Nightwatching

Unputdownable · Psychological Suspense · Horror · Tense · Gripping A FALLON BOOK CLUB PICK “Pulse-pounding locked-room suspense.” —Elle “Nightwatching is like nothing I've read before. I wolfed it down in two sittings; it's amazing.”—Lisa Jewell A footstep on the stairs. A second to react. What happens next will determine everything. Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants.

Peter Greenaway: Nightwatching~ISBN 2-914563-23-X U.S. $24.95 / Paperback, 8.25 x 7 in. / 128 pgs / 32 color. ~Item / June / Film Greenaway is a cultural omnivore who eats with his mouth open. --Pauline Kael

In 2007, the internationally renowned filmmaker Peter Greenaway ("The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; The Draughtsman's Contract") will release "Nightwatching," a feature-length study of the life and loves of the eighteenth-century Dutch painter, Rembrandt, via his controversial masterpiece, "The Night Watch," an ensemble painting which depicts the identification of a murderer. According to Greenaway, the painting is "Rembrandt's "J'accuse."" There is a conspiracy painted in Rembrandt's "The Night Watch." The sinister title of the painting alone suggests we should look for it . Is this a painting, or an act of theater, or a still from a film?" In this accompanying artist's book, Greenaway offers fans a glimpse into his own artistic process, with written analyses of each of the characters in the painting followed by a wealth of enlarged, close-up details in which brush marks practically jump from the page.

Often treated like night itself—both visible and invisible, feared and romanticized—Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the US. In her newest work, María DeGuzmán explores representations of night in art and literature from the Caribbean, Colombia, Central and South America, and the US, calling into question night's effect on the formation of identity for Latina/os in and outside of the US. She takes as her subject novels, short stories, poetry, essays, non-fiction, photo-fictions, photography, and film, and examines these texts through the lenses of nationhood, sexuality, human rights, exoticism, among others.

The Long Century's Long Shadow explores what is cinematic about the developments in literature, art, and aesthetic thinking that emerged in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Volume 15 of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, Wars and the War Office, picks up on the previous volume’s recounting of Nightingale’s famous work during the Crimean War and the comprehensive analysis she did on its high death rates. This volume moves on to the implementation of the recommendations that emerged from that research and to her work to reduce deaths in the next wars, beginning with the American Civil War. Nightingale’s writings describe the creation of the Army Medical School, the vast improvements made in the statistical tracking of disease, and new measures for soldiers’ welfare. Her role in the formulation of the first Geneva Convention in 1864 is related, along with her concern that voluntary relief efforts through the Red Cross not make war “cheap.” Nightingale was decorated by both sides for her work in the Franco-Prussian War. While much of her work concerned the mundane sending out of supplies, we see also in her writing her emerging interest in militarism as the cause of war. Her opposition to the Afghan War (of her time) and her work to provide nursing for the Egyptian campaigns, the Zulu War, and the start of the Boer War are also included.