A Surplus Of Sirens

Whoever takes the blame, humanity will pay the price. Elizabeth is adjusting to her new role as designated human arbiter for the supernatural community. Petty magical arguments? Now officially her jam. But when the Nymph of the North Wind is murdered and Elizabeth is tasked with deciding which siren tribe should pay for the crime, she’s out of her depth—by a few thousand feet or so. Either way Elizabeth rules will devastate the planet. But it’s hard to focus on finding a solution when her mother has been kidnapped and her boyfriend has decided that he won’t let her keep secrets from him anymore. Elizabeth will need all her allies to get her through this one. But every ally comes with a cost—and the cause of this murder halfway around the world may be closer to home than she’d like to admit.

Lady Vivianna Darby was considered a smashing success by society’s standards. After all, she landed Ryder Maxen, the coveted Duke of Margate, in her first season out. Wildly in love, Viv believed herself lucky to have escaped the cold marriages common amongst the ton. Until she found her husband in bed with an opera singer. Now four years later, Viv is determined to save her sisters from the same fate until Viv’s phaeton-racing husband suffers a deadly accident, and she’s forced by duty to go to his deathbed. Preparing herself for widowhood, she realizes she’ll soon be free of the empty marriage she’s been trapped in. But what will she do if he lives? The Duke and the Siren is the third book in the steamy, heart-stopping historical romance series, The Unwanted Dukes. If you love sexy, spellbinding romance and heartwarming humor, don’t miss this captivating series from bestselling author Jessie Clever. Discover adventure and romance when you download The Duke and the Siren today.

It has long been argued that opera is all about sex. Siren Songs is the first collection of articles devoted to exploring the impact of this sexual obsession, and of the power relations that come with it, on the music, words, and staging of opera. Here a distinguished and diverse group of musicologists, literary critics, and feminist scholars address a wide range of fascinating topics--from Salome's striptease to hysteria to jazz and gender--in Italian, English, German, and French operas from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The authors combine readings of specific scenes with efforts to situate these musical moments within richly and precisely observed historical contexts. Challenging both formalist categories of musical analysis and the rhetoric that traditionally pits a male composer against the female characters he creates, many of the articles work toward inventing a language for the study of gender and opera. The collection opens with Mary Ann Smart's introduction, which provides an engaging reflection on the state of gender topics in operatic criticism and musicology. It then moves on to a foundational essay on the complex relationships between opera and history by the renowned philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément, a pioneer of feminist opera criticism. Other articles examine the evolution of the "trouser role" as it evolved in the lesbian subculture of fin-de-siècle Paris, the phenomenon of opera seria's "absent mother" as a manifestation of attitudes to the family under absolutism, the invention of a "hystericized voice" in Verdi's Don Carlos, and a collaborative discussion of the staging problems posed by the gender politics of Mozart's operas. The contributors are Wye Jamison Allanboork, Joseph Auner, Katherine Bergeron, Philip Brett, Peter Brooks, Catherine Clement, Martha Feldman, Heather Hadlock, Mary Hunter, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Lawrence Kramer, Roger Parker, Mary Ann Smart, and Gretchen Wheelock.

Cheese, wine, honey and olive oil - four of Greece's best known contributions to culinary culture - were already well known four thousand years ago. Remains of honeycombs and of cheeses have been found under the volcanic ash of the Santorini eruption of 1627 BC. Over the millennia, Greek food diversified and absorbed neighbouring traditions, yet retained its own distinctive character. In Siren Feasts, Andrew Dalby provides the first serious social history of Greek food. He begins with the tunny fishers of the neolithic age, and traces the story through the repertoire of classical Greece, the reputations of Lydia for luxury and of Sicily and South Italy for sybaritism, to the Imperial synthesis of varying traditions, with a look forward to the Byzantine cuisine and the development of the modern Greek menu. The apples of the Hesperides turn out to be lemons, and great favour attaches to Byzantine biscuits. Fully documented and comprehensively illustrated, scholarly yet immensely readable, Siren Feasts demonstrates the social construction placed upon different types of food at different periods (was fish a luxury item in classical Athens, though disdained by Homeric heroes?). It places diet in an economic and agricultural context; and it provides a history of mentalities in relation to a subject which no human being can ignore.

Bill Nash is a newspaper columnist, freelance writer and photographer based in Southern California. He writes a weekly column for the Ventura County Star and occasional feature stories. He also both writes and takes photographs to illustrate travel articles. He has published nearly 50 travel destination pieces on locations including California, Florida, New York, Hawaii, Tennessee, Arizona, Oregon and international destinations in Mexico, Canada, Chile, Italy, Korea and Australia. Also a non-fiction author, Bill wrote Oil, Orchards and Flames, a history of the fire department in Santa Paula, California. He has a background in journalism, public relations and advertising.

Increasing scarcity, conflict, and environmental damage are critical features of the global water crisis. As governments, international organizations, NGOs, and corporations have tried to respond, Chilean water law has seemed an attractive alternative to older legislative and regulatory approaches. Boldly introduced in 1981, the Chilean model is the worlds leading example of a free market approach to water law, water rights, and water resource management. Despite more than a decade of international debate, however, a comprehensive, balanced account of the Chilean experience has been unavailable. Siren Song is an interdisciplinary analysis combining law, political economy, and geography. Carl Bauer places the Chilean model of water law in international context by reviewing the contemporary debate about water economics and policy reform. He follows with an account of the Chilean experience, drawing on primary and secondary sources in Spanish and English, including interviews with key people in Chile. He presents the debate about reforming the law after Chile‘s 1990 return to democratic government, as well as emerging views about how water markets have worked in practice. The resulting book provides insights about law, economics, and public policy within Chile and lessons for the countries around the world that are wrestling with the challenges of water policy reform.

What started as a small sequence of poems about the Starbucks logo grew to monstrous proportions after the poet fell under a siren spell herself. All Day I Dream About Sirens is both an ancient reverie and a screen-induced stupor as these poems reckon with the enduring cultural fascination with siren and mermaid narratives as they span geographies, economies, and generations, chronicling and reconfiguring the male-centered epic and women’s bodies and subjectivities.