Creatures Are Stirring

Creatures Are Stirring is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and co-habitable future. The book reconceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture's creaturely qualities--formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms. Addressing a broad audience, Creatures Are Stirring uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors' essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings' points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.

Imagination Inspires Adventure What would life be without imagination? You would forget the taste of mud cakes, the touch of colorful gems on a short hike, and the smell of the salty sea as you look for treasure all within your backyard. You would miss seeing your childs smiles and great ideas, or the sound of laughter as he or she finds the new imaginary friend or foe. You would miss out on your childs next adventure play out in your own home. Read this story packed full of creativity and watch as your child is inspired to dream. This picture book is packed with fun ideas that even the best high tech device cant offer. Beware, though, it may include getting dirty! - Readers Favorite Book Reviews From trudging through the mud to digging for dinosaurs, this book is full of adventures. Casey Rislov inspires children to be explorers of their very own imagination - Leah Stover, Bookstore Owner With lively visual charm and an engaging text, this tale encourages children to explore worlds of their own imagining - Kirkus Reviews

Edgar Award Finalist: The patriarch of a wealthy, notoriously unpleasant Philadelphia family is murdered, and a former FBI agent must figure out whodunit. The Hannaford who made the family fortune called himself a tycoon. The newspapers called him a robber baron. Since the days of Robert Hannaford I, the family has infested Philadelphia society like a disease. The current Hannafords are a clan of embezzlers, gamblers, and fantasy novelists. This Christmas, they have money in their bank accounts, crime in their blood, and murder on their minds. Gregor Demarkian is their reluctant guest. A former FBI agent who quit the agency after his wife’s death, he is invited by the Hannaford patriarch to come for dinner at the family mansion. Demarkain arrives just in time to find his host bludgeoned to death in his study and his investigation will lead him to the Hannafords, a family of cold-blooded killers.

Bestiary: A compendium of animals or birds, real or mythical, with a description of their habits and appearance. Most important to a bestiary is the religious or moral lessons that each animal can teach people. In this context, the book seeks to build on the traditions of the medieval bestiary and considers the unique animals of the Alberta Mountains and foothills. From the perspective of a rancher who has an intimate knowledge of the landscape and animals, the feel and texture of natural life are illuminated in prose that is both stirring and humorous. With the author's sensitivity to the rhythms of the land, the animals and the heavens, the reader is drawn into the natural world where connections to historical knowledge underscore a passionate concern for the environment and humankind's responsibility to the world we share with all creatures.

Before "New Age" there was "New Thought," a philosophy that sought God through metaphysics and was wildly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American mystic and bestselling author RALPH WALDO TRINE (1866-1958) was one of the most influential writers on New Thought principles, and here, in this 1899 book, he explains that how humanity behaves toward its fellow creatures is a measure of our own civility, or lack thereof: . how children learn kindness through the gentle treatment of animals . why fashion-in clothing, in food-cannot dictate our usage of animals . how a society's viewpoint on animals is reflected in its culture . and more. Vegetarians, animal lovers, and those seeking a closer communion with the natural world will find this a stirring work.

With echoes of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Yejidé's novel explores a forgotten quadrant of Washington, DC, and the ghosts that haunt it. Longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction! "Yejidé’s writing captures both real news and spiritual truths with the deftness and capacious imagination of her writing foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and N.K. Jemisin...Creatures of Passage is that rare novel that dispenses ancestral wisdom and literary virtuosity in equal measure." --Washington Post "The novel is worthy of every Toni Morrison comparison it receives, effortlessly blending the brutalities of D.C.'s history with the mythical and supernatural. Creatures of Passage is a lyrical journey that will stick with you." —NPR, a Best Book of 2021 "Creatures of Passage resists comparison. It's reminiscent of Beloved as well as the Odyssey, but perhaps its most apt progenitor is the genre of epic poems performed by the djelis of West Africa...All these otherwise clashing elements become, in this cast, a cohesive whole, telling us that this, too, is America." --New York Times Book Review "In its luminous prose, and its nods to mysticism and myth, the novel brings to mind the best of Toni Morrison. It’s that good." --Washington Post, One of the Best Books about Washington, DC Nephthys Kinwell is a taxi driver of sorts in Washington, DC, ferrying passengers in a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere with a ghost in the trunk. Endless rides and alcohol help her manage her grief over the death of her twin brother, Osiris, who was murdered and dumped in the Anacostia River. Unknown to Nephthys when the novel opens in 1977, her estranged great-nephew, ten-year-old Dash, is finding himself drawn to the banks of that very same river. It is there that Dash--reeling from having witnessed an act of molestation at his school, but still questioning what and who he saw--has charmed conversations with a mysterious figure he calls the "River Man." When Dash arrives unexpectedly at Nephthys's door bearing a cryptic note about his unusual conversations with the River Man, Nephthys must face what frightens her most. Morowa Yejidé's deeply captivating novel shows us an unseen Washington filled with otherworldly landscapes, flawed super-humans, and reluctant ghosts, and brings together a community intent on saving one young boy in order to reclaim itself.

"T'was the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring-not even a mouse." This timeless poem is so well known to children and so often recited by adults it is virtually a part of our common heritage. Written on Christmas Eve in 1822-in a horse-drawn sleigh with jingling bells according to legend-it evokes the excitement and good cheer of Christmas Eve like no other work of American literature. Paired with Thomas Nast's drawings of St. Nicholas, from which we derive the classic image of Santa Claus, this lovely edition may well become the quintessential American Christmas book for children of all ages.

National Book Award Finalist: A biologist’s “thoroughly enjoyable” account of the expeditions that unearthed the history of life on our planet (Publishers Weekly). Not so long ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vague and vastly off the mark, and much of the knowledge of our own species’ history was a set of fantastic myths and fairy tales. But scientists were about to embark on an amazing new era of understanding. From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Big Picture, this book leads us on a rousing voyage that recounts the most important discoveries in two centuries of natural history: from Darwin’s trip around the world to Charles Walcott’s discovery of pre-Cambrian life in the Grand Canyon; from Louis and Mary Leakey’s investigation of our deepest past in East Africa to the trailblazers in modern laboratories who have located a time clock in our DNA. Filled with the same sense of adventure that spurred on these extraordinary men and women, Remarkable Creatures is a “stirring introduction to the wonder of evolutionary biology” (Kirkus Reviews). “Charming and enlightening.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As fast-paced as a detective story.” —Nature