The Taste of Ashes - The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe

In the fourteenth century, French kings prized such fare as peacock, storks and herons. Guillaume Tirel not only cooked these dishes, he left a book on how to do it. Because (it is said) he had a long sharp nose, he was nicknamed "Taillevent" ("Slice-wind"), and his classic cookbook is often referred to as "Taillevent's Viandier". Le Viandier has survived in at least four different versions. Now Jim Chevallier has translated one of the earliest and most difficult versions - the so-called Fifteenth Century version. This affordable translation makes a precious historical document more readily available to recreational medievalists, food historians and students of medieval life. Luckily, too, many of the dishes listed use familiar ingredients such as chicken, veal, eggs and peas. Adventurous cooks can adapt these original period recipes for modern use, and impress their friends with brewets, pasties, galantines and coulis.

Learn to write and tell stories that keep your readers begging for more.

This new version combines the classic works of Dorothea Brande (Becoming A Writer) with Marie Shedlock (The Art of the Story-Teller).

Together, they address the underlying issues all fiction writers have - how to routinely write stories which are riveting to the reader and keep them coming back for the next installment.

A reissue of a classic work originally published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande's creative-writing classroom of the 1920s.

Decades before brain research "discovered" the particular roles of the right and left sides of the brain in human endeavor, Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, how to call forth the inner writer.

Brande had novice writers note the effects of everything in their environment on their writing. She showed them how to harness the unconscious, how to fall into "artistic coma," then how to reemerge and be their own critics.

Marie Shedlock examines the real secrets behind telling a story that engages the audience - not only capturing and communicating the drama, but also how to select and craft the story which keeps them riveted to the very end.

Together, this novel pairing fills the gap of how to train a new writer to become a successful fiction author.

At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Leon Marc gives the reader the big picture of Eastern Europe-its political, economic, social and cultural history, the nature of changes there and of the issues at stake in the political and economic transition-while putting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EU enlargement into a broader perspective of general European history. Three key strands of Eastern Europe-Central Europe, Eastern Europe proper, and Southeast Europe-are identified and the Germanic, Byzantine, and Ottoman influences on the region are examined. What’s So Eastern About Eastern Europe? is written in an accessible, non-academic way, addressing the stereotypes about the region and their roots and explaining why the notion of Eastern Europe is now obsolete and misleading. It gives an Eastern European’s perspective, and is informed by the author’s own personal experience of the changes that brought the Wall down.