Best Selling Books by Ian Tan

The most up-to-date and unified study of critically acclaimed and best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver In Understanding Barbara Kingsolver, Ian Tan situates Kingsolver''s oeuvre in an ecocritical and ecofeminist context and argues that her work puts forward an ethics of difference that informs a more egalitarian vision of the world. Following a brief biography, Tan explores ecocriticism as a literary strategy and analyzes Kingsolver''s early nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, as an entry point to her thematic interests. Subsequent chapters attend to Kingsolver''s nine novels, including her breakout The Poisonwood Bible and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead, and the ways they engage with some of the most important issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including postcolonialism and climate change. This book shows how Kingsolver gives her readers the aesthetic tools to begin to see the familiar and the ordinary in a different light, allowing idealism to enrich our everyday lives.

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger’s theories as a framework through which Stevens’s poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens’s repeated emphasis on the terms “being”, “consciousness”, “reality” and “truth” as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens’s modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.

Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation in the positioning of the Irish novel as a response to larger legacies of Anglo-American modernism, and how aesthetic re-imagining can be possible in the aftermath of the destruction of certainties and literary tradition heralded by postmodern practice and metatextual consciousness. It is this book’s argument that intertextual influences flowing from Stevens’s poetry towards the vitality of the novelistic imagination enact robust dialectical exchanges between existential chaos and artistic order, contemporary form and poetic precursors. Through readings of novels by important contemporary Irish novelists John Banville, Colum McCann, Ed O’Loughlin, Iris Murdoch, and Emma Donoghue, this book contemporizes Stevens’s literary influence with refence to novelistic style, themes, and thematic preoccupations that stake the claim for the international status of the contemporary Irish novel as it shapes a new understanding of “world literature” as exchange between national languages, cultures, and alternative formulations of aesthetic modernity as continuing project.

You want to lose weight effectively but all the different pieces of advice from your friends and the media are driving you up the wall. The truth is really quite simple - it''s really about calories in and calories out. Ian Tan, an ex-journalist living in the food paradise of Singapore, struggled for years to find out why he was not able to stop gaining weight, and then found out the truth. He compiled his findings in this short book because he was tired of his friends asking him how did he lose 10kg in 8 months in 2013 and not gained or lost any weight since. This book will not shed new scientific light, but will help you rediscover some simple truths that you can apply easily to your daily life, and it has helped many people lose weight without feeling miserable. Indeed, anyone can lose weight!