Nowhere is evidence of Bernini's unique abillity to unite architecture with sculpture and painting into a beautiful whole more compelling than in the Baroque chapel of Bernini's design: a dark world sealed below by a balustrade, covered by a luminous celestial dome, and populated by bodies of paint, marble, stucco, and flesh. This book explores three of these Baroque chapels to show how Bernini achieved his remarkable effects. Giovanni Careri examines the ways in which the artist integrated the disparate forms of architecture, painting, and sculpture into a coherent space for devotion, and then shows how this accomplishment was understood by religious practitioners. In the Fonseca Chapel, the Albertoni Chapel, and the church of Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, all in Rome, Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links each to a particular spiritual journey. Using contemporary theories in anthropology, film, and reception aesthetics, he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms. As an inquiry into the ways art in a certain historical context transformed and was transformed by its audience, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion is also a penetrating investigation into the aesthetic principles of multimedia composition.

Bernhard Schlink brings to these seven superbly crafted stories the same sleek concision and moral acuity that made The Reader an international bestseller. His characters–men with importunate appetites and unfortunate habits of deception–are uneasily suspended between the desire for love and the impulse toward flight. A young boy’s fascination with an eerily erotic painting gradually leads him into the labyrinth of his family’s secrets. The friendship between a West Berliner and an idealistic young couple from the East founders amid the prosperity and revelations that follow the collapse of communism. An acrobatic philanderer (one wife and two mistresses, all apparently quite happy) begins to crack under the weight of his abundance. By turns brooding and comic, and filled with the suspense that comes from the inexorable unfolding of character, Flights of Love is nothing less than masterful

Young Man Hogan's journey begins in the dazzling streets of a nameless necropolis, and leads across fleeting landscapes - deserts, seas, mountains, islands, cities and great plains - to countless entertainments and adventures in four continents. It is an exploration and a celebration, glittering and exuberant, of the writer's art and of life itself.

"How can you be sick of living in "Paris"?" Life unravels when American psychotherapist Kristin Louise Duncombe faces being uprooted again-to follow her husband from their secure nest in Paris to bourgeois Lyon. The result is a touchstone memoir for anyone facing a move, dealing with marital ghosts, or confronting the professional death of starting anew. Duncombe's unique specialty is helping "trailing spouses" maintain their sanity while following their other half around the globe. But she must reconfigure everything she thought she knew about her "expat expertise" when her child sinks into existential crisis, addiction to Lyonnais cream puffs blooms, and tea time is to be had with glamorous French moms whose sex lives include swingers' parties. This boisterous, big-hearted book provides a compelling glimpse into love, family, and sex in France, and a modern family grappling with the inevitable downs - and ups - of building a new life. "An insightful memoir of life in France in which the author and her multi-cultural family embrace the wisdom, step by step, that home is where the heart is."-Meg Bortin, author of "Desperate to be a Housewife" ""Five Flights Up "is hilarious and brave. With her trademark honesty, Kristin Louise Duncombe reveals the imperfect yet privileged world of being a foreigner in France."-Lizzie Harwood, author of "Xamnesia" "A must-read for any woman coping with monumental transitions, and who has felt they have lost their way along this trajectory we call life."-Samantha Verant, author of "Seven Letters from Paris""

"When twenty-three-year-old Emily Cavenaugh's marriage to her abusive high school sweetheart ends, she trades in her dull smalltown life for an all-access pass to see the world as a flight attendant. Hoping for a new start, she moves to San Francisco to bunk with six other new flight attendants them is KC Valentine, a free spirit who encourages Emily to shed her mousy ways and start collecting experiences as exciting as her passport stamps. Emily soon follows KC's advice a little too well, falling in love with an older, married co-worker named Tien, a father to two young girls. But as Emily and Tien become more deeply entangled, KC grows distraught.Neither her friends nor co-workers know the real reason she became a flight attendant: to find her father who abandoned her as a child."--Provided by publisher.

Ursula Hegi grew up in Germany and moved to the United States at age eighteen. As she grew older and raised a family, questions about her roots and her native land haunted her until, at last, she felt compelled to write about them. Tearing the Silence brings together her interviews with dozens of German-born Americans, and their confrontations with the taboo of the Holocaust.

A flop house, a pumping station, a maid's room, a homeless center, a former brothel, a Richard Meier building, a circus trailer, a sail boat, a skyscraper, buildings named Esther and Loraine—just a few of the places New Yorkers call home. For the past eight years writer Toni Schlesinger has been bringing us these "conversation places" in her weekly column in the Village Voice. Through her incisive questioning, original writing, and comic parallel reveries, Schlesinger creates miniature documentaries on the lives, passions, hopes, and heartbreaks of many of New York City's millions