They had been there often as tourists. They had cherished the dream of someday living all year under the Provencal sun. And suddenly it happened. Here is the month-by month account of the charms and frustrations that Peter Mayle and his wife -- and their two large dogs -- experience their first year in the remote country of the Luberon restoring a two-centuries-old stone farmhouse that they bought on sight. From coping in January with the first mistral,...

"The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his...

Having settled in Provence, France, the author describes simple events in his life, such as sneaking through customs with expensive truffles, attending a Pavarotti concert, finding two coins in his garden and enjoying his fiftieth birthday.

A fun craft and lore book whose main focus is a step-by-step guide to how to build a fairy house, what tools and materials to use, and many ideas on different details you can add to your fairy house. Also included are bits of fairy lore, fairy dos and don'ts, fairy wisdom, and other fairy crafts and activities. This book will be heavily illustrated with hands on photos of fairy house building, and photos of steps for some of the specific details. “Fairy...

The author offers a culinary tour of France in search of the perfect country bistro, village market, omelette, and bottle of wine.

Dinesen, whose real name is Karen Blixen, tells her story of the 17 years she ran a coffee farm in Kenya, Africa.

"Ellen DeGeneres has bought and renovated nearly a dozen homes over the last twenty-five years, and describes her real-estate and decorating adventures as "an education." She has long cared deeply about design: "I think I wanted to be an interior designer when I was thirteen." This deluxe edition of Home is printed on extremely high quality paper, printed on a sheet-fed press, and bound in a real cloth covered case with a tipped in photo of Ellen...

"A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt's The Unwritten Book explores ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting, in the broadest sense of each. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying. Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we'll never...

Essays pay tribute to the two different cities of the author's youth--Sarajevo, until the city came under siege, and then Chicago, where he and his family started a new life, leaving behind everything they had ever known.

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends...