"As the storm is fast approaching the Louisiana coast, Cora Boisdore refuses to leave the city. Her parents, Joe Boisdore, an artist descended from freed slaves who became the city's preeminent furniture makers, and his white "Uptown" wife, Dr. Tess Eshleman, are forced to evacuate without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and Cora catatonic--the victim or perpetrator of some violence mysterious even to herself....

Two thousand years into the future, runaway pollution has made the earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus, and the moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the gas planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved. In this unstable system, the anarchist Paula...

Published seven years after her debut collection A Dome of Many-Coloured Glasses, Pictures of the Floating World (1919), is another dazzling volume of poetry from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Amy Lowell. Divided into two sections; Pictures of the Floating World finds inspiration from both Japanese and Chinese poetry, with Lowell trying her hand at the hokku and Chinoiserie. In poems like "Reflections" and "Falling Snow," Lowell paints delicate...

Geishas and the Floating World returns readers to a lost world of sensuality and seduction, rich with hedonism, abandon, and sexual and personal politics. "Floating World" refers to Japan's traditional Geisha pleasure districts, but also to the artistic and literary worlds associated with them. At the heart of the "Floating World" and the system it supported was an extensive network of talented courtesans and entertainers, typified by the still fascinating,...

Following the first book on Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World which examined the PLOT of the novel and the CHARACTERS this book examines the THEMES and ELEMENTS OF STYLE. This allows the critic of the novel to have a comprehensive view of what the novel is about, how it is crafted, who the players are and what kind of style the novelist adopts. This should prepare any student of Kazuo Ishiguro in general or of this novel in particular,...

"Ebbesmeyer's goal is noble and fresh: to show how the flow of ocean debris around the world reveals 'the music' of the world's oceans." -New York Times Book Review Through the fascinating stories of flotsam, one of the Earth's greatest secrets is revealed. In Flotsametrics and the Floating World, maverick scientist Curtis Ebbesmeyer details how his obsession with floating garbage-from rubber ducks to discarded Nike sneakers-helped to revolutionize...

Few realize what a vital role World War II and Florida played in each other's history. The war helped Florida move past its southern conservative mentality and emerge as a sophisticated society, and thousands of military men were trained under Florida's sunny skies. Here are stories from some of the one hundred military bases, including Tyndall Field, where Clark Gable trained, and Eglin Air Force Base, where Doolittle planned his raid on Tokyo. Read...