Love and loss, life and death, among the nighttime creatures of the city that never sleeps Like her bestseller Red-Tails in Love, Marie Winn’s Central Park in the Dark explores a once-hidden world in a series of interlocking narratives about the extraordinary denizens, human and animal, of an iconic American park. Her beguiling account of a city’s lakes and woodlands at night takes the reader through the cycle of seasons as experienced by nocturnal active beasts (raccoons, bats, black skimmers, and sleeping robins among them), insects (moths, wasps, fireflies, crickets), and slugs (in all their unexpected poetical randiness). Winn does not neglect her famous protagonists Pale Male and Lola, the hawks that captivated readers years ago, but this time she adds an exciting narrative about thirty-eight screech owls in Central Park and their lives, loves, and tragedies there. An eye-popping amount of natural history is packed into this entertaining book—on bird physiology, spiders, sunsets, dragonflies, meteor showers, and the nature of darkness. But the human drama is never forgotten, for Central Park at night boasts a floating population not only of lovers, dog walkers, and policemen but of regulars young and old who, like Winn, hope to unlock the secrets of urban nature. These “night people” are drawn into a peculiar kind of intimacy. While exploring the astonishing variety of wildlife in the city park, they end up revealing more of their inner lives than they expected.

Love and loss, life and death, among the nighttime creatures of the city that never sleeps Like her bestseller Red-Tails in Love, Marie Winn’s Central Park in the Dark explores a once-hidden world in a series of interlocking narratives about the extraordinary denizens, human and animal, of an iconic American park. Her beguiling account of a city’s lakes and woodlands at night takes the reader through the cycle of seasons as experienced by nocturnal active beasts (raccoons, bats, black skimmers, and sleeping robins among them), insects (moths, wasps, fireflies, crickets), and slugs (in all their unexpected poetical randiness). Winn does not neglect her famous protagonists Pale Male and Lola, the hawks that captivated readers years ago, but this time she adds an exciting narrative about thirty-eight screech owls in Central Park and their lives, loves, and tragedies there. An eye-popping amount of natural history is packed into this entertaining book—on bird physiology, spiders, sunsets, dragonflies, meteor showers, and the nature of darkness. But the human drama is never forgotten, for Central Park at night boasts a floating population not only of lovers, dog walkers, and policemen but of regulars young and old who, like Winn, hope to unlock the secrets of urban nature. These “night people” are drawn into a peculiar kind of intimacy. While exploring the astonishing variety of wildlife in the city park, they end up revealing more of their inner lives than they expected.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the county. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. 843 carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction-- 20 pieces in all, with classics sprinkled among 13 new ones commissioned from great New York writers. Bill Buford spends a wild night in the park; Jonathan Safran Foer envisions it as a tiny, transplanted piece of a mythical Sixth Borough; and Marie Winn answers definitively Holden Caulfield's question of where the ducks go when the park's ponds freeze over. There are bird sightings and fish sightings; Jackie Kennedy and James Brown sightings; and pieces by Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, and Francine Prose. This vibrant collection presents Central Park, in all its many-faceted glory, a 51-block swath of special magic.

In this latest foray into the ailing American psyche, Joan Didion takes her scalpel to inauthenticity and dogma, and lays bare the discrepancies between urban realities and the images peddled by America's attendant quack doctors. Like its great predecessors, 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album', 'Sentimental Journeys' is a thoroughly astringent, bracing report on the State of the Union.

Croce, dance critic for "The New Yorker" from 1973 to 1996, shares her most significant and provocative reviews that revealed the logic and history of ballet, modern dance, and their postmodern variants to a generation of theatergoers.

Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.

Molly’s up against the undead—and the fate of Manhattan is in her hands—in the third and final book of the Dead City trilogy, which Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins says “breathes new life into the zombie genre.” Molly and the Omegas fight to contain the storm unleashed by Operation Blue Moon. As they do, Molly’s personal life is thrown into turmoil when she discovers that one of her closest friends has joined the ranks of the undead, a development that threatens the Omegas as well as Molly’s relationship with her mother. As Molly and her friends battle the Dead Squad (a special NYPD task force made up entirely of zombies), they discover that the world’s largest gold reserve is kept in a vault eighty feet below the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They find a photograph of the vault’s construction in the 1920s and realize that the construction crew was led by none other than the leader of the undead, Marek Blackwell. Could this explain the source of all his money? And if so, what is he planning to do with it? Is he rebuilding Dead City…or is he building an undead army?

Dark tourism has become widespread and diverse. It has passed into popular culture vernacular, deployed in guide books as a short hand descriptor for sites that are associated with death, suffering and trauma. However, whilst books have been devoted to dark tourism as a general topic no single text has sought to explore dark tourism in spaces where crime - mass murder, genocide, State sanctioned torture and violence - has occurred as an organising theme. Dark Tourism and Crime explores the socio-cultural contours of this unique type of tourism and explains why spaces/places where crime has occurred fascinate and attract tourists. The book is marked by an ethics of respect for the suffering a place has experienced and an imperative to learn something tangible about the history and legacy of that suffering. Based on empirical ethnographic research it takes the reader from the remnants of Auschwitz concentration camp to the tranquil Australian island of Tasmania to explore precisely what things a dark tourist might encounter - architecture, art installations, gardens, memorials, physical traces of crime - and how these things invoke and evoke past crimes. This volume furthers understanding of dark tourism and will be of interest to students, researchers and academics of criminology, tourism and cultural studies.

Paige Kelly is used to weird—in fact, she probably corners the market on weird, considering that her best friend, Dottie, has been dead since the 1950s. But when a fire demon attacks Paige in detention, she has to admit that things have gotten out of her league. Luckily, the cute new boy in school, Logan Bradley, is a practiced demonslayer—and he isn't fazed by Paige's propensity to chat with the dead. Suddenly, Paige is smack in the middle of a centuries-old battle between warlocks and demons, learning to fight with a magic sword so that she can defend herself. And if she makes one wrong move, she'll be pulled into the Dark World, an alternate version of our world that's overrun by demons—and she might never make it home.

"Who wouldn't want to be a big star on Broadway some day? You'd do almost anything to get there, wouldn't you?" "Wait a minute! You wouldn't kill somebody just for that, would you?" "Yeah? Well I know somebody who did." "You mean actually killed someone?" "Well, she made sure that the gal got killed." "Wow! Did she get caught? "That's a whole 'nother story. Let me tell you!"