The idea of mixing tropical plants with perennials and hardy annuals has been around since Victorian times. It is now enjoying a newfound popularity because tropical plants are more widely available. Gardeners who want to bring the lush beauty of tropicals to an existing garden, or who want to create an authentic vintage garden, will delight in The Exotic Garden. Although tropicals are novelties in temperate climates, they can successfully be grown anywhere. Iversen shows how tropicals can easily be used as annuals to perk up a garden with color during non-blooming seasons. The author's expert advice shows how to grow tropicals in beds, borders, and containers, select and combine plants, and use the tools of color, texture, and form. Plus, there are special overwintering tips and a full color glossary of more than 100 plants.
An Instant National Bestseller! An Indie Next Pick! A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine | USA Today | Buzzfeed | Greatist | BookPage | PopSugar | Bustle | The Nerd Daily | Goodreads | Literary Hub | Ms. Magazine | Library Journal | Culturess | Book Riot | Parade Magazine | Kirkus | The Week | Book Bub | OverDrive | The Portalist | Publishers Weekly A Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine | CNN | Book Riot | The Daily Beast | Lambda Literary | The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Goodreads | Bustle | Veranda Magazine | The Week | Bookish | St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Den of Geek | LGBTQ Reads | Pittsburgh City Paper | Bookstr | Tatler HK A Best of 2021 Pick for NPR “A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence.”—NPR “A sumptuous, decadent read.”—The New York Times “Vo has crafted a retelling that, in many ways, surpasses the original.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review Immigrant. Socialite. Magician. Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
A fascinating survey of the enduring human love affair with the exotic and the strange, and its impact on Western culture Exotic explores our obsession with the lure of distant lands and their promise of the weird and wonderful, the beautiful and grotesque. Through a host of evocative images, this book shows how the absorption of 'the foreign,' through arts, design, architecture, and other cultural elements, has consistently enriched Western society, contributing to it cultural dynamism and artistic energy. Exotic's focus is especially relevant to the modern globalized world in which our engagement with cultures and traditions from around the globe is easier – and potentially more fraught – than ever before.
Exuberant Chinese-inspired drawing rooms, Persian-style boudoirs, bulbous Mogul domes, and Turkish smoking rooms were once the rage in avant-garde circles and are undergoing a resurgence in popularity today as the global economy brings attention to the styles of the Far East, India, and the Islamic world. Emmanuelle Gaillard and Marc Walter’s lavish new book traces the Asian sources of this fashion, and its transformation in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western settings. Illustrated with extraordinary vintage and contemporary interior photography, fabrics, wallpapers, patterns, decorative objects, and costumes, this volume tours the houses of writers, thinkers, business tycoons, princesses, and even the Russian empress Catherine the Great.Exotic Tasteis a rich treat for anyone drawn to the fantastic, elaborate style of Orientalism. Praise forExotic Taste: "Beginning in the 18th century, European tastemakers, chafing under the constraints of classicism, turned to the exotic East, swooning over the intricate patterns and scenes and lush, sensual colors found in the arts of China, Japan, India, and the Arabic world.Exotic Taste: Orientalist Interiors examines the craze for all things Eastern that resulted in such anomalies as English country houses with onion domes and the tiled fantasia, complete with trickling fountain and pool, that the Victorian painter Lord Leighton build in his London home." –Elle Décor "The lengths that collectors will go to, the money and legwork they will sink into exotic antiques completely unrelated to their daily lives, can make for transporting reading. [One of] the year’s five best books in the genre, Exotic Taste makes particularly good holiday reading because of Ms. Gaillard’s descriptions of jolly multicultural parties and intense shopping sprees." --The New York Times From Chinese-inspired drawing rooms and Persian-style boudoirs to graceful Mogul domes and Turkish smoking rooms, stylistic influences from the Far East, India and the Islamic world have inspired Western architects, artists and designers for nearly 400 years. Dripping with exotic colors and tiles, this sumptuous tome is a history lesson and design book packed into one." --Detroit News "In 'Exotic Taste,' Emmanuelle Gaillard and Marc Walter appeal to those interested in collecting, design, architecture and art history and take readers on an artistically historical journey by illustrating, through more than 200 images, the development of Orientalism through the 19th and 20th centuries." --Newsday "Exotic Taste: Orientalist Interiors[is] a sumptuous look at how decorative styles from the Far East, India and the Islamic world found their way to the west." -Houston Chronicle
"A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard"--
Show Me How is a revolutionary reimagining of the reference genre, one part how-to guide, one part graphic art showpiece, and one part pure inspiration. In a series of 500 nearly wordless, highly informative step-by-step procedurals, readers learn how to do hundreds of useful (and fascinating and important and sometimes downright bizarre) tasks, including: Perform CPR, dance the tango, pack a suitcase, win a bar bet, play the blues, make authentic sushi rolls, fight a shark . . . and 493 more essentials of modern life. Packed with useful hands-on reference material, Show Me How is a work of art that just happens to also be an indispensable real-life resource. Visit showmenow
During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.
The “Other”—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen’s early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of alterity, diversity, and ethnicity. Written over the course of fourteen years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism, Essay on Exoticism encompasses Segalen’s attempts to define “true Exoticism.” This concept, he hoped, would not only replace nineteenth-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries’ propensity to reduce the exotic to the “colonial.” His critique envisions a mechanism that appreciates cultural difference—which it posits as an aesthetic and ontological value—rather than assimilating it: “Exoticism’s power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise,” he writes. Segalen’s pioneering work on otherness anticipates and informs much of the current postcolonial critique of colonial discourse. As such Essay on Exoticism is essential reading for both cultural theorists or those with an interest in the politics of difference and diversity.
Fear of being abandoned keeps nineteen-year-old Harmony Dust trapped in an abusive and cruel relationship. She thinks she has hit bottom--tens of thousands of dollars in debt, struggling to get by, and so controlled by her boyfriend that she doesn't protest when he begins openly sleeping around. Things can't get worse . . . until someone tells her how much money she can make as an exotic dancer. For the next three years, Harmony lives a double life as Monique, a dancer in a fully-nude strip club. Scars and Stilettos is Harmony's stark, honest, and ultimately hopeful story of how God found her in that dark, noisy place and led her out. She has since married, completed an MA in social welfare, and now leads Treasures, an organization helping women in the sex trade discover their true worth. "Harmony wrote her story so that you and your friends may get help out of whatever dark tunnel you find yourself in. I know her heart, and it is to see all of us live our lives in the very purpose for which we were created. I do want to warn you . . . once you start this book, you will not be able to put it down. You will laugh, you will cry, you will be encouraged, you will fall in love with God all over again . . . and you will want to get a copy for every person you know." --Holly Wagner, from the preface "Harmony's story is compelling evidence of how far the love of God reaches to heal broken lives and restore all that has been stolen." --Nancy Alcorn, Mercy Ministries
Describes the most common exotic animals on the loose in Florida--species like green iguanas, Burmese pythons, Nile Monitor lizards, and Rhesus monkeys.
