While spying on her neighbors with her son's toy binoculars, Nina becomes entranced with the subjects of her secret vigils until she encounters them in the real world and must decide whether to let them into her life or not.

The 1700s saw the rise of the China market and some notable changes to global consumption patterns. This book explores the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities - Canton, a major trading city, Nagasaki, official port of Tokugawa Japan, and Batavia, link between the Indian Ocean and China seas.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 More and more people are noticing links between urban geography and the spaces within the layout of panels on the comics page. Benjamin Fraser explores the representation of the city in a range of comics from across the globe. Comics address the city as an idea, a historical fact, a social construction, a material-built environment, a shared space forged from the collective imagination, or as a social arena navigated according to personal desire. Accordingly, Fraser brings insights from urban theory to bear on specific comics. The works selected comprise a variety of international, alternative, and independent small-press comics artists, from engravings and early comics to single-panel work, graphic novels, manga, and trading cards, by artists such as Will Eisner, Tsutomu Nihei, Hariton Pushwagner, Julie Doucet, Frans Masereel, and Chris Ware. In the first monograph on this subject, Fraser touches on many themes of modern urban life: activism, alienation, consumerism, flânerie, gentrification, the mystery story, science fiction, sexual orientation, and working-class labor. He leads readers to images of such cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, London, Lyon, Madrid, Montevideo, Montreal, New York, Oslo, Paris, São Paolo, and Tokyo. Through close readings, each chapter introduces readers to specific comics artists and works and investigates a range of topics related to the medium’s spatial form, stylistic variation, and cultural prominence. Mainly, Fraser mixes interest in urbanism and architecture with the creative strategies that comics artists employ to bring their urban images to life.

In this series of essays, the author, who is from Mexico, gives her impressions and remembrances of various cities that she has visited around the world, including Prague, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Lima, Suva, and Bangkok. It is a book about the nostalgia that grows over time about the places she has visited, but it is also a tome where one can learn about the impacts on the world of love, war, imperialism, race, travel, Maximilian, México, Buddhism, umbrellas, traditions, and many other things. This work received the Dolores Castro Prize for literature written by women from Aguascalientes, Mexico.

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Stunning satellite images of one hundred cities show our urbanizing planet in a new light to reveal the fragile relationship between humanity and Earth Seeing cities around the globe in their larger environmental contexts, we begin to understand how the world shapes urban landscapes and how urban landscapes shape the world. Authors Karen Seto and Meredith Reba provide these revealing views to enhance readers’ understanding of the shape, growth, and life of urban settlements of all sizes—from the remote town of Namche Bazaar in Nepal to the vast metropolitan prefecture of Tokyo, Japan. Using satellite data, the authors show urban landscapes in new perspectives. The book’s beautiful and surprising images pull back the veil on familiar scenes to highlight the growth of cities over time, the symbiosis between urban form and natural landscapes, and the vulnerabilities of cities to the effects of climate change. We see the growth of Las Vegas and Lagos, the importance of rivers to both connecting and dividing cities like Seoul and London, and the vulnerability of Fukushima and San Juan to floods from tsunami or hurricanes. The result is a compelling book that shows cities’ relationships with geography, food, and society.

A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast