Absence is as crucial as presence. The decision to stop dating has made Vaughn Hargrave’s life infinitely simpler: he has friends, an excellent wardrobe, and a job in the industry he loves. That’s all he really needs, especially since sex isn’t his forte anyway and no one else seems interested in a purely romantic connection. But when a piece is stolen from his art gallery and insurance investigator Jonah Sondern shows up, Vaughn finds himself struggling with that decision. Jonah wants his men like his coffee: hot, intense, and daily. But Vaughn seems to be the one gay guy in Toronto who doesn’t do hookups, which is all Jonah can offer. No way can Jonah give Vaughn what he really wants, not when Jonah barely understands what love is. When another painting goes missing, tension ramps up both on and off the clock. Vaughn and Jonah find themselves grappling not just with stolen art, but with their own differences. Because a guy who wants nothing but romance and a guy who wants nothing but sex will never work—right? Not unless they find a way to fill in the spaces between them. Winner: Best Asexual Contemporary and Historical Romance in the 2017 Rainbow Awards Winner: Best Asexual Book in the 2017 Rainbow Awards "An unlikely romance between two beautifully written characters will leave readers swooning." – Kirkus **See this title's page on RiptidePublishing.com for content warnings.**

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

I truly believe this book is a good read; that it is a good story. One that I think most people will enjoy. It has drama, suspense, a little comedy, and romance. But there is murder, kidnapping, and mystery. What more could you want? All I ask is for you to give it a try. Remember the title is Blank Spaces, a novel about forgotten memories. Melissa Morgan is a young woman who desperately wants to remember her childhood. Her brother, Stephen, would rather she didn't. Her childhood was filled with tragedy. Stephen remembers, and he can see no reason for Melissa to remember, to the point that he will do anything to keep her from remembering. Melissa is kidnapped, and she starts having nightmares about her father. Even after being rescued, she continues to have nightmares. Her roommate, Lacey, suggests getting professional help. Jesse Taylor is stunned to see Melissa on the evening news. There, on TV, is the only person who can clear his name from a crime that he did not commit. Is this a sign that he is to go to her? Wanting to get his name cleared, Jesse asks Melissa to help him. Melissa has no idea why he is asking for her help until he tells her the truth that she is the only witness to her father's murder. Now Melissa must remember her childhood to help Jesse. Stephen is adamant that she not remember. But Melissa wants to fill in the blank spaces in her mind even if it means destroying her mind completely.

Discusses four types of theatrical landscapes; the deadly theatre, the holy theatre, the rough theatre, and the immediate theatre.

From the archives of Libby Scheier (Fonds 130).

For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure, and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, from intention to outcome, from myth to reality. Those who conducted the hundreds of expeditions that probed Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century adopted a mode of scientific investigation that had been developed by previous generations of seaborne explorers. They likened the two continents to oceans, empty spaces that could be made truly knowable only by mapping, measuring, observing, and preserving. They found, however, that their survival and success depended less on this system of universal knowledge than it did on the local knowledge possessed by native peoples. While explorers sought to advance the interests of Britain and its emigrant communities, Dane Kennedy discovers a more complex outcome: expeditions that failed ignominiously, explorers whose loyalties proved ambivalent or divided, and, above all, local states and peoples who diverted expeditions to serve their own purposes. The collisions, and occasional convergences, between British and indigenous values, interests, and modes of knowing the world are brought to the fore in this fresh and engaging study.

Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature is an inquiry into the empty spaces encountered not just on the pages of printed books in c.1500-1700, but in Renaissance culture more generally. The book argues that print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to foster the modern idea of the 'gap' (where words, texts, images, and ideas are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, fragmented, or perhaps never devised in the first place). It re-imagines how early modern people reacted not just to printed books and documents of many different kinds, but also how the very idea of emptiness or absence began to be fashioned in a way which still surrounds us. Jonathan Sawday leads the reader through the entire landscape of early modern print culture, discussing topics such as: space and silence; the exploration of the vacuum; the ways in which race and racial identity in early modern England were constructed by the language and technology of print; blackness and whiteness, together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as waste or vacant; the genesis of blank forms and early modern bureaucracy; the political and devotional spaces of printed books; the impact of censorship; and the problem posed by texts which lack endings or conclusions. The book itself ends by dwelling on blank or empty pages as a sign of human mortality. Sawday pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture - Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton, for example - as well as introducing readers to a host of lesser-known figures. The book also discusses the work of numerous women writers from the period, including Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Gray, Lucy Hutchinson, Æmelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth.