Jen Templeton Jay is a wealthy New England socialite when she leaves home to become a writer. To help her screenwriting career, she moved to California and made the acquaintance of charming film director Dem Dmitri. Dem is married, however, and their affair does not materialize ...until they met again at a museum in London, where Jen is researching a Georgian romance novel. Free from his wife's proximity, Dem starts an affair with Jen. Meanwhile, Jen has begun to write. Her novel will be historical romance, and it will feature British socialite Elizabeth Ollernshaw Cullen, who just happens to fall in love with a penniless actor named Jack Kincaid. Back in real life, Dem leaves Jen brokenhearted. Unable to hide from the truth in her fiction, Jen tries to kill herself and wakes up in a London clinic. On the road to recovery, she seems to be doing well-except she hears things, like the sound of rustling leaves, when no leaves are rustling. Meanwhile her novel continues to grow, set in the current location of the London clinic-once known as the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, where ladies promenaded in skirts that sounded oddly of rustling leaves. Perhaps Jen's failed love story can be healed through the love of her characters-or perhaps not.

An ancient manuscript and the hidden bones of St. Thomas Becket lead a historian into unexpected danger.

An ever-present barrel of apples at the back door and the daily aroma of fresh bread. Weekly card games, stolen chickens, honky-tonks and a frigid one-room schoolhouse. Tradition and Family. Welcome to 1950s Paradise, Newfoundland. Growing up as one of 17 children, Pennell transports us back to a then little village full of love, adventure, mischief and colourful characters. In this love letter to his hometown, Pennell captures the significant changes over the decades and shows us that Paradise really was a little piece of heaven on earth.

"Walks to the Paradise Garden is the last unpublished manuscript of the late American poet, photographer, publisher and bon viveur Jonathan Williams (1929-2008). This book chronicles Williams' road trips across the Southern United States with photographers Guy Mendes and Roger Manley in search of the most authentic and outlandish artists the South had to offer. Williams describes the project thus: 'The people and places in Walks to the Paradise Garden exist along the blue highways of America.... We have traveled many thousands of miles, together and separately, to document what tickled us, what moved us, and what (sometimes) appalled us.' The majority of these road trips took place in the 1980s, a pivotal decade in the development of Southern 'yard shows' and many of the artists are now featured in major institutions. This book, however, chronicles them at the outset of their careers and provides essential context for their inclusion in the art historical canon"--Back cover.

Shopping malls in China create a new pseudo-public urban space which is under the control of private or quasi-public power structure. As they are open for public use, mediated by the co-mingling of private property rights and public meanings of urban space, the rise, publicness and consequences of the boom in the construction of shopping malls raises major questions in spatial political economy and magnifies existing theoretical debates between the natural and conventional schools of property rights. In examining these issues this book develops a theoretical framework starting with a critique of the socio-spatial debate between two influential bodies of work represented by the work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. Drawing on the framework, the book examines why pseudo-public spaces have been growing so rapidly in China since the 1980s; assesses to what degree pseudo-public spaces are public, and how they affect the publicness of Chinese cities; and explores the consequences of their rise. Findings of this book provide insights that can help to better understand Chinese urbanism and also have the potential to inform urban policy in China. This book will be of interest to academics and researchers in both Chinese studies and urban studies.

A beautifully illustrated art history and cultural biography, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities focuses on one of the most influential artistic quarters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – London’s Tite Street, where a staggering amount of talent thrived, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent. For Wilde, the street was full of ‘wonderful possibilities’, while for Whistler it was ‘the birthplace of art’, where a new brand of aestheticism was nurtured in his controversial White House. Modern masterpieces in art and literature flowed from the studios and houses of Tite Street, but this bohemian enclave had a dark side as well. Here Whistler was bankrupted, Frank Miles was sent to an asylum, Wilde was imprisoned, and Peter Warlock was gassed to death. Throughout its turbulent existence, Tite Street mirrored the world around it. From the Aesthetic movement and its challenge to Victorian values, through the Edwardian struggle for women’s suffrage, to the bombs of the Blitz in the 1940s, it remained home to innumerable artists and writers, socialites and suffragettes, musicians and madmen. The Street of Wonderful Possibilities reveals this complex history, tying together private and professional lives to form a colourful tapestry of art and intrigue, illuminating their relationships to each other, to Tite Street and to a rapidly modernising London at the fin de siècle.