Light So Brilliant

Add this collection of 21 enchanting arrangements (including "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence," "Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella," and "The Holly and the Ivy")to your Christmas gig bag. These renditions shine as solos but have the richnessto cut through background chatter at a holiday party. Evoking an ancient rather than modern setting, they contain variations that intermediate through advanced harpists will find both intricate and satisfying. The entire book can be played cover-to-cover in fifty-five minutes. Suitable for lever harps with 33 strings or more. Contains dynamics, chords, and some fingering suggestions.

This “superb history” of artificial light traces the evolution of society—“invariably fascinating and often original . . . [it] amply lives up to its title” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light. Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world’s ecosystems. Edison’s bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light

The complete four-book series of Light's Keeper in one volume. Jane has been running from one thing her whole life. Magic. She’s just had no clue it exists. On a dream holiday to Nice, France, she finds out. To do that, she must meet him. Her guard. The Hell-Hexed vampire who’s watched over and protected her through multiple lifetimes. Julian Deveraux is trapped, always has been, always will be. The self-avowed guard of a creature born from the heart of dimensional fire, he can only watch her from afar. He can’t pull her into this magical realm again. All he wants is for her to lead a peaceful life, but when she comes to Nice, his desires unravel. He finds himself squeezed between Jane’s growing power and the dark Council of Nix. A dangerous group of magicians, they control his every move. But they can’t control Jane, no matter how hard they hunt her. Nothing can stop her now she’s chosen to rise. She will find a way to stop the Council and fold herself back into Julian’s arms, no matter what it takes.

“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.