The first book from photographer, Rob McCarthy, exploring New York City in a new and dynamic way.

First published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the underground story—of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism. Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis.

From the heat of an Acapulco night... Cyn McCall knew she could always count on her late husband's friend and business partner, Worth Lansing. He could make her laugh and forget her problems. She could tease him about his many romantic entanglements. The last thing Cyn expected was to find herself longing for a man who could never settle down.

Join twins Mia and Maddie and their sidekick little sister, Lulu, as they travel the country finding adventure, mystery, and sometimes mischief along the way. Together with their famous mother, singer Gloria Glimmer, and their slightly wacky nanny Miss Julia, the sisters learn lessons about being good friends, telling the truth, and a whole lot more. In this fourth book in the Faithgirlz Glimmer Girls series, the Glimmer family is headed to the Big Apple—New York City! Gloria has been asked to perform a concert in Times Square and the whole family joins her. Miss Julia immediately starts planning a sightseeing trip for the sisters that will be better than all the rest, but plans never turn out exactly as they imagine when the Glimmer girls are involved. So what happens when sibling rivalry, random acts of kindness, and a little mystery all meet up at some of the most famous sights in New York City?

At dawn, the streets of New York resonate with a life of its own: muted, subdued, and mysterious. Award-winning photographer Jean-Michel Berts captures the city that never sleeps in moments of dream-like serenity. The city's greatest landmarks and views are captured here like never before, as buildings, bridges, completely deserted streets, trees, and empty flights of stairs take on a poetic, ethereal quality. Much more than a hymn, this photographic gem is a moving homage to the world's greatest city, seen as a virtuoso sculptor's masterpiece. Each print is given ample breathing space in a GIFTS-volume whose opulent trim size befits the spectacular quality of the shots.

This “superb history” of artificial light traces the evolution of society—“invariably fascinating and often original . . . [it] amply lives up to its title” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In Brilliant, Jane Brox explores humankind’s ever-changing relationship to artificial light, from the stone lamps of the Pleistocene to the LEDs embedded in fabrics of the future. More than a survey of technological development, this sweeping history reveals how artificial light changed our world, and how those social and cultural changes in turn led to the pursuit of more ways of spreading, maintaining, and controlling light. Brox plumbs the class implications of light—who had it, who didn’t—through the centuries when crude lamps and tallow candles constricted waking hours. She identifies the pursuit of whale oil as the first time the need for light thrust us toward an environmental tipping point. Only decades later, gas street lights opened up the evening hours to leisure, which changed the ways we live and sleep and the world’s ecosystems. Edison’s bulbs produced a light that seemed to its users all but divorced from human effort or cost. And yet, as Brox’s informative portrait of our current grid system shows, the cost is ever with us. Brilliant is infused with human voices, startling insights, and timely questions about how our future lives will be shaped by light