An accomplished debut, The Flower Boy is the tragically romantic story of people from two cultures, one ruling the other, and the human passions that defy and nearly overcome social taboos. In the colonial society of 1930s Ceylon, the separation between servant and master is clearly drawn. Young Chandi, however, knows that the baby born to his mother’s mistress will be his friend. And, indeed, their friendship blossoms in the lush gardens of the tea plantation on which they live. Many, English and Ceylonese, are troubled by the friendship, but the English planter is charmed by the children’s bond, and ultimately by Chandi’s mother, Premawathi. But the world encroaches on their Eden. Beautifully observed, compellingly plotted, The Flower Boy is a compassionate novel of a lost world and those who struggled to hold on to it.

A companion to the popular website APracticalWedding.com and A Practical Wedding Planner, A Practical Wedding helps you sort through the basics to create the wedding you want -- without going broke or crazy in the process. After all, what really matters on your wedding day is not so much how it looked as how it felt. In this refreshing guide, expert Meg Keene shares her secrets to planning a beautiful celebration that reflects your taste and your relationship. You'll discover: The real purpose of engagement (hint: it's not just about the planning) How to pinpoint what matters most to you and your partner DIY-ing your wedding: brilliant or crazy? How to communicate decisions to your family Why that color-coded spreadsheet is actually worth it Wedding Zen can be yours. Meg walks you through everything from choosing a venue to writing vows, complete with stories and advice from women who have been in the trenches: the Team Practical brides. So here's to the joyful wedding, the sensible wedding, the unbelievably fun wedding! A Practical Wedding is your complete guide to getting married with grace.

A man moves into a dark, colorless town, and brings with him flowers and color that affect all of his neighbors.

The Flower Boycelebrates the quiet child. You know the ones - they rarely speak in class, they don't have a big circle of friends but you should never write them off...

In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder"--a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal. In The Flower of Empire, Tatiana Holway tells the story of this magnificent lily, revealing how it touched nearly every aspect of Victorian life, art, and culture. Holway's colorful narrative captures the sensation stirred by Victoria regia in England, particularly the intense race among prominent Britons to be the first to coax the flower to bloom. We meet the great botanists of the age, from the legendary Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to the extravagant flower collector the Duke of Devonshire. Perhaps most important was the Duke's remarkable gardener, Joseph Paxton, who rose from garden boy to knight, and whose design of a series of ever-more astonishing glass-houses--one, the Big Stove, had a footprint the size of Grand Central Station--culminated in his design of the architectural wonder of the age, the Crystal Palace. Fittingly, Paxton based his design on a glass-house he had recently built to house Victoria regia. Indeed, the natural ribbing of the lily's leaf inspired the pattern of girders supporting the massive iron-and-glass building. From alligator-laden jungle ponds to the heights of Victorian society, The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.

"The Reading Room" feature new stories, sections of novels, essays, and poetry for well-known writers with international reputations and new young writers just coming up. Contributors include Larry Rivers, Juan Goytisolo, Stanley Crouch, Madison Smartt Bell, Lionel Abel, Don Maggin, and Mark Minsky.

South Korean Film: Critical and Primary Sources is an essential three-volume reference collection representing three distinct phases in the development of South Korean national cinema, foregrounding how epochal characteristics inform the way in which the national cinema represents the penetrating thematic concern of auteur-ship, genre, spectatorship, gender, and nation, as well as the way in which these themes find expression in distinct visual styles and forms.

The Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group from New Mexico, some of whom migrated around 1700, in the aftermath of the second Pueblo Revolt, to their present location on First Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona. This collection of more than one hundred tales from both New Mexico and Arizona Tewa, first published in 1926, bears witness to their rich cultural history. In addition to emergence and animal stories, these tales also provide an account of many social customs such as wedding ceremonials and relay racing--that show marked differences between the two tribal groups. A comparison of tales from the two divisions of the tribe reveals something of what has happened to both emigrant and home-staying Tewa over two centuries of separation. Yet, while only half of the Arizona tales are distinctly parallel to the New Mexican, additional similarities may be found in such narrative features as the helpfulness of Spider old woman and her possession of medicine, creating life magically under a blanket, or Coyote beguiling girls into marriage. Elsie Clews Parsons was a pioneering anthropologist in the Southwest whose works included the encyclopedic Pueblo Indian Religion. The Tewa tales she gathered for this volume are thus notable not only as fascinating stories that will delight curious readers, but also as authentic reflections of a people less known to scholars.