Best Selling Books by Peter Boxall

Bibliographies.

The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the political and literary value of the novel as a genre.

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo''s writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time. Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo''s ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.

Strategy and Human Resource Management is concerned with examining how HR strategy impacts on an organisation''s chances of survival and its relative success, and with understanding how it varies across important organisational, industry and societal contexts. It takes an analytical approach, which examines and explains what managers do and why they do it before offering any sort of prescription for what the authors think they should do. This approach is grounded in research but is brought to life with examples, cases and vignettes to offer a practice-orientated analysis of the subject. As well as explaining important general principles in strategic HRM, critical features of the different contexts in which they are applied are examined. For this fifth edition, there is increased coverage of contemporary topics, including capital markets and increasing financialisation, Industry 4.0, the shaping of employee voice under different varieties of capitalism and the effects of austerity. Strategy and Human Resource Management retains, however, the classic sources that are fundamental to the subject while also including important theoretical advances and the best new studies of strategies in the world of work and people.

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More''s Utopia to Margaret Atwood''s Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as ''the last modernist'', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy. So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge. Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett''s writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.

This critical introduction examines the formal and thematic features common among twenty-first-century writers from around the world.

This Element revisits the relation between Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett to argue that the dialogue between them might offer new ways of thinking about the nature of both writers'' pessimism. The authors suggest that Leopardi becomes increasingly important for Beckett, not only because he frames a literary philosophy of scepticism, but because he gives a rich account of the means by which thoroughgoing pessimism might open on to an unenchanted mode of persistence. In doing so, the Element looks past the impasse - between going on and not going on - that threatens to forestall imaginative possibilities for both writers.

The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as ''The Idea of Beauty'', the nature of ''Mere Being'', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself - those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.

As a 56 years old male living in the suburbs of London, sport has played a major part in my life. Life in the Medium Paced Lane tracks 40 years of performing at the highest level (achieveable). Like limbo, the bar gets lower as time moves on. This is a memoir that will excite most of the population (okay slightly ambitious). It takes in the sixties (just) through to the noughties. It encompasses a sporting life that has rubbed shoulders with the good, great and the ugly. From the playing fields of Essex to international encounters on the other side of the world. Catching a cricket ball from a superstar to plucking an egg out of the midnight sky. The grandeur of Lord''s to a burning sofa on a wicket in South Essex. Hopefully as humorous as it is true. A page turning read that leaves you just wondering...well just wondering - Enjoy!

J Curve is a humorous contemporary tale of how a high flyer in business allows greed to become his main motivation and potentially his downfall. The story opens in October 2014 in the City of London. Brett Hunter, the supposedly suave and sophisticated, Managing Director of Sobbolds Leisure; brewery owners, with an extensive portfolio of hotels, pubs, restaurants and much more, is about to embark on his biggest deal to date. The takeover of Gulbey- Barrett''s, the sleeping drinks conglomerate giant. Hunter believes that he is nearing the pinnacle of his career, with the social trappings associated with this. His parallel life though is driven by greed. In the weeks that follow Hunter''s world begins to disintegrate, but he hasn''t got to where he is without the ability to fight his corner. Max Shadpole though, the Executive Editor of The Sunday Post, a national tabloid newspaper has been on his case for a long time and whilst Hunter is distracted by the impending business deal, Max edges towards exposing the real Hunter. Throughout J Curve looks at the characters and their lives; magnifying warts and all of those involved in the impending City takeover. The glamorous, high flying bankers, Jayne Russell and Jane Morgan play prominent roles and their contrasting characters are illuminated as the story progresses. The Directors at Gulbey''s, in particular the upstanding Edward Goodyear and the eccentric Guy Gulbey, prove that tragedy and day to day humour are both fundamental to everyday life. Threaded throughout the story is how life at the top can be very lonely. J Curve avoids the technicalities of business, concentrating on how life spins in many directions for all those involved, moving at a fast pace, culminating in many revelations and an unexpected twist of fate.

We examine the propensity of respondents to choose the status quo (SQ) or current situation alternative as a function of complexity in two separate state-of-the-world choice experiments. Complexity in each choice set was characterized as the number of single and multiple changes in levels of attributes from the current situation and the order of the choice task in the sequence of multiple tasks provided to respondents. We show that increasing complexity leads to increased choice of the SQ and that a respondent''s age and level of education also influenced this choice. We outline the effects of the alternate approaches for incorporating the SQ into welfare measurement. These findings have implications for the design of stated preference experiments, examining passive use values and for empirical analysis leading to welfare measurement.

This study tests the argument that human resource management in hotels enhances service-recovery performance and job satisfaction through empowering front-line employees to respond to service failures. After an initial phase of qualitative interviewing, dyadic data were gathered through a large-scale survey in thirty hotels in Sri Lanka. The results of structural equation modelling show that the HR practices and management styles adopted in this context help to develop job competence, which is then related to service-recovery performance and job satisfaction. However, they show that service recovery is carefully stage-managed and ''staircased'' in this hotel context with empowerment strongly related to hierarchical level. Empowerment to address service failures is important in these hotels but it is deliberately graduated according to rank. While employee training shows benefits for both parties, greater job autonomy would enhance the well-being of these service workers. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2019.03.006.