A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that poor people in Ireland could ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to the elite. Swift's use of satirical hyperbole was intended to mock hostile attitudes towards the poor and anti-Catholicism among the Protestant Ascendancy as well as the Dublin Castle administration's policies in general. In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire.
Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). Other works include the essay collections Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) and Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow; Three Men on the Bummel, a sequel to Three Men in a Boat; and several other novels. Jerome was born in Walsall, England, and, although he was able to attend grammar school, his family suffered from poverty at times, as did he as a young man trying to earn a living in various occupations. In his twenties, he was able to publish some work, and success followed. He married in 1888, and the honeymoon was spent on a boat on the River Thames; he published Three Men in a Boat soon afterwards. He continued to write fiction, non-fiction and plays over the next few decades, though never with the same level of success.
Vanity Fair is a novel by the English author William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text. It was published as a single volume in 1848 with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero, reflecting Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. It is sometimes considered the "principal founder" of the Victorian domestic novel.
Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First World War England.
Darby and Joan is a proverbial phrase for a married couple content to share a quiet life of mutual devotion.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous novel by English writer Jerome K. Jerome describing a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty.
Idleness is a lack of motion or energy. In describing a person, idle suggests having no labor: "idly passing the day".
The lazy argument or idle argument is an attempt to undermine the philosophical doctrine of fatalism by demonstrating that, if everything that happens is determined by fate, it is futile to take any kind of action. Its basic form is that of a complex constructive dilemma.
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne are contained in three books and 107 chapters of varying length. They were originally written in Middle French and published in the Kingdom of France. Montaigne's stated design in writing, publishing and revising the Essays over the period from approximately 1570 to 1592 was to record "some traits of my character and of my humours." The Essays were first published in 1580 and cover a wide range of topics.
The Importance of Being Idle: A Little Book of Lazy Inspiration is a humorous self-help book by author Stephen Robins. It was published by Prion Books in August 2000 and re-released as a paperback in 2001. Using an alphabetic subject-list format, it presents a collection of essay-extracts, quotations and journal excerpts from a wide variety of writers and thinkers, including Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell, Charles Dickens, and Samuel Johnson. The book describes itself as 'call to arms for would-be loafers everywhere to turn their hands to absolutely nothing whatever', emphasizing the benefits of giving oneself nothing to do in the modern world of stress and long working hours. In the words of James Thurber, "It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all".
Three Men on the Bummel is a humorous novel by Jerome K. Jerome. It was published in 1900, eleven years after his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat .
Penelope Jane Leach is a British psychologist who researches and writes extensively on parenting issues from a child development perspective.
Jacob Have I Loved is a 1980 coming of age novel for teenagers and young adults by Katherine Paterson. It won the annual Newbery Medal in 1981. The title alludes to the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau in the Bible, and comes from Romans 9:13.
The Idler was a series of 103 essays, all but twelve of them by Samuel Johnson, published in the London weekly the Universal Chronicle between 1758 and 1760. It is likely that the Chronicle was published for the sole purpose of including The Idler, since it had produced only one issue before the series began, and ceased publication when it finished. The authors besides Johnson were Thomas Warton, Bennet Langton, and Joshua Reynolds.
The Shadow Lines (1988) is a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. It is a book that captures perspective of time and events, of lines that bring people together and hold them apart; lines that are clearly visible from one perspective and nonexistent from another; lines that exist in the memory of one, and therefore in another's imagination. A narrative built out of an intricate, constantly crisscrossing web of memories of many people, it never pretends to tell a story. Instead, it invites the reader to invent one, out of the memories of those involved, memories that hold mirrors of differing shades to the same experience.
Steve "Patch" Earl Johnson and Dr. Kayla Caroline Brady are a supercouple on the American soap opera Days of Our Lives. Steve is portrayed by Stephen Nichols and Kayla is portrayed by Mary Beth Evans. On internet message boards, the couple is often referred to by the portmanteau "Stayla". The couple was initially popular from 1986 through 1990 until the "death" of Steve. Both characters have since returned: after being presumed dead for 16 years, Steve returned to the show on June 9, 2006, and Kayla returned on June 12, 2006, before both departed again in February 2009. Kayla returned in December 2011. In August 2015, Steve returned to Salem, and the couple reunited soon after.
Home Chimes was a London magazine published between 1884 and 1894 by Richard Willoughby, and edited by F. W. Robinson. Originally published as a weekly, it was published as a monthly from January 1886.
Abby Rosmarin is a model and writer. She is the author of Amazon bestselling The Ballerina's Guide to Boxing, as well as The Secret to a Happy Marriage, In the Event the Flower Girl Explodes, Chick Lit , I'm Just Here for the Free Scrutiny, and No One Reads Poetry: A Collection of Poems. She is also known for the viral essay "To The Women Who Choose Not to Have Children". Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, xoJane, MindBodyGreen, Elite Daily, HelloGiggles, Thought Catalog, Elephant Journal, Bustle, and others.
Ku Kyung-mi is a South Korean novelist. A member of literary coterie Work (작업), she began to write fiction in 1996. Her fiction deals mainly with the out-of-work, who are labeled as failures in a capitalist economy. She has published novels targeted at young adult readers since 2012. She has won two writing awards: Kyungnam Newspaper Annual Spring Writing Contest (1996) and Kyunghyang Shinmun New Writer's Award.
Levels of Life is a 2013 memoir by English author Julian Barnes, dedicated to his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent who died in 2008.
