In search of an off-beat day trip? This book offers basic information for the casual visitor to canal parks, museums and related historic sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey. It includes a guide to attractions along the famed Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park, the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site (where a railroad carried canal boats over a mountain) the National Canal Museum, as well as to canal towns, small museums and out-of-the way canal restorations. The book includes maps, illustrations, historic photographs, a list of canal-related events, publications and organizations. 
If the trip piques your interest in canal history, the book offers an overview of the canal era, lively accounts of how the canals were built and vignettes about the 19th-century leaders who got the job done. Check out the excerpts section for the story of Mathew Carey and a brief summary of Pennsylvania's canal history. 
Finally, you'll find ways to get involved with canal societies and an overview of the canal restoration movement. The book also describes how canal restoration projects are being used as tool for economic development.

Canal Parks, Museums and Characters of the Mid-Atlantic

Travel

Mulligan, Kate

Specialty Travel

Wakefield Pr

The Misplaced Corpse (Wakefield crime classics) [Paperback]

The Misplaced Corpse

Literature & Fiction

Martin, A.E.

Contemporary

In this incisive guide to Wagnr's masterwork, Der Ring des Nibelung en, Peter Bassett explains how Wagner fashioned mythical story with music of such power and expressiveness that it influenced the course of 20th century music. During the course of its four separate dramas, this work for musical stage describes how greed and lust for power inevitably lead to destruction. However, it also points to a new beginning based on hope and love.

A Ring for the Millennium: A Guide to Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen

Arts & Photography

Bassett, Peter

Music

Ivor Hele was an artist of extraordinary discipline and power. He was also enormously prolific and completed more commissioned works than any other artist in the history of Australian art. His front-line responses to war, sketched and painted for the Australian War Memorial, the portraits that won him the Archibald prize an astonishing five times during the 1950s, his exuberant nudes (Ivor and his wife swam nude at Maslins beach long before it was fashionable or legal to do so) and his magnificent landscapes of that rugged coastline south of Adelaide - where he lived as a recluse - combine to make up a prodigious body of work. This book focuses on the non-war art in an attempt to offer a wider view of the man, his exceptional ability and his rigorous discipline. It is released to coincide with an exhibition that celebrates his life-long dedication to his art.

Ivor Hele: The Productive Artist

Hylton, Jane

History & Criticism

Billed by its author--the pseudonymous Mynona (German for “anonymous” backward)--as “the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus,” The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona’s philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as “a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.,” when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here). With this first English-language edition, Wakefield Press introduces the work of a great forgotten German fabulist. Mentioned in his day in the same breath as Kafka, Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography and Kant for Children) and a literary absurdist by night, who composed black humored tales he called Grostesken. His friends and fans included Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus.

The Creator

Mynona

Literary

First published in French in 1983, The Cathedral of Mist is a collection of stories from the last of the great Francophone Belgian fantasists: distilled tales of distant journeys, buried memories and impossible architecture. Described here are the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the memory chambers that fuel the marvelous futility of the endeavor to write; the beautiful woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed shape at dusk, that gives this book its title. The Cathedral of Mist offers the sort of ethereal narratives that might have come from the pen of a sorrowful, distinctly Belgian Italo Calvino. It is accompanied by two meditative essays on reading and writing that fall in the tradition of Marcel Proust and Julien Gracq. Paul Willems (1912–97) published his first novel, Everything Here Is Real, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright.

The Cathedral of Mist (Imagining Architecture, 3)

WILLEMS, Paul

First published in German in 1902, Hashish is a collection of decadent, interwoven tales of Satanism, eroticism, sadism, cannibalism, necrophilia and death.
Encountering the enigmatic dandy Count Vittorio Alta-Carrara in a Parisian eatery, the narrator finds himself invited to a “Hashish Club,” where in the dim light of red-filtered candles, a roomful of “recumbent wanderers” explores the abyss of the unconscious. The narrator and the count don a variety of identities as they in turn enter the narratives, sometimes participating in them, other times merely observing them from the vantage point of a shifting divan. Engaging in romantic liaisons with masks and cadavers, taking part in Satanic orgies and carnivals, plotting blasphemy and riding carriages through cityscapes where time loses its bearings, the protagonists draw the reader into their narrative and psychological unmooring.
A forgotten yet important chapter in the lineage of German fantastic and decadent literature, this translation of Hashish is illustrated throughout with drawings by the author’s brother-in-law, Alfred Kubin, from the book’s second, 1913 German edition.
Oscar A.H. Schmitz (1873–1931) lived the life of a literary dandy. Although best remembered in Germany for his second book, Hashish, and the decadent lineage it helped inaugurate in German letters, his output was wide-ranging, from Romantic verse to plays and travel books, to a series of popular nonfiction works on politics, yoga, astrology, etiquette and Jungian psychology.

Hashish

Schmitz, Oscar

Science Fiction & Fantasy

“The art of the biographer consists specifically in choice. He is not meant to worry about speaking truth; he must create human characteristics amidst the chaos.”―Marcel Schwob
Imaginary Lives remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Apollinaire, Borges, Jarry and Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas De Quincey and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue.
These 22 portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique lives, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows. These “imaginary lives” thus acquaint us with the “Hateful Poet” Cecco Angiolieri instead of his lifelong rival, Dante Alighieri; the would-be romantic pirate Major Stede Bonnet instead of the infamous Blackbeard who would lead him to the gallows; the false confessor Nicolas Loyseleur rather than Joan of Arc whom he cruelly deceived; or the actor Gabriel Spenser in place of the better-remembered Ben Jonson who ran a sword through his lung.
Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. The secret influence on generations of writers, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French).

Imaginary Lives

Schwob, Marcel

United States

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