Cafe Life New York: An Insider’s Guide to the City’s Neighborhood Cafes by SANDY MILLER

New In Paperback $20.00     *Local Author

Discover the cafés of New York City, the neighborhood hangouts that even street-smart New Yorkers often miss. Organized according to neighborhood, this book, the newest addition to the popular Café Life series, features those cafés that anchor neighborhoods and make life in the city richer and less daunting. The highly personal and richly anecdotal text, supplemented by color photographs that beautifully evoke both the city and its cafés, portrays the magic and allure of New York’s café culture from the perspective of both café owners and patrons. Learn about New York’s neighborhoods through its cafés; learn about New York’s cafés through its neighborhoods. Each reflects and reveals the other.

Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills by DAVID STRADLING

New In Hardcover $35.00 - 10%

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein, with environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.

Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created a great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water.

The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation’s ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence of writers and artists - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation.

In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish “Borscht Belt” in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

David Stradling is associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His focus is the intersection of urban and environmental history. He is author of Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 and editor of Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts.

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by LINDA COLLEY 

New In Hardcover $27.50

There were many ordeals—and adventures—in the tumultuous life of this emblematic 18th-century Englishwoman. At age 20 Marsh was captured by Barbary pirates and narrowly fended off the Moroccan sultan’s attempts to induct her into his harem. She married a British merchant, went through both luxurious high living and humiliating bankruptcy, followed him to India, where they remade themselves as colonial grandees, then suffered another bankruptcy. (A further ordeal was snagging a husband for her under-dowried daughter.) Historian Colley (Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850) styles Marsh a female Candide batted about by world-historical forces. Shaped by the breakdown of barriers in this age of proto-globalization (Colley speculates excitedly, but without evidence, that Marsh was of mixed racial background), her life was opened up by the rise of the British Empire and disrupted by attendant upheavals like the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. Still, in Colley’s account, she retains her own power: Marsh cannily leveraged family connections to the British naval bureaucracy to facilitate her voyaging, published a piquant memoir of Moroccan captivity and enjoyed a scandalous 18-month tour of India accompanied by a dashing, unmarried British officer. Colley makes of her story both an engaging biography and a deft, insightful social history.

The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places

New In Paperback $16.00

Travel writing maintains its seemingly endless popularity, and this volume offers a particularly transporting body of work, pairing exotic locales with writers of the highest caliber: Russell Banks writes on the Everglades, Francine Prose explores the secrets of Prague, Robert Hughes takes us on a tour of Italy, and more. From the most beautiful gardens to visit in Japan to the best free things to do in Provence, this book is as enlightening as it is entertaining. Whether off to the other side of the globe or to their favorite reading chair, wanderers of every sort will find this book truly indispensable.

Other featured writers and places include:
Nik Cohn on Savannah
Philip Gourevitch on Tanzania
Shirley Hazzard on Capri
Pico Iyer on Iceland and Ethiopia
Nicole Krauss on Japan
Suketu Mehta on the Himalayas
Edna O’Brien on Bath
Patricia Storace on Provence and Athens
James Truman on Iran
Gregor Von Rezzori on Romania
Edmund White on Jordan
Simon Winchester on Mount Pinatubo
William Dalrymple on his pilgrimage to Santiago
John Julius Norwich on the Vatican
Jan Morris on Hawaii

Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by CHUCK THOMPSON

New In $15.00

Travel writers lie, argues Thompson, and their editors not only know and excuse it, but demand it. As laid out in this vivid and ribald memoir by veteran travel writer Thompson—a former editor of Maxim and Travelocity.com’s short-lived print magazine—the industry is packed to the rafters with hacks churning out the same reheated swill for thinly disguised advertorial copy in glossy magazines. Sick of leaving the most interesting material on the cutting-room floor, Thompson slashes through the clichés of the travel industry’s snake-oil salesmen with unmitigated glee. The Caribbean is a miasmic hellscape. The supposed narcoterrorist danger zone, Colombia, is a wonderful place with wonderful people (But who buys magazines to read that?). And the widely respected Lonely Planet guidebooks have ruined more travel destinations than have the tourists its writers sermonize against. If all Thompson was aiming for had been caustic observations about the industry he knows from the inside out, the book would have been an amusing but limited experience. But Thompson weaves his take on the travel racket and the damage it does into an engagingly personal narrative about his own nomadic life, tossing out raucous anecdotes about teaching ESL in a remote Japanese town or snorting cocaine with fellow staffers in the Alaska House of Representatives.
The Little Book of the Sea by LORENZ SCHROTER

New In Hardcover $15.00

A random collection of nautical trivia that will turn you into the most loved (or most hated) person on the boat! Did you know?…..That Britain s coast line is endless? That the brother of Ernest Hemingway founded a nation? How to inseminate a sea urchin? That some seamounts are named after Tolkien figures? How much foam is on the sea, right now? Why the sea is blue? How far is the horizon? Most of the time, we see only the world s surface, but there are stories behind every corner, some just funny, some very strange (there a people, who believe we are living inside the globe, not outside and science cannot prove them wrong!) and some important (how to save the world for example.) You are on holiday at the coast and you don t know how to entertain your kids? Tell them a story. In this book there are more than 200.

Amphigorey Again by EDWARD GOREY

New In Paperback $22.00

This latest collection displays in glorious abundance the offbeat characters and droll humor of Edward Gorey. Figbash is acrobatic, topiaries are tragic, hippopotami are admonitory, and galoshes are remorseful in this celebration of a unique talent that never fails to delight, amuse, and confound readers. Amphigorey Again contains previously uncollected work and two unpublished stories—”The Izzard Book,” a quirky riff on the letter Z, and “La Malle Saignante,” a bilingual homage to early French silent serial movies. Rough sketches and unfinished panels show an ironic and singular mind at work.

Think with the Senses Feel with the Mind Art in the Present Tense: La Biennale di Venezia

New In Paperback / Boxed Set $85.00

Curated by the esteemed former MOMA curator Robert Storr, the goal of the 52nd International Exhibition of Visual Arts is to define the new century-110 years after the first Biennale. This year’s exhibition is a presentation of the art and artists of developing countries viewed in combination with the art of artists from the more established cultures of the world.One hundred artists have been selected from all over the world and, for the first time in the history of the Biennale, includes artists from emerging nations such as India, Turkey and Nigeria. This two volume catalog-one dedicated to the participating countries, the other focusing on the featured artists-features invaluable essays on emerging art trends and the exhibition’s up-and-coming artists

Cheryl Dunn: Some Kind of Vocation

New In Hardcover $40 - 10%

Photographer and filmmaker Cheryl Dunn has been one of America’s foremost chroniclers of the underground scene since the mid-1990s. This first retrospective looks at the worlds of street art, graffiti and life on the creative margins from an appreciative insider’s point of view. It features documentary photographs of San Francisco artists like Barry McGee, Margaret Killgallen and Chris Johanson, with whom she shared a distinct and elusive sensibility, as well as others from Los Angeles and her home town of New York, including, like Phil Frost, Mike Mills and Ed Templeton. Also included is a rare, 60-minute film documenting the scene imported to Tokyo and focused on 13 artists in particular–including McGee, Johanson, Mills, Killgallen, Templeton, Frost, Thomas Campbell, Stephen Powers, Tommy Guerrero, Josh Lozcano, Brendon Fowler and Aaron Rose. Through candid interviews, riveting footage of art in action, and a massive demolition derby in the streets of Tokyo, the film captures these artists just before they broke through to the mainstream. It is about building things up, knocking them down and the simple enjoyment of making work with friends before the business of art takes hold. Features extra rare footage of all of the artists as well as short films about Johanson and Gonzales.

Vietnam Style by BERTRAMD DE HARTINGH with photos by LUCA INVERNIZZI TETTONI

New In Hardcover $ 44.95 - 10%

…the true heart of Vietnam style, as described in the fine photos and thoughtful text, still emanates from the ancient aesthetic and traditions of the Vietnamese people. –Los Angeles Times

…lavish color images of interiors and gardens depict everything from hill tribes’ dwellings at the
Vietnam Museum of Ethnology to the French colonial Hanoi Opera House. –Library Journal