Kirjahaku

When Bob and Roberta Smith - pseudonym of the artist Patrick Brill - was elected a Royal Academician in 2013, he had a more complex relationship with the Royal Academy than most. He remembers well the feeling of suspense as his parents, both artists, waited to hear whether their submissions had been accepted for the annual Summer Exhibition. The outcome brought jubilation or despair, but rarely to both, which led to its problems. In The Secret to a Good Life, Bob and Roberta Smith introduces his mother, Deirdre Borlase, and her encounters with the often sexist and class-ridden art establishment of post-war Britain. Her story has led her son to ruminate on drawing, politics and the challenge that art can pose to authority. In the colourful signwriting style for which he is best known, the artist tells a poignant and political family story. In the end, it is Deirdre who provides the answer to the question: what is the secret to a good life?

In his award-winning first book, Bob Smith offered up a witty dose of nineties reality with his observations as a happily adjusted gay man. Now, after breaking up with his longtime boyfriend, Smith looks back to his painfully normal childhood to see where all the trouble really began. Like every other American kid, Bob's adolescence was marked by alternating moments of blissful ignorance, hazy confusion, and humiliating self-consciousness. And in these pages, Bob evokes his youth with a vividness that will make you shudder and howl with recognition.In these hysterically humorous pages, Bob Smith introduces readers to his comically unsympathetic grandmother, who makes light of his carsickness: "Bob only throws up because he's near the window and he can"; to his first teacher crush, whose "five-o'clock shadow could plunge a room into darkness"; and to his first brush with fame, when he fainted from his chair during a biology filmstrip ("Way to go, Smith "). Sharp, observant, ingeniously ironic and wholly satisfying, this new Lambda Award-nominated collection is at once bittersweet nostalgic fun and a testament to the unquestionable gifts of a highly original comic writer.

As an openly gay comic, Bob Smith broke barriers with an appearance on "The Tonight Show." Now Smith offers up his own original, whine-free perspective on being grown up and gay.In OPENLY BOB, the acclaimed comedian candidly, and humorously, tackles issues facing grown-up gays as they make their place in an overwhelmingly straight society. From bringing your boyfriend home to your father's funeral, to being the only gay couple at a family wedding, to surviving couples counseling, Smith's decidedly wry spin on the events of our lives resonates with keen observation and hilarious truth."So Mom says to me on the phone, 'Just because you're coming home for your father's funeral doesn't mean we can't have fun '"Sex education, meteor showers, lesbian ventriloquist dummies, fleamarket shopping, body piercing, pot -smoking drag queens, environmental correctness, Judgment Day, Samuel Beckett, Newt Gingrich, Coco Chanel, Sigmund Freud--nothing and no one escapes Smith's incisive eye in this very human collection of comic essays.

A casebook of interpretations of the ballad The Walled-Up Wife. Some contributors offer competing nationalistic claims concerning the ballad's origins, Ruth Mandel examines gender and power issues in the ballad, and Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble presents a structuralist interpretation.

In these moving, often surprising essays, award-winning author and comedian Bob Smith writes about facing life with ALS, his rich, funny experience of fatherhood before and after his diagnosis, and about his enduring relationship with nature, which inspires him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children. Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at such public concerns as global warming and environmental destruction, he also articulates how the wild world is a visual and vocal echo that we’re still alive.

A high risk private military contractor, Shadow Bear, crosses paths with Hawaii's ruthless Korean Mafia and Korea's most notorious serial killer. All he wants is to finish his life in solitude after a botched mission with the CIA, but he's forced to face his worst nightmare when their paths cross.