Think outside of the box—that’s what Annie Dawson must do when she discovers a mysterious birchbark box in the attic of Grey Gables, the home bequeathed to her by her grandmother, Betsy Holden. The old box, exquisitely carved by an American Indian artist, contains a beaded ceremonial regalia collar and an obscure verse: Sister Otter, water dancing, sun splashes over circles you draw. If love took you to desert dry, where would you dance? Annie knows of no American Indian connection to her family in the region around Stony Point, the quaint New England fishing village on Maine’s rugged coastline where the mystery unfolds. But this very personal glimpse into Passamaquoddy life is somehow threaded through Annie’s family history. She is driven to find the connection. The poem poignantly reminds Annie of the loss of Wayne, the love of her life who was swept away by a heart attack nearly two years earlier. She feels that love has taken her to “desert dry.” Will the grief that cries out to her ever be filled again with the dancing waters of love? Meanwhile Annie, her best friend Alice MacFarland and the members of Stony Point’s Hook and Needle Club are preparing handcrafted items for charitable fundraising at the village’s annual Harvest on the Harbor autumn festival. With the mystery of the box and its contents hanging heavy in the air, the crafters decide a First Nations theme would be perfectly appropriate. Is there a simple explanation as to how the beautiful box found its way into the attic at Grey Gables? Or will Annie’s mystery again tear at the seams of Stony Point’s quiet façade? Join Annie, Alice, and the other members of the Hook and Needle Club as they follow the thread of this latest trail wherever it leads. As the mystery reaches its climax, someone will be boxed in. But who? Views: 45
Two hilarious stories from the bestselling and well-loved author Diana Wynne Jones, about the worst visitors in the world coming to stay. In VILE VISITORS, we meet Angus Flint and Chair Person – the worst guests in the world. In Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? We meet a man so mean, he even insults the furniture! Despite the children’s best pranks, he just won’t leave. But when the furniture has had enough, it’s time to rise up and get rid of this most vile of visitors…In Chair Person, that old armchair with the broken crystal ball spilled on it has been locked in the shed. But then the children find a mysterious visitor… Transformed into the most annoying visitor ever, they are desperate to get rid of him. But can they turn him back into a chair before he ruins them forever? Views: 45
In two previous books, Janet Malcolm explored the hidden sides of, respectively, institutional psychoanalysis and Freudian biography. In this book, she examines the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example -- the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision, a book about the crime -- she delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung.Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and... Views: 45
Edward Seidensticker's Tokyo: From Edo to Showa, available here for the first time in a single volume, tells the story of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to one of the most renowned modern cities in the world. With the same scholarship and style that won him admiration as one of the premier translators of Japanese literature, he offers the reader his own brilliant picture of a whole society suddenly emerging into the modern world. By turns elegiac and funny, reflective and crisp, Tokyo: From Edo to Showa is an important cultural history of Asia's greatest city. Views: 45
