Gawkers

How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. In contrast to the singular and aloof bourgeois flâneur, badauds were passive, collective, instinctive, and highly impressionable. Above all, they were visual, captivated by the sights of everyday life. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer. Bridget Alsdorf examines the work of painters, printmakers, and filmmakers who made badauds their artistic subject, including Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Eugène Carrière, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and Louise Lumière. From morally and intellectually empty to sensitive, empathetic, and humane, the gawkers these artists portrayed cut across social categories. They invite the viewer’s identification, even as they appear to threaten social responsibility and the integrity of art. Delving into the ubiquity of a figure that has largely eluded attention, idling on the margins of culture and current events, Gawkers traces the emergence of social and aesthetic problems that are still with us today.

Compiling a portrait that's both fascinating and deliciously fun, Gastropolis explores the endlessly evolving relationship between New Yorkers and food.

A new person is in charge of research at Panacea Corp, and she’s planning to create a disposable army through controlling the embedded chips of cryogens—people who have had their bodies frozen after passing away. The team must find a way to stop her while dealing with nonstop downpour, jail time, and a horde of curious gawkers descending on a remote area to watch the cryo invasion. The setting: In 2115, embedded chips, virtual reality, and the threat of extreme weather have led to a market for pod warehouses—businesses that offer a pod-like space that keeps a person’s body alive while the person lives entirely in virtual reality. But not everyone embraces technological advances, and a group of people have adopted the tech of 2005 while isolating themselves using a Faraday cage and a tesseract. Panacea Corp—the world’s most powerful corporation—connects them all through providing the metaverse, the pod warehouses, and the land to the technology resisters. Panacea Exodus is book 2 in the Panacea Trilogy. The trilogy starts with Panacea Genesis (book 1) while Panacea Omega (book 3) wraps up the series.

In 2048, while visiting Pastworld, a Victorian London theme park, teenaged Caleb meets seventeen-year-old Eve, a Pastworld inhabitant who has no knowledge of the modern world, and both become pawns in a murderer's diabolical plan that reveals disturbing truths about the teenagers' origins.

Charm School for Men is a brilliantly clear, gregarious book. With these generous and direct words, Lori Stein somehow takes you into the mind of the single man. This is not merely a book about dating, nor is it a book about how to pick up women. Lori Stein demonstrates that there are seven key mistakes that commonly derail even the most eligible bachelors. Dazzling as Lori Stein's insights are, it is her indefatigable patience and understanding that makes this book a crucial resource for single men. Men who want to have a better understanding of women will read Charm School for Men. This book relates to any man of any age who has tried to meet a woman and has gotten a reaction that has mystified him. It will also help men understand what they really want in a relationship and how to go about getting it in a healthy and fun way.

The collected nonfiction of the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ironweed: “A great pleasure to read no matter what the subject” (Library Journal). When William Kennedy arrives in Barcelona, his guidebook recommends taking the trolley around town—but the trolleys haven’t run in the city for years. He’s on his way to interview the novelist Gabriel García Márquez when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees something impossible: a yellow trolley running down the street. Márquez, however, is not surprised; like all great writers of both fiction and nonfiction, he knows that impossible things happen every day. A remarkable collection from one of America’s greatest authors, Riding the Yellow Trolley Car features work from all stages of Kennedy’s career. Through each piece runs the thread that ties together his greatest works: a love and deep understanding of his hometown, the city of Albany, New York, and the good and evil men who have made it what it is. Featuring interviews and essays on some of the most prominent authors of the twentieth century, from Saul Bellow and E. L. Doctorow to Norman Mailer and the legendary García Márquez—as well as insightful reflections on topics from baseball to the death of a prominent cat to Kennedy’s wife’s hiccups—Riding the Yellow Trolley Car is an essential book for all those who love to read, or live to write.

How modern food helped make modern society between 1870 and 1930: stories of power and food, from bananas and beer to bread and fake meat. The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today. Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat.