Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters of twentieth-century science fiction and the movies, comics, and video games of the present day. Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and Europe—including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—transformed the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality, and being replete with a dark underside of decay and death; and of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass. In a study as wide-ranging, vivid, and beautiful as our beloved exotic blooms themselves, Jane Desmarais charts the history and influence of these humid, tropical worlds and their creations, providing a steamy window onto our recent past.

A step-by-step manual designed to help parents cope with children's fears; Monsters Under the Bed and Other Childhood Fears discusses common fears, how to respond to childhood anxieties, and other ways to deal with frightened children. “With the culture getting scarier and parents getting busier, there is a growing need to help parents understand and cope with childhood fears. This thoughtful and practical work fulfills that need extraordinarily well.”—Stan and Jan Berenstain, authors of The Berenstain Bears children's book series This book is about how to respond to your child's fears. Most children experience fears of the dark, strangers, unidentified noises, and numerous other things for a short time and then they pass. By supporting your child and filling in the gaps in her knowledge, you can minimize most of the normal childhood fears many children experience. By preparing your child in advance for the new situations she must meet, you may be able to avoid new fears.—From the Introduction Praise for Monsters Under the Bed “The authors of Monsters Under the Bed have created a great resource for parents to help their children. The fun parti s that some of the basic wisdom in this book may also apply when the occasional wayward monster slips under an adult bed.”—Sheryl Leach, president of The Lyons Group, creator of Barney “Fears often annoy, disturb, and sometimes even prevent a child from enjoying childhood. At no time are fears a laughing matter. This book offers parents a variety of clever suggestions on how to help their child 'slay' the ubiquitous monsters that lurk under the bed, in the hall, and outside the window. Today's concerned but busy parents will appreciate the straightforward yet family-oriented language of this book.”—Ted Ayllon, Ph.D., professor of psychology and special education, Georgia State University; author, with Mori Freed, of Stopping Baby's Colic

Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition. Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition.

Corporate marketing professional Ali Sable's charming and handsome co-worker traps her into a situation with no safe way out.

If you found out you were something very different than what you thought, what would you do? On the night of the annual charity Goblin Ball, professional archivist Romy Ussher runs into a mysterious man from her past. Enoch Crowe is a global businessman and playboy; when she met him years before with her late husband, there was a frisson of attraction but he made her uneasy. Now Crowe seems hell-bent on a closer relationship, and Romy finds herself drawn into a supernatural web where nothing is as it appears – including her. Trying to escape Crowe’s clutches, she accepts a job at a remote college. But the door to the otherworld is open, and things keep coming through looking for her. When Crowe offers his help, is it a trap? Chasing down clues going back to ancient Egypt, Romy tries to understand her heritage while keeping her sanity...and humanity. Through the Monster-glass is the first book in the Chaos Roads Trilogy. Follow Romy’s journey to make sense of past, present and future while a malevolent being deep in the shadows orchestrates a conspiracy spanning multiple worlds and dimensions.

Exploring the economics, science, and cultural significance of houseplants, a many-tendrilled history of our domestic, pot-bound companions. Our penchant for keeping houseplants is an ancient practice dating back to the Pharaohs. House Plants explores the stories behind the plants we bring home and how they were transformed from wild plants into members of our households. A billion-dollar global industry, house plants provide interaction with nature and contribute to our health, happiness, and well-being. They also support their own miniature ecosystems and are part of the home biome. Featuring many superb illustrations, House Plants explores both their botanical history and cultural impact, from song (Gracie Fields’s “Biggest Aspidistra in the World”), literature (Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying), and cinema (Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors) to fashion, technology, contemporary design, and painting.

Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France’s nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behaviour and viewed a woman’s scent as something alluring, but also something to be controlled. Drawing on a wealth of resources, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France explores how fiction and related writing on olfaction meet, permeate, and illuminate one another. The book examines medical tracts, letters, manuscripts, posters, print advertisements, magazine articles, perfume manuals, etiquette books, interviews, and encounters with fragrant materials themselves. Cheryl Krueger explores how the olfactory language of a novel or poem conveys the distinctiveness of a text, its unique relationship to language, its style, and its ways of engaging the reader: its signature scent. Shedding light on the French perfume culture that we know today, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France follows the scent trails that ultimately challenge us to read perfume and literature in new ways.

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

From one of the most ferociously brilliant and distinctive young voices in literary nonfiction: a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld, exposing a raw personal journey along the way. Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Kent Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. He pitches a tent at an annual four-day music festival in Illinois, among the misunderstood, thick-as-thieves fans who self-identify as Juggalos. He treks to the end of the continent to visit a legendary hockey enforcer, the granddaddy of all tough guys, to see how he’s preparing for his last foe: obsolescence. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a self-immunizer who is willing to prove he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. He insinuates himself with a modern-day Robinson Crusoe on a tiny atoll off the coast of Australia. He explores the Amish obsession with baseball, and his own obsession with horror, blood, and guts. And in the piercing interstitial meditations between these essays, Russell introduces us to his own raging and inimitable forebears. I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, blistering and deeply personal, records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.