Taking you through the year day by day, The Cardiff Book of Days contains a quirky, eccentric, amusing or important event or fact from different periods of history, many of which had a major impact on the religious and political history of Britain as a whole. Ideal for dipping into, this addictive little book will keep you entertained and informed. Featuring hundreds of snippets of information gleaned from the vaults of Cardiff's archives, it will delight residents and visitors alike.
When an avid gardener and seasoned quilt and stitchery designer combines her two passions, magic sprouts! Using wool as her medium and flowers as her muse, Kathy Cardiff brings her blossoming backyard garden to life in projects that blend elegant beauty with a touch of primitive charm. Projects from pillows and sewing notions to table toppers and wall quilts culminate in a stunning nine-block sampler quilt bursting with blooms. Add basic embroidery-stitch details to give each flower, leaf, and vine Kathy's special brand of cottage style.
In October 1869, as America stood on the brink of becoming a thoroughly modern nation, workers unearthed what appeared to be a petrified ten-foot giant on a remote farm in upstate New York. The discovery caused a sensation. Over the next several months, newspapers devoted daily headlines to the story and tens of thousands of Americans—including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the great showman P. T. Barnum—flocked to see the giant on exhibition. In the colossus, many saw evidence that their continent, and the tiny hamlet of Cardiff, had ties to Biblical history. American science also weighed in on the discovery, and in doing so revealed its own growing pains, including the shortcomings of traditional education, the weaknesses of archaeological methodology, as well as the vexing presence of amateurs and charlatans within its ranks. A national debate ensued over the giant's origins, and was played out in the daily press. Ultimately, the discovery proved to be an elaborate hoax. Still, the story of the Cardiff Giant reveals many things about America in the post-Civil War years. After four years of destruction on an unimagined scale, Americans had increasingly turned their attention to the renewal of progress. But the story of the Cardiff Giant seemed to shed light on a complicated, mysterious past, and for a time scientists, clergymen, newspaper editors, and ordinary Americans struggled to make sense of it. Hucksters, of course, did their best to take advantage of it. The Cardiff Giant was one of the leading questions of the day, and how citizens answered it said much about Americans in 1869 as well as about America more generally.
As a discerning reader of nineteenth-century American fiction, Englishman Colin Ware is familiar with the tradition of transcending disastrous love affairs by booking the next ocean liner to Europe. Now that he has experienced the pain and humiliation of heartache firsthand, he decides to try this cure in reverse. New Cardiff, Vermont, may be an infinitesimal blot on the rural American landscape, but to Colin it's the ideal place to mend his broken heart. The townsfolk are a quirky, endearing lot, and they welcome the migrating artist into their fold. Colin does his part by capturing his adopted countrymen and women in charcoal and ink. He even discovers love again -- with Mandy, an attendant at the Shining Shores nursing home. When Colin's ex arrives to woo him back to her and his native land, he has to choose between his new love and the woman he's known for years. With its pitch-perfect dialogue, New Cardiff takes readers on the exhilarating cross-cultural odyssey of a man hurtling headlong into life.
Four brand-new novellas by the #1 New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning “grand mistress of ghoulishness” (Publishers Weekly). An academic in Pennsylvania discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from someone she has never heard of. A pubescent girl, overcome with loneliness, befriends a feral cat that becomes her protector from the increasingly aggressive males that surround her. A brilliant but shy college sophomore is distraught to discover that she’s pregnant, and the professor who takes her under his wing may not have innocent intentions. And a woman who marries into a family shattered by tragedy finds herself haunted by her predecessor’s voice, an inexplicably befouled well, and a compulsive attraction to a garage that took two lives. In these psychologically daring, chillingly suspenseful pieces, the author of We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde writes about women facing threats past and present, once again cementing her reputation for “great intelligence and dead-on imaginative powers” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
The Cardiff Giant, set in Cooperstown, New York, has up its novelistic sleeve Puck's profound declaration, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Jess Freeman, investigative reporter, arrives on the scene to look into the weird disappearance from the Farmers' Museum of a huge human figure. He had been unearthed in the late nineteenth century near Cardiff, New York. Jess confronts locals and outsiders who all have a theory, including that the giant has been reanimated and is lurching throughout the community. They are enmeshed in self-punishing belief systems such as alien abduction, astrology, kabbalistic numerology, New Age rebirthing, and religious dogmas reduced to literal absurdities. The fast-paced action centers around episodes where they pay a sorry price for their beliefs. But skeptics don't fare much better, susceptible as they are to mental disorders that show the faculty of reason is fragile indeed. These characters group and regroup, with romance always on their minds, and finally come to recognitions at once surprising and moving.
A page-turning mystery as funny as it is darkly atmospheric. Returning to the same territory that made his short story collection so compelling, John Williams explores the dark side of city life-the prostitutes, the drug dealers, the crooked businessmen and the people just watching life, trying not to let it pass them by. It's 1999 and Charlie Unger is dead. Once a champion boxer, then the heart and soul of a band called the Wurriyas, his death draws together the other members of the band, long since broken up after their one hit faded. Mazz makes his way up from England, nervous about facing Charlie's daughter Tyra since things ended badly between them years before. As Mazz tries to reconcile with her, the two of them dig into the suspicions that surround her father's death, unraveling a mystery that is connected to the very city itself. A brilliant portrait of a city poised on the brink of change, a story about the possibilities of righting past wrongs-Cardiff Dead is a gritty, thrilling tale written straight from the heart.
9 Days To Heaven is a refreshingly modern devotion consisting of nine separate days of prayers and meditations. Based on the promise of Rev 3:20, this nine day spiritual journey of 15 minute steps will bring everlasting meaning to your life. It can be used by anyone interested in discovering God or wanting to draw nearer to Him.
Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.
Cardiff After Dark is the first monograph by British-based Polish photographer Maciej Dakowicz. Dakowicz spent five years photographing the nighttime revelries that take place in Cardiff over the weekend. Focused around a few pedestrianized streets in the city centre, Dakowicz's images capture nightlife fueled by alcohol and emotions. The arc of an evening's entertainment is captured in these candid photographs, which reveal fun and hilarity as well as fighting and drunken exhaustion. There are stag nights and hen parties, men dressed as superheroes and women dressed as Playboy bunnies, mountains of discarded chip wrappers, arrests by the police, and lots and lots of posing for photographs. Dakowicz's images, at times shocking or upsetting, form an important documentary photobook of British urban life in the early part of the 21st century.
