The Spectacular

It’s taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms, from the author of The Best Kind of People It’s 1997 and Missy’s band has finally hit the big time as they tour across America. At age twenty-two, Missy gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. The only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving someone in every town—until she’s left stranded at the border because of a forgotten party favour. Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga centre where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth, eighty-three, is planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, crashes at her house, she decides it’s time the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again. In this book, by turns sharp and provocative, Zoe Whittall captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

Sutter's the guy you want at your party. Aimee's not. She needs help and it's up to Sutter to show Aimee a splendiferous time and then let her go forth and prosper. But Aimee's not like other girls and before long he's over his head. For the first time in his life he has the power to make a difference in someone else's life - or ruin it forever.

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

Create your own delicious, gorgeous, and professional-quality candies with The Sweet Book of Candy Making. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned candy maker, you will find mouthwatering recipes and expert tips to inspire you—and satisfy your sweet tooth. Inside, you'll find: —Candy-making essentials: all you need to know about equipment, ingredients, and techniques, including step-by-step lessons on pulling taffy, rolling truffles, filling peanut butter cups, and more —More than 50 recipes for sugar candies, fondant, caramels, toffee, fudge, truffles, chocolates, marshmallows, and fruit and nut candies —Troubleshooting tips for each type of candy —How to perfect the classics you love, from English Toffee to Chocolate Fudge to Peanut Brittle —Try your hand at something new: Pistachio Marzipan Squares, Passion Fruit Marshmallows, Mango-Macadamia Nut Caramels, Lemon Meringue Lollipops, and more —Decorating techniques to show off your tasty results Get started in your kitchen with The Sweet Book of Candy Making!

This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity. To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors—Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson—and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidence—lynching photographs—to show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise. An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.

Liz Conor explores the role of media technology in the emergence of the 'modern woman' in the 1920s. At once liberating & confining, the media images of women set standards of appearance that were closely tied to ideas about the roles a woman could fulfill, from city girl to mannekin to flapper.

A buoyant and heartwarming celebration of individuality, identity, and dressing to suit yourself! It's almost Frankie's birthday and everything is ready -- except for something to wear. All of her party dresses feel wrong. Her family tries to help, but it's no good. What Frankie longs for is a suit. A spectacular suit ... Can Frankie find the outfit of her dreams? The perfect gift for birthday parties, crafters, and children who don't identify with traditional gender roles Wonderful conversation starter for teachers and librarians to explore gender and identity with age-relevant material from creators whose life experience is reflected in the story

From the New York Times Bestselling Author of The Magnolia Palace: A thrilling story about love, sacrifice, and the pursuit of dreams, set amidst the glamour and glitz of Radio City Music Hall in its mid-century heyday. New York City, 1956: Nineteen-year-old Marion Brooks knows she should be happy. Her high school sweetheart is about to propose and sweep her off to the life everyone has always expected they’d have together: a quiet house in the suburbs, Marion staying home to raise their future children. But instead, Marion finds herself feeling trapped. So when she comes across an opportunity to audition for the famous Radio City Rockettes—the glamorous precision-dancing troupe—she jumps at the chance to exchange her predictable future for the dazzling life of a performer. Meanwhile, the city is reeling from a string of bombings orchestrated by a person the press has nicknamed the “Big Apple Bomber,” who has been terrorizing the citizens of New York for sixteen years by planting bombs in popular, crowded spaces. With the public in an uproar over the lack of any real leads after a yearslong manhunt, the police turn in desperation to Peter Griggs, a young doctor at a local mental hospital who espouses a radical new technique: psychological profiling. As both Marion and Peter find themselves unexpectedly pulled in to the police search for the bomber, Marion realizes that as much as she’s been training herself to blend in—performing in perfect unison with all the other identical Rockettes—if she hopes to catch the bomber, she’ll need to stand out and take a terrifying risk. In doing so, she may be forced to sacrifice everything she’s worked for, as well as the people she loves the most.