Winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature A blazing new story collection that will make you feel like the house is collapsing in on you, from the 3 time International Booker Prize finalist, "lead[ing] a vanguard of Latin American writers forging their own 21st-century canon.” –O, the Oprah magazine The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin's tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child's first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents. In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. Empty Houses challenges this consensus by reexamining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly--the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin--writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies--this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, David Kurnick reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, Kurnick shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. Investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers, he establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority. In the process he illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, Empty Houses provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

Despite their differences within, two houses are close friends.

How often do we tend to skip the houses without planets when looking at one's birth chart for the very first time? Interpreting Empty Houses provides a detailed account of these houses that are most often overlooked when delineating horoscopes as they, like houses holding planets, provide valuable insight pertaining to the department of life they each rule. The author explains the meanings of each of the twelve houses when empty as determined by the condition of its planetary ruler as it may be positioned throughout the remaining eleven houses of the horoscope. About the Author: Ana Ruiz was born in Spain and resides in Canada. She has been contributing columns and articles on astrology since she began her path down this road of stellar wisdom during the mid-eighties. Her writings have appeared in various newspapers and magazines such as American Astrology and Dell Horoscope. She has also contributed many articles to the American Federation of Astrologers bulletin; Today's Astrologer, as well as a monthly Sun sign column to their Web site. She is also the author of The Spirit of Ancient Egypt, Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, Prediction Techniques Regarding Romance and The Soul of Andalusia. The author's interest in this area of astrology arose from the fact that she has five planets in the 7th house, leaving exactly half of her natal chart with empty houses. The lack of information on this subject, or books for that matter, further inspired Ruiz to study these houses and share her research with the hopes of filling this gap.

A New York Times Best Illustrated book! A Boston Globe Best Children's Book of 2018 “Accompanied by Lane's evocative art that suggests layers of history, Fogliano's story turns this childhood scenario into a radiant poem about the mysteries of other people and the wonderfulness of home.” —New York Times Deep in the woods is a house just a house that once was but now isn’t a home. Who lived in that house? Who walked down its hallways? Why did they leave it, and where did they go? Two children set off to find the answers by piecing together clues found, books left behind, forgotten photos, and discarded toys, creating their own vision of those who came before, in this deeply moving tale of imagination by Ezra Jack Keats Award–winning author Julie Fogliano and Caldecott Award–winning illustrator Lane Smith.

Renowned city planner and housing advocate Alan Mallach presents effective strategies for community leaders, local officials, and nonprofits contending with vacant properties in the United States. Examples illustrate creative ways to reduce the harm caused by vacant properties, jump-start housing markets in struggling neighborhoods, create the potential for future revival, and transform vacant properties into community assets.