A fantastical children’s story based around the Laugherty family and the adventures they have when visiting the Musty Old Magical Curiosity Shop, which sells anything that anybody wants. “The shopkeeper looked very strange to Miles. He was wearing a pointed purple hat decorated with stars that twinkled like real stars. His eyes were piercing like X-rays. They went right through Miles’s body and made him feel as though the man knew everything from A to Z.” Mabble Merlin turns out to be the wildest, wackiest, most wizardly shopkeeper you could ever hope to meet, and everything in his shop is odd and magical.

Space could be a lonely and hostile place especially if you were 21 yearons old and a lone female. Tayce Traun was that female. A young privileged daughter of a commodore cast out in the dead of night when her home world is destroyed by a powerful evil countess and her warrior army. For the first three yearons Tayce fights to keep her exploration cruiser, Amalthea One, from falling into the wrong hands with help from the on board guidance and operation's computer, who is her only friend and companion. Tayce vowed that she would avenge the death of her parents and the destruction of her home planet. She has an idea to create a crime fighting team and call it the Amalthean Quests Team. The new journey starts and slowly one by one new members join the team.

Anthony Vidler, an internationally recognized scholar, theorist, and critic of modern and contemporary architecture, is widely known for his essays on the most pressing issues and debates in the field. This volume brings together a collection of such writings—including the iconic, long unavailable “Scenes of the Street”—into one volume.Scenes of the Street and Other Essaysshowcases Vidler’s engaging and accessible expertise on both contemporary and historic subjects that are relevant to today's concerns. “Scenes of the Street,” a multi-faceted analysis of city planning is one such example; other essays in this volume include “Unknown Lands: Guy Debord and the Cartographies of a Landscape to be Invented,” “Transparency and Utopia: Constructing the Void from Pascal to Foucault,” and “The Modern Acropolis: Tony Garnier from La Cité Antique to the Cité Industrielle.” Vidler writes in his introduction: In the following essays, I have interrogated the struggle for an urban architecture in the modern period, its critiques and aspirations, in the belief that understanding the historical dimensions of the debate will lead to a renewal of interest in an architecture calculated to redeem, if only partially, our “planet of slums” and its deteriorating environment; an interest that will not simply reject “utopia” out of hand or fall back into the complacencies of nostalgia. Written during a period in which the debates themselves were actively engaged by critics and supporters of modernism, they reflect contemporary issues as they search for their prehistory. As historical inquiries, they inevitably also engage the transformations in history writing itself since 1970, intellectual responses to the social and political conditions of postwar modernity. This fascinating series of essays on issues and figures is an invaluable resource for architects and art historians and enthusiasts of structure and substance alike.

A simple visit to a psychic turns Aria's life upside down when the three wishes she makes on a whim start coming true. Suddenly, she's rich, successful, and has the man of her dreams at her side. But as the unexpected consequences of her wishes are revealed, Aria realizes she's made a grave mistake. Determined to undo the wishes, Aria turns to magic spells, only to discover that the repercussions are far worse than she could have imagined. As she questions whether she's stumbled into an alternate reality, Aria must confront her doubts and fears head-on. Can Aria overcome her skepticism and embrace her newfound abilities to cast her own spells? Will she find a way to reverse the wishes and restore her former life? Or will she be forever changed by the magic she never asked for? Join Aria on her journey of self-discovery in a world where wishes can come true, but at a cost.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton--who coined the terms "the great unwashed" and "the pen is mightier than the sword"--is best remembered for persuading Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations; but Lord Lytton was a prolific and influential novelist in his own right, inspiring Edgar Allan Poe, H. Rider Haggard and Madame Blavatsky, among others. His radicalism was applauded by William Godwin, the father of both Mary Shelley and the anarchist movement, and his ideas about power foreshadowed those of Friedrich Nietzsche. Fascinated by crime, Bulwer-Lytton was an outspoken critic of his society, both in his novels and throughout his political career. Equally fascinated by paranormal phenomena, he wrote two of the most important occult fantasies in English literature and set the agenda of the Society for Psychical Research. His historical romance The Last Days of Pompeii has inspired several movies and a star-studded television series, while his stately home at Knebworth has provided brooding Gothic backdrops for many other films. This book covers Bulwer-Lytton's novels in detail, exploring their influence on writers and film makers and, via Richard Wagner's operatic adaptation of Rienzi, the catastrophe of Adolf Hitler.