front cover of How to Do It
How to Do It
Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians
Rudolph M. Bell
University of Chicago Press, 1999
How to Do It shows us sixteenth-century Italy from an entirely new perspective: through manuals which were staples in the households of middlebrow Italians merely trying to lead better lives. Addressing challenges such as how to conceive a boy, the manuals offered suggestions such as tying a tourniquet around your husband's left testicle. Or should you want to goad female desires, throw 90 grubs in a liter of olive oil, let steep in the sun for a week and apply liberally on the male anatomy. Bell's journey through booklets long dismissed by scholars as being of little literary value gives us a refreshing and surprisingly fun social history.

"Lively and curious reading, particularly in its cascade of anecdote, offered in a breezy, cozy, journalistic style." —Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement

"[Bell's] fascinating book is a window on a lost world far nearer to our own than we might imagine. . . . How pleasant to read his delightful, informative and often hilarious book." —Kate Saunders, The Independent

"An extraordinary work which blends the learned with the frankly bizarre." —The Economist

"Professor Bell has a sly sense of humor and an enviably strong stomach. . . . He wants to know how people actually behaved, not how the Church or philosophers or earnest humanists thought they should behave. I loved this book." —Christopher Stace, Daily Telegraph
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front cover of She Didn't Mean To Do It
She Didn't Mean To Do It
Daisy Fried
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000
"The poems successfully maintain a delicate balance, a unique and distinct interior logic." --Philadelphia City Paper "The poems in Daisy Fried's first collection of poetry read like tough, urban fables. Formally innovative and thematically challenging, these poems traverse the geography of sex and teenage initiation rights . . . These poems resist being pinned down. They roam the pages in a kind of tight, disruptive free verse." --Ploughshares "Fried shows that poetry can be lyrical, bombastic, garrulous even, and still transport her readers." --Pittsburgh Tribune-Review "Maybe this is the book of the year, it has such range and it is so well-written, for her faithfulness to her emotion is matched by her carefulness of execution." --Thom Gunn "Fried's poetry attacks and attacks, and gets through. And when it does, it does because she jams the right words into a strikingly original order with ferocity, intelligence and dash." --August Kleinzahler "Of the urban landscape-its grit, power, ugly beauty, comedy and pain, Daisy Fried makes vital poetry." --Alicia Suskin Ostriker Daisy Fried, recipient of a Pew Fellowship in poetry, has published widely in journals, including American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, and Threepenny Review. She has written articles and book reviews for Glamour, Philadelphia Magazine, Newsday, and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others, and has taught creative writing at Haverford College and Rutgers University. She holds a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College and lives in South Philadelphia.
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