the company operated 511 Borders superstores in the United States. The company also operated 175 stores in the Waldenbooks Specialty Retail segment, including Waldenbooks, Borders Express, Borders airport stores, and Borders Outlet stores. In February 2011, Borders applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and began liquidating 226 of its stores in the United States. Despite a purchase offer from the private equity firm Najafi Companies, Borders was not able to find a buyer acceptable to its creditors before its July bidding deadline, so it began liquidating its remaining 399 retail outlets, with the last remaining stores closing in September. The Chapter 11 case was ultimat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Waterstone’s
Waterstones, formerly Waterstone's, is a British book retailer that operates 311 shops, mainly in the United Kingdom and also other nearby countries. As of February 2014, it employs around 3,500 staff in the UK and Europe. An average-sized Waterstones shop sells a range of approximately 30,000 individual books, as well as stationery and other related products. Established in 1982 by Tim Waterstone, after whom the company was named, the bookseller expanded rapidly until being sold in 1993 to WHSmith. In 1998, Waterstones was bought by a consortium of Waterstone, EMI and Advent International. The company was taken under the umbrella of HMV Group, which later merged the Dillons Booksellers, Dillons and Ottakar's brands into the company. Following several poor sets of results for the group, HMV put the chain up for sale. In May 2011, it was announced that A&NN Capital Fund Management, owned by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, had bought the chain for £53.5m and appointed Jame ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angela's Ashes
''Angela's Ashes: A Memoir'' is a 1996 memoir by the Irish-American author Frank McCourt, with various anecdotes and stories of his childhood. The book details his very early childhood in Brooklyn, New York, US but focuses primarily on his life in Limerick, Ireland. It also includes his struggles with poverty and his father's alcoholism. The book was published in 1996 and won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. A sequel, '' 'Tis'', was published in 1999, followed by ''Teacher Man'' in 2005. Synopsis The narrative is told from the point of view of Frank McCourt as a child. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on 19 August 1930, Frank (Francis) McCourt is the oldest son of Malachy McCourt and Angela Sheehan McCourt. Both of his parents immigrated from Ireland and married in a shotgun wedding over Angela's pregnancy with Frankie. Angela is from Limerick, Ireland, and is fond of music, singing, and dancing. Malachy, from Northern Ireland, is an alcoholic known for his "od ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank McCourt
Francis McCourt (August 19, 1930July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book ''Angela's Ashes'', a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood. Early life and education Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on August 19, 1930, the eldest child of Irish Catholic immigrants Malachy Gerald McCourt, Sr. (March 31, 1901January 11, 1985), of Toome, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, who was aligned with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Angela Sheehan (January 1, 1908December 27, 1981) from Limerick. Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just 21 days after birth, on March 5, 1934. In fall of 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Ireland. Frank was 4 years old. His brother Malachy was 3 and the twins were 2 years old ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wild Swans
''Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China'' is a family history that spans a century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China, by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, ''Wild Swans'' contains the biographies of her grandmother and her mother, then finally her own autobiography. Her grandmother had bound feet and was married off at a young age as the concubine of a high-status warlord. Chang's mother rose in status as a member of the Communist Party. Chang took part in the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Red Guards, but eventually her father was tortured and she was sent to the countryside for thought reform. Later, she earned a scholarship to study in England, where she still lives. ''Wild Swans'' won the 1992 NCR Book Award and the 1993 British Book of the Year. It has been translated into 37 languages and sold over 13 million copies. Synopsis Chang's Grandmother's story The book starts by relating the biography of Chang's grandmother ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jung Chang
Jung Chang (, , born 25 March 1952) is a Chinese-British writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography ''Wild Swans'', selling over 10 million copies worldwide but banned in the People's Republic of China. Her 832-page biography of Mao Zedong, '' Mao: The Unknown Story'', written with her husband, the Irish historian Jon Halliday, was published in June 2005. Life in China Chang was born on 25 March 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province. Her parents were both Chinese Communist Party officials, and her father was greatly interested in literature. As a child she quickly developed a love of reading and writing, which included composing poetry. As Party cadres, life was relatively good for her family at first; her parents worked hard, and her father became successful as a propagandist at a regional level. His formal ranking was as a "level 10 official", meaning that he was one of 20,000 or so most important cadres, or ''ganbu'', in the country. The Communist P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital media, digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as ''The Daily (podcast), The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones (publisher), George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times, 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national "newspaper of record". For print it is ranked List of newspapers by circulation, 18th in the world by circulation and List of newspapers in the United States, 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is Public company, publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 189 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mother
] A mother is the female parent of a child. A woman may be considered a mother by virtue of having given childbirth, birth, by raising a child who may or may not be her biological offspring, or by supplying her ovum for fertilisation in the case of gestational surrogacy. An adoptive mother is a female who has become the child's parent through the legal process of adoption. A biological mother is the female genetic contributor to the creation of the infant, through sexual intercourse or egg donation. A biological mother may have legal obligations to a child not raised by her, such as an obligation of monetary support. A putative mother is a female whose biological relationship to a child is alleged but has not been established. A stepmother is a woman who is married to a child's father and they may form a family unit, but who generally does not have the legal rights and responsibilities of a parent in relation to the child. A father is the male counterpart of a mother. Women who ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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