"This is the kaleidoscopic drama of a young boy of the slums from the moment of his birth in a charity hospital, until his tragic death. In an effort to find something besides 'hardness and hitting out, and twisted people all afraid', Tommy turns to narcotics, and thus creates his own world: one in which he is not constantly gnawed by an acute awareness of the meaninglessness of what is going on around him. He meets Alice, in whom he sees his life-long search for beauty: the rose behind the hard brick city. He knows that he has only touched this beauty for an instant, and he sees it moving farther away from him. At last, in a final escape from the squalor around him, he takes an overdose of narcotics, and ends his search."--From publisher's website.
The author, Barbara Maltby was "Mom" and wrote Letom from a collection of hastily scribbled notes on scraps of paper that were thrown into a box marked, hopefully, Book, over the years she was in the motel business. Sources were also copies of letters written to friends and relatives, the yearly newsletter sent to guests and friends, and her daily log. The stories are mostly humorous or bizarre. They draw a naked picture of human behavior in a setting that seems to bring out the real person often void of the trappings of polite society. It gives glimpses of the traveling public behind closed motel doors and tells stories of the lives of people seldom seen through other exposures. As maid, desk clerk, handyman, maintenance crew, laundress, bartender and cook, this Mom and Pop saw interesting interludes in the lives of travelers. What she tells is true and is a personal expression of what happened to them and what it did to them. A friend told the author that more happens at the motel in one day than most people experience in a lifetime.
Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life. Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Rather than focusing on corporate commissions, he devoted himself to designing research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, and other structures that would serve the public good. But this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. Kahn himself, however, is not the only complex subject that comes vividly to life in these pages. His signature achievements—like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad—can at first seem as enigmatic and beguiling as the man who designed them. In attempts to describe these structures, we are often forced to speak in contradictions and paradoxes: structures that seem at once unmistakably modern and ancient; enormous built spaces that offer a sense of intimate containment; designs in which light itself seems tangible, a raw material as tactile as travertine or Kahn’s beloved concrete. This is where Lesser’s talents as one of our most original and gifted cultural critics come into play. Interspersed throughout her account of Kahn’s life and career are exhilarating “in situ” descriptions of what it feels like to move through his built structures. Drawing on extensive original research, lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students, and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive genius, revealing the mind behind some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated architecture.
The House with the Brick-Kiln By E. F. Benson Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric, oblique, and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories, which were often first published in story magazines such as Pearson's Magazine or Hutchinson's Magazine, 20 of which were illustrated by Edmund Blampied. These "spook stories," as they were also called, were then reprinted in collections by his principal publisher, Walter Hutchinson. His 1906 short story, "The Bus-Conductor," a fatal-crash premonition tale about a person haunted by a hearse driver, has been adapted several times, notably in 1944 (in the film Dead of Night and as an anecdote in Bennett Cerf's Ghost Stories anthology published the same year) and in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. The catchphrase from the story, "Room for one more," even spawned an urban legend, and also appears in the 1986 Oingo Boingo song, "Dead Man's Party." We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
