Could you identify a sausage gun if you had to? How about a plate warmer or a well-sweep? Any idea how the term log-rolling really originated? Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), a prolific popular historian and the first American to chronicle everyday life and customs of the colonial era, describes what these and many other obscure utensils were and how they were used. She also conveys a vivid picture of home production of textiles, colonial dress, transportation,...

"Three interlocking stories focusing on the residents of a town called Sam Dent, the undercurrent of the Trump movement in America, and a series of local tragedies"--

After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century, as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons. Both a salute to, and a devastating satire of a time, place, and culture, The Guermantes Way defines the great tradition of novels that follow the initiation of a...

In 1947 a young American woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But Rome had its way with her, the novel was abandoned, and what followed was not a novel but a series of sketches of Roman life, most written between 1948 and 1951. This new edition of her now classic book includes an evocative foreword by the eminent translator William Weaver, who was a close friend of the author's and often wandered the...

"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this stunning debut collection unerring charts the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner." --

"On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp--an area known as "The Waters" to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan--herbalist and eccentric Hermine "Herself" Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest--the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn--has...

Highlights interior and exterior Mexican decor, illustrating examples of design in architecture, textiles, ceramics, tile, and metalwork.

... 'tis very fine, but where d'ye sleep, or where d'ye dine? Blenheim Palace was still being built when this verse was composed in 1714. The author - possibly Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift - was attacking the grandiloquent baroque style of architecture which placed dining rooms far from kitchens, making food stone cold before it even reached the table. The question posed is one that fascinates visitors to historic houses - in England and elsewhere....

Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, a new novel is a coming-of-age tale, part family and social drama, as it follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world.

By turns humorous, warm, stark, and frightening, these stories glow with childhood memories, the reality of parents growing old, and the casual cruelty men and women inflict on one another. Here is the familiar outer world of family summers at remote lakes, winters of political activism, and seasons of exotic friends, mundane lives, and unexpected loves. But here, too, is the inner world of hidden places and all that emerges from them.