A fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical past Manhattan has a pervasive quality of glamour—a heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more. Progressing up New York’s central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won’t find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies—from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project—to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder–working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world’s premier stage magician’s feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious—and meaningful—marquee of magic. Unlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses—no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a city whose ever-changing fortunes have always been founded on magical activity.

This highly anticipated follow-up volume presents the exquisite designs of Tord Boontje, one of the most creative and romantic industrial designers working today. Tord Boontje: Enchanted World is a comprehensive visual document of the designer’s most recent work. As an artist and a craftsman, Boontje incorporates an artisanal sensibility into contemporary industrial design, drawing upon a rich graphic tradition to create objects of exceptional beauty and delicacy. Featured here are some of his latest works, many undertaken after Boontje stepped down as Head of Design Products at the Royal College of Art in 2013 (a position he assumed after Ron Arad in 2009). Now, solely focused on his own design studio in London, Boontje showcases many of his designs, including the wispy Icarus Lamp, an armoire constructed entirely of pressed-metal fig “leaves” for Meta, a portable Bluetooth speaker for Yamaha hidden under a curtain of horsehair, and many other romantic explorations that have made Boontje’s output stand out in the world of design. Combining developing technologies and traditional approaches, his pieces are prized for their originality, delicacy, and intricate detail. This book is a must for design lovers, providing readers with a window into how Boontje crafts his unique objects, from studio prototype to retail. Indeed, the book is conceived as a work of total design, using special printing effects and beautiful marginalia on almost every page in the form of Boontje’s sensitive and romantic detailed hand-drawn illustrations that have served as the inspiration for many of the objects featured here.

“A totally captivating, hilarious, and clever look on the magical kingdom of Manhattan, where kissing frogs has never been this fun.”—Melissa de la Cruz, author of The Au Pairs Katie Chandler had always heard that New York is a weird and wonderful place, but this small-town Texas gal had no idea how weird until she moved there. Everywhere she goes, she sees something worth gawking at and Katie is afraid she’s a little too normal to make a splash in the big city. Working for an ogre of a boss doesn’t help. Then, seemingly out of the blue, Katie gets a job offer from Magic, Spells, and Illusions, Inc., a company that tricks of the trade to the magic community. For MSI, Katie’s ordinariness is an asset. Lacking any bit of magic, she can easily spot a fake spell, catch hidden clauses in competitor’s contracts, and detect magically disguised intruders. Suddenly, average Katie is very special indeed. She quickly learns that office politics are even more complicated when your new boss is a real ogre, and you have a crush on the sexy, shy, ultra powerful head of the R&D department, who is so busy fighting an evil competitor threatening to sell black magic on the street that he seems barely to notice Katie. Now it’s up to Katie to pull off the impossible: save the world and–hopefully–live happily ever after.

Holiday season 2007 is going to be Enchanted! Featuring an all-star cast that includes Patrick Dempsey and Amy Adams, the new Disney film is sure to be a hit with audiences of all ages. Following the lovable Giselle from an animated world to the mean streets of Manhattan, the movie pays tribute to classic fairy tales and the never-ending belief by girls of all ages that Prince Charming truly does exist./DIV 8 x 8 #1: Before the FallDIVOnce upon a time, life was peaceful and idyllic for Giselle. Revisit some of Giselle's happiest moments in a fairytale land far away from the bustling, noisy, dirty city of New York.

Born to immigrant parents in Minnesota just before the turn of the century, Frances Frankowski grew up coveting the life of her best friend, Rosalie Mendel. And yet, decades later, when the women reconnect in San Francisco, their lives have diverged. Rosalie is a housewife and mother, while Frances works for the Office of Naval Intelligence and has just been given a top-secret assignment: marry handsome spy Ainslie Conway and move to the Galápagos Islands to investigate the Germans living there in the build-up to World War II. Amid active volcanoes, forbidding wildlife and flora, and unfriendly neighbors, Ainslie and Frances carve out a life for themselves. But the secrets they harbor—from their friends, from their enemies, and even from each other—may be their undoing.

“The Enchanted wrapped its beautiful and terrible fingers around me from the first page and refused to let go after the last. A wondrous book that finds transcendence in the most unlikely of places. . . . So dark yet so exquisite.” — Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus An astonishing and redemptive novel for readers of Alice Sebold and Toni Morrison, told from the point of view of a convict whose magical interpretations of prison life allow him to find absolute joy while isolated from the rest of humanity and a female investigator who experiences her own personal salvation in her work as a death penalty investigator. This is an enchanted place. Others don’t see it but I do. The enchanted place is a high security prison and is relayed through the eyes of an inmate on death row who escapes his surroundings by immersing himself in books, and by re-imagining the world that surrounds him. Instead of focusing on the cloudy medical vines that snake across the floor, empty and waiting for the warden’s finger to press the red buttons, our narrator sees golden horses as they run deep under the earth, heat flowing like molten metal from their backs. A woman and fallen priest haunt the prison halls--an unnamed female investigator only known as the Lady who is known for discovering information relating to soon-to-be executed inmates’ backgrounds that can be used to overturn their sentences. She is put on the case of a man named York and as she digs into his past, the experience brings up ghosts of her own and threatens to destroy everything that she has come to know about the enchanted place. The Enchanted is a magical novel about redemption, the humanity that can lie within what is monstrous, and the human capacity to transcend and survive.

This beloved Newbery Honor-winning story about a feisty heroine is sure to enchant readers new and old. At her birth, Ella of Frell receives a foolish fairy's gift—the “gift” of obedience. Ella must obey any order, whether it's to hop on one foot for a day and a half, or to chop off her own head! But strong-willed Ella does not accept her fate... Against a bold backdrop of princes, ogres, giants, wicked stepsisters, and fairy godmothers, Ella goes on a quest to break the curse forever. A tween favorite for 25 years—now shared with today's young readers by moms, teachers, and other adults who remember the pleasure of discovering this fun fairy-tale retelling themselves!