(Limelight). For well over twenty years, M. Owen Lee has been offering intermission talks during the Saturday afternoon Texaco Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, which now reach countries on six continents. In this book, Father Lee covers various operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Richard Strauss, as well as a selection of French operas, including Faust, Carmen and Les Contes d'Hoffman. In all, his repertory contains 23 operatic masterworks, to all of which he brings insight, learning and the most infectious enthusiasm. "One just cannot get enough of [Father Lee's] brilliant, stimulating, thought-provoking insights...I feel there is no one more knowledgeable or qualified in the entire field of opera commentary. No one." The Opera Quarterly

A HelloGiggles Best New Release A PopSugar Best Book of July A BookBub Editor's Pick A SheReads Best Book of Summer A GoodReads Buzzy New Release A Mind Body Green Best Book of July A PureWow Best Beach Read of Summer 2018 "An effortless page-turner, almost a movie treatment more than a novel...intelligent commercial fiction."--The Wall Street Journal After five years of marriage, Cass Coyne has lost some of her boundless confidence. Her husband sees their ups and downs as normal challenges in a healthy relationship, but Cass lies awake at night wondering what you do when you need a break from your marriage? It comes as a shock to Jonathan when Cass persuades him to try a marital "intermission": a six-month separation during which they'll decide if the comfortable life they've built together is still the one they both want. Six months apart from their beloved dog is a different story, so they agree to meet once a month for a custody exchange. Time apart on opposite coasts makes the Coynes realize their problems may lie deeper than sweaty gym socks left on the bed and an empty container of milk put back in the fridge. Can a marriage experiment go too far for two people who once thought they had it all figured out?

Intermission is an uncommon and refreshing excavation of popular culture, memory, and relationship. It offers startling interpretations of the fashionable sitcoms and young-adult novels which were prevalent during the late 1970s while exploring the nuances of belonging, faith, and loss. With a tensile gesture we are moved from the icons of the 1960s-Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the playful insertion of Jim Morrison's documented acronym of his own name, Mr. Mojo Risin'-to the cityscapes inherited by Generation X.

American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman's musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this, Feldman's work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field, and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in 'crystalline' forms. Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s, Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method, despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Not only are there direct relations to be found between staff-notated works and grid scores, but much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.