Raise your entertaining ante with Steven Stolman, and make every party an affair to remember. You’re invited as everyone’s favorite “serial entertainer” returns to share memories, recipes, and photographs from his favorite parties over the years in The Serial Entertainer’s Passion for Parties. Playful yet elegant in scope, these extravagant celebrations leave nothing to be desired, and you’ll take it all in from a front row seat. With Stolman’s engaging storytelling and signature sense of humor, learn ideas and tips you can integrate into the most meaningful occasions in life: dinner parties, fundraising galas, weddings, and birthdays and the like. New recipes, artful flower arranging, and more is revealed as Stolman divulges the wisdom he has gleaned from party planning over the years. Allow The Serial Entertainer's Passion for Parties to inspire you. There are get-togethers, and there are parties. If you ask Steven Stolman, the former should always become the latter. Steven Stolman was born in Boston, raised in West Hartford, and now divides his time among homes in Florida, New York and Wisconsin. He graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York, he had a career as a fashion designer and was president of Scalamandré textiles house for a time. He is now a designer and a brand strategist. His published works include Scalamandré: Haute Décor, 40 Years of Fabulous, and Confessions of A Serial Entertainer.

Menus and anecdotes give away one man’s secrets for entertaining in style. Steven Stolman has a gregarious personality. He loves to entertain: cocktail parties in Palm Beach, football game-day gatherings in Wisconsin, family Passover Sedars in Connecticut, and dinner parties in his New York apartment. “Of all our friends, we have the smallest places, yet we seem to do more entertaining than anyone.” It’s about the people and the food, he says. He also loves old community and church cookbooks from the 1950s to the ’70s. And these are his inspirations for party food: dips and cheese spreads with crackers, family recipes for delicious roasts, breakfast casseroles, and desserts. What Stolman confesses is that he hates hostess gifts and isn’t afraid to say so. He advises women not to take a purse to a party and just “tuck it behind here” to avoid holding it—thanks for ruining my furniture arrangement! He advises about the importance of having silver serving pieces and how to dress for a cocktail party or a dinner party (at least try!). And he confesses that even when he has hired servers to pass hors d’oeuvres, he can’t help but carry a tray around himself! This book will give any novice party host ideas and confidence, and it will inspire seasoned hosts to simplify and enjoy the party. Steven Stolman is the author of 40 Years of Fabulous and Scalamandré: Haute Décor. He divides his time among homes in Palm Beach, New York, and Milwaukee.

For decades now, serial killers have taken center stage in the news and entertainment media. The coverage of real-life murderers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer has transformed them into ghoulish celebrities. Similarly, the popularity of fictional characters such as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter or Dexter demonstrates just how eager the public is to be frightened by these human predators. But why is this so? Could it be that some of us have a gruesome fascination with serial killers for the same reasons we might morbidly stare at a catastrophic automobile accident? Or it is something more? In Why We Love Serial Killers, criminology professor Dr. Scott Bonn explores our powerful appetite for the macabre, while also providing new and unique insights into the world of the serial killer, including those he has gained from his correspondence with two of the world’s most notorious examples, David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) and Dennis Rader (“Bind, Torture, Kill”). In addition, Bonn examines the criminal profiling techniques used by law enforcement professionals to identify and apprehend serial predators, he discusses the various behaviors—such as the charisma of the sociopath— that manifest themselves in serial killers, and he explains how and why these killers often become popular cultural figures. Groundbreaking in its approach, Why We Love Serial Killers is a compelling look at how the media, law enforcement agencies, and public perception itself shapes and feeds the “monsters” in our midst.

Elevates global entertainment to an area of worthy media study that was previously reserved for global news and takes a worldwide approach, encompassing Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil, and India - in addition to the more high-profile, heavily researched areas of Europe and East Asia.

A formidable textiles house and decorative tastemaker for more than 80 years in the world of high-end interior design. Scalamandré is revered for its comprehensive offerings of fabrics, wallcoverings and trims available to-the-trade through design centers across the United States, Europe, and Asia. The Scalamandré touch has also been applied to compelling collections of china, crystal, flatware and gifts along with ultra-luxury bedding and related decorative accessories showcased in fine stores worldwide. Scalamandré: Haute Décor celebrates the world of Scalamandré as seen through the eyes of the international design elite while paying homage to the people, places and events that contributed to the nearly cinematic Scalamandré story. All those who appreciate and cultivate beauty in their lives will enjoy this insider’s look at this interior design treasure. Steven Stolman, designer, writer and all-around style provocateur, was born in Boston, raised in West Hartford and attended Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern Universities before graduating from New York’s Parsons School of Design. Known for his lighthearted use of decorative fabrics in apparel design, he now serves as president of Scalamandré, bringing the legendary American textiles house into its future. He divides his time between homes in Florida, New York, and Wisconsin.

Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. William Warner shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety about the effects of new media on consumers. Warner uncovers a buried and neglected history of the way in which the idea of the novel was shaped in response to a newly vigorous market in popular narratives. In order to rein in the sexy and egotistical novel of amorous intrigue, novelists and critics redefined the novel as morally respectable, largely masculine in authorship, national in character, realistic in its claims, and finally, literary. Warner considers early novelists in their role as entertainers and media workers, and shows how the short, erotic, plot-driven novels written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood came to be absorbed and overwritten by the popular novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Considering these novels as entertainment as well as literature, Warner traces a different story—one that redefines the terms within which the British novel is to be understood and replaces the literary history of the rise of the novel with a more inclusive cultural history.

This is one of the very first books on the subject that features, among other interesting love stories, a revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved"; the letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much that had been suppressed; a detailed account of the whole progress of Clara Schumann's beautiful love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or misunderstood._x000D_ Volume 1:_x000D_ The Overture_x000D_ The Ancients_x000D_ The Men of Flanders_x000D_ Orland Di Lassus and His Regina_x000D_ Henry and Frances Purcell_x000D_ The Strange Adventures of Stradella_x000D_ Giovanni and Lucrezia Palestrina_x000D_ Bach, the Patriarch_x000D_ Papa and Mamma Haydn_x000D_ The Magnificent Bachelor_x000D_ Gluck the Domestic, Rousseau the Confessor, and the Amiable Piccinni_x000D_ A Few Tunesters of France and Italy – Peri, Monteverde, et al._x000D_ Mozart_x000D_ Beethoven: the Great Bumblebee_x000D_ Von Weber – the Rake Reformed_x000D_ The Felicities of Mendelssohn_x000D_ The Nocturnes of Chopin_x000D_ Volume 2:_x000D_ Franz Liszt_x000D_ Richard Wagner_x000D_ Tschaikovski, the Woman-Dreader_x000D_ The Heart of a Violinist_x000D_ An Omnibus Chapter_x000D_ Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck_x000D_ Musicians as Lovers

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Prac­tice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity. Now including a reading group guide.

In this cogent and well-researched book, Harold Schechter argues that, unlike the popular conception of the media inciting violence through displaying it, without these outlets of violence in the media a basic human need would not be met and would have to be acted out in much more destructive ways. Schechter demonstrates how violent images saturated the earliest newspaper, how art and disturbing images are not incompatible and how the demoaisation of comic books in the 1950s det up a pattern of equating testosterone fuelled entertainment with aggression.