Gift Books
The symmetrical, exuberant heart is everywhere: it gives shape to candy, pendants, the frothy milk on top of a cappuccino, and much else. How can we explain the ubiquity of what might be the most recognizable symbol in the world?
In The Amorous Heart, Marilyn Yalom tracks the heart metaphor and heart iconography across two thousand years, through Christian theology, pagan love poetry, medieval painting, Shakespearean drama, Enlightenment science, and into the present. She argues that the symbol reveals a tension between love as romantic and sexual on the one hand, and as religious and spiritual on the other. Ultimately, the heart symbol is a guide to the astonishing variety of human aff
- The Unlucky Mummy, which is rumored to have sunk the Titanic and kick-started World War I
- The Dybbuk box, which was sold on eBay and spawned the horror film The Possession
- The Conjured Chest, which has been blamed for fifteen deaths within a single family
- The Ring of Silvianus, a Roman artifact believed to have inspired J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
- And many more!
On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand?
In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy--the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering. Dozens of such books live on in the world's most famous libraries and museums. Dark Archives exhumes their origins and brings to life the doctors, murderers, and indigents whose lives are sewn together in this disquieting collection. Along the way, Rosenbloom tells the story of how her team of scientists, curators, and librarians test rumored anthropodermic books, untangling the myths around their creation and reckoning with the ethics of their custodianship. A librarian and journalist, Rosenbloom is a member of The Order of the Good Death and a cofounder of their Death Salon, a community that encourages conversations, scholarship, and art about mortality and mourning. In Dark Archives--captivating and macabre in all the right ways--she has crafted a narrative that is equal parts detective work, academic intrigue, history, and medical curiosity: a book as rare and thrilling as its subject.Selections include Emile Zola's fable Cat's Paradise, in which an indoor cat takes to the streets; Gipsy by Booth Tarkington, a brilliant study of a wild cat; The Cat that Walked by Himself from Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories; Tom Quartz by Mark Twain; How a Cat Played Robinson Crusoe by Charles G. D. Roberts; Charles Perrault's classic rendition of Puss in Boots; and entrancing cat tales by Saki, Bram Stoker, Théophile Gautier, and others.
Paris, Les Miserables
Dublin, Ulysses
Florence, A Room with a View
Naples, My Brilliant Friend
Berlin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Nordland, Growth of the Soil
St Petersburg, Crime and Punishment
Sierra de Guadarrama, For Whom the Bell Tolls
La Mancha, Don Quixote
Davos, The Magic Mountain
Bath, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion
London, Oliver Twist
Yorkshire Moors, Wuthering Heights
Cairo, Palace Walk
Soweto, Burger's Daughter
Kerala, The God of Small Things
Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), The Quiet American
Kabul, The Kite Runner
Hanging Rock, Picnic at Hanging Rock
New York, The Catcher in the Rye
Monterey, Cannery Row
Mississippi River, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Monroeville, To Kill a Mockingbird
Cartagena, Love in the Time of Cholera
Chile, The House of the Spirits Delve into this book to discover some of the world's most fascinating literary places and the novels that celebrate them. Each book in the Inspired Traveller's Guides series offers readers a fascinating, informative and charmingly illustrated guide to must-visit destinations round the globe. Also from this series, explore intriguing: Artistic Places (March 2021), Spiritual Places, Hidden Places and Mystical Places.
Mapping Fairy-Tale Space: Pastiche and Metafiction in Borderless Tales by Christy Williams uses the metaphor of mapping to examine the narrative strategies employed in popular twenty-first-century fairy tales. It analyzes the television shows Once Upon a Time and Secret Garden (a Korean drama), the young-adult novel series The Lunar Chronicles, the Indexing serial novels, and three experimental short works of fiction by Kelly Link. Some of these texts reconfigure well-known fairy tales by combining individual tales into a single storyworld; others self-referentially turn to fairy tales for guidance. These contemporary tales have at their center a crisis about the relevance and sustainability of fairy tales, and Williams argues that they both engage the fairy tale as a relevant genre and remake it to create a new kind of fairy tale.
Mapping Fairy-Tale Space is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes fairy-tale texts that collapse multiple distinct fairy tales so they inhabit the same storyworld, transforming the fairy-tale genre into a fictional geography of borderless tales. Williams examines the complex narrative restructuring enabled by this form of mash-up and expands postmodern arguments to suggest that fairy-tale pastiche is a critical mode of retelling that celebrates the fairy-tale genre while it critiques outdated ideological constructs. Part 2 analyzes the metaphoric use of fairy tales as maps, or guides, for lived experience. In these texts, characters use fairy tales both to navigate and to circumvent their own situations, but the tales are ineffectual maps until the characters chart different paths and endings for themselves or reject the tales as maps altogether. Williams focuses on how inventive narrative and visual storytelling techniques enable metafictional commentary on fairy tales in the texts themselves. Mapping Fairy-Tale Space argues that in remaking the fairy-tale genre, these texts do not so much chart unexplored territory as they approach existing fairy-tale space from new directions, remapping the genre as our collective use of fairy tales changes. Students and scholars of fairy-tale and media studies will welcome this fresh approach.