In recent years, society has focused more and more attention on the period between active working age and old age (or the “Third Age”). This book reports the results of an experiential home research project in which inhabitant-based information on housing experiences was gathered in order to help housing designers and planners make their products feel “homier”. What is the relationship between housing and experiences of home? What makes housing feel “homey”? What things are necessary in an apartment to make it a real home? The data consist of group discussions which took place in South Ostrobothnia, Finland. The most crucial factors in homey housing proved to be human relationships and the sense of independence in life management. Home functionality, aesthetics, the role of building, movables and culture, as well as the influence of nature and the environment, are also shown to be key elements of homeyness. The concluding chapter differentiates four discourses of housing and ageing. Home is understood as building and possessions, but it can also have emotional content: it is about memories and feelings. Furthermore, it is seen as interaction between the self and surroundings and as a complicated concept of multiple homes varying in time and space.

One night, in the Realm of the Moon, in the middle of the central plaza came and stood a house entirely made from transparent frozen glass. Behind its glass walls that are completely transparent and yet solid, lives a girl. She is a beautiful girl, and more beautiful inside. Many blink at her and call her to come outside to talk to her, to help her, even to take her with them if she wants, but she seems not to listen. She continues her life in an invisible universe where everything is transparent, almost unreal – unreal for those who believe only what they can see with their eyes. But how did she end up here? Many have said they love her and it is probably true as they stood behind her wall for days, even months trying to find the way to enter. Knights and princes, a poet and a painter, a wizard and an astronomer, the twin firewalkers, all make a try. Will there finally be someone to succeed in saving the girl?

When the lights go down and the film starts to roll, we give ourselves over to the magic of movies. But as George Toles observes, what we experience in this house of light may strike closer to home than we imagine. In eleven essays, Toles combines aesthetic inquiry with a psychology of spectatorship to illuminate the dialogue between sentiment and irony that unfolds in every good movie. Reflecting a literary critic's and professional screenwriter's ongoing love affair with cinema, each essay plunges the reader into the experience of one or more films, inviting us to ponder the nature and implications of that experience. Toles considers a wide variety of film experience, from Frank Capra to the Coen brothers to Alfred Hitchcock. However escapist a trip to the movies might be, says Toles, there is no escaping some version of "home" in every film experience. Toles examines important homes-from the cottage in Random Harvest to the foreboding Bates house in Psycho-to suggest that the house of film is a frame we long to enter in the spirit of homecoming but one that we cannot possess any more securely than the lost home of our beginnings. As film study marks a return to art-centered criticism, A House Made of Light breaks new ground in its assessment of the creation-and enjoyment-of movies.

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A washed-up music producer hatches a desperate get-rich-quick scheme that finds him on an airplane headed for Boise … with an extended layover in the unexplored and dangerous realms of the afterlife. “… an absolutely winning story, a rousing, funny, and surprisingly moving tale ... Readers won’t want the novel to end.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Thanks to a rickety 747 past its prime, Jensen Bennett has found himself in the afterlife. Normally this wouldn’t be great news for a guy trying to get his life back on track, but thankfully for Jensen, the hereafter just so happens to be the brand-new home of recently deceased rock star Hedley Grange – the only one who knows the earthly location of a lost, unreleased rock ‘n’ roll album worth millions. Can Jensen find Grange in the spirit world before a doctor vacationing near the crash site revives him for good and his last chance at happiness disappears into the afterlife forever?