Sam Taylor

'Lyrical and profound, delving into the depths of human connection. You will cry.'GLAMOUR'Impressive . . . it gripped my heart and imagination.'JO BROWNING WROE'Intriguing . . . there is also significant charm and energy.'GUARDIAN'Compulsive, electrifying.'SPECTATOROne man, one choice, two lifetimes.A house fire, Vienna, 1933: thirteen-year-old Max is orphaned, disfigured and adopted by an Aryan family who change his identity - and his prospects.A house fire, Vienna, 1933: thirteen-year-old Max saves his parents and escapes unharmed, to face life as a Jew in 1930s Austria.In one unforgettable night, Max Spiegelman's life splits in two. As war looms and Nazism continues to rise, Max is forced into choices that place him and his alter ego on opposing sides of a divided world. Tethered by their dreams, the boys watch helplessly, haunted by visions of what could have been. But in each parallel universe, they share a magnetic bond with an enchanting, grey-eyed girl.The Two Loves of Sophie Strom is a profound story about how tragedy, choice and life-altering love shape our future.READERS ADORE THE TWO LOVES OF SOPHIE STROM:'More than once moved me to tears.''One of my top reads of the year.''Incredible! Thought-provoking, compelling and deeply moving.''Absolutely blew me away . . . I cannot recommend this book enough.''Eye-opening and thoroughly enjoyable.''I found myself wishing that the story would not end.'

A breathtaking story of unfulfilled dreams, unexpected second chances, and love in a present-day France turning against itself, from the Goncourt Prize-winning author of And Their Children After Them. H l ne is approaching 40. Born in a small town in the east of France, she worked hard to leave it behind and achieve a life worthy of the glossy magazines she pored over as a teen. But now that she seemingly has it all--a husband and two daughters, a successful career, and a custom-designed house near Nancy--she feels unfulfilled, as though the years have passed her by. Christophe just turned 40 and has never left his little corner of France, where he grew up with H l ne. No longer as handsome as he used to be, he's led an unassuming life, preferring to party with friends than to apply himself. These days, he's selling dog food, dreaming of playing hockey again like he did when he was 16, and living with his father and son--a quiet, indecisive existence, which could be seen as failure. And yet he fully believes that anything is still possible. Through the story of how their two disparate lives intersect once more, Connemara beautifully evokes the complex pain and joy of returning to your roots, and trying to make a relationship last in a rapidly changing, increasingly divided country.

At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth-and our plastic-choked ocean. Faced with the question of how to express the enormous ecological loss of our time, poet Sam Taylor marries this collective loss to a personal story of loss involving childhood, memory, and a mother's early death to cancer, a story which culminates in a scene the speaker is compelled to revisit, relive, and revise. Along the way, the poet's experiments in a poetics of "self-erasure" create a polyphonic reading experience, enrich the book's journey into the underworld, and deepen its investigation into nonfiction, myth, and aesthetics. Weaving together a diversity of themes, styles and lyric innovation, The Book of Fools challenges and refreshes our notions of what a poem can look like and what it can accomplish.This is the illustrated edition (9780942544770) that features 9 color illustrations, including prints by Picasso, Matisse, and Van Gogh and stunning plankton photography by Christian and Noe Sardet. Poet David Keplinger, author of The World to Come, says, "Sam Taylor's new book is a masterwork: a modern epic that drives toward our planetary grief with exhilarating invention... This is Taylor at the height of his game, and these poems are a brilliant display of his powers."The poet Craig Santos Perez, author of Unincorporated Territory, adds, "The Book of Fools is a haunting journey into the (under)worlds of personal loss, global inequity, and ecological disaster. Just as the characters and mythic figures in this book cross borders, the poems traverse the aesthetic terrains of lyric and narrative, while also experimenting with typographical innovation (erasure, footnotes, strikethrough, greyscale, and more). Taylor brilliantly creates a "composite canvas" to capture what it means to make art in our precarious times and to continue 'dancing of our erasure."And Donald Revell said: "With The Book of Fools, Sam Taylor has introduced a truly new and absolutely necessary disturbance into the field. All too often, memory and memoir serve as a baroque means of concealment; here, there is very purest disclosure...and by that I mean disclosure at the molecular level. In Taylor's ravishing text, the atoms of every image are seen to shiver and to shimmer. It is as though Taylor knows exactly what is at stake in the gamble of utterance. The Book of Fools is thrilling to witness and believe."

In the cold, treacherous land of Vesimaa, children are stolen from their families, forced to undergo a horrific transformative procedure and serve as magical fire-wielding soldiers. Pran and Oksana - both taken from their homes at a young age - only have each other to hold onto in this heartless place. Pran dreams of one day destroying the empire; Oksana only dreams of returning home. When they discover the emperor has a new, more terrible mission than ever for them, Pran and Oksana vow to escape his tyranny forever. But they soon find that the only way to defeat the monsters that subjugated them may be to become monsters themselves.

A paper-based beginner-friendly workbook for students that teaches how to build a website - without the use of a computer. This is the perfect book for any beginner who finds it easier to engage with paper than with code on a computer screen. Also perfect for classrooms in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas that lack multiple computers or even reasonable Internet access. Numerous students can work simultaneously from this workbook then try their code on a shared computer either in the classroom or at home.

As a collection of politically engaged poetry for the 21st century, Nude Descending and Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet speaking to the urgency of our contemporary moment, especially its ecological crisis. This is a book that brings all the supposed sensitivity of poetry into contact with the world we actually live in—with all its crises, madness, and modernity—and insists that we feel it all. A reader will recognize many of the urgent political issues of our time, yet will find them re-inhabited and transformed here by the imaginative power of poetry. Our great ecological crisis is cast as the fulfillment of a long history of violence, domination, lies, and alienation—in one word, empire—and the book suggests that a livable future requires that we wholly inhabit our body-heart-mind and discover a new paradigm.