From a morning croissant on the Canal Saint-Martin to a magical dinner on the Eiffel Tower, this title takes you on a gourmet tour of Paris.

Dr. Paige Waterford is struggling with a strained marriage and trying to find her stride after finishing her residency and beginning her career in the ER. When she meets Carly Becker, the fog begins to lift, and she feels a connection like none she’s ever known. Carly Becker has been searching for the perfect woman all her life, but no one ever seems to be just right. She must be fun and adventurous, love travel and theater, and most importantly, golf. Paige checks all the boxes, except the most important one—she’s married. Through their mutual passion for golf, a friendship grows, and Paige finds the courage to separate from her husband. Then, on a group trip to Paris, they rewrite the rules. Under Paris Rules, they explore their feelings. But is Paige brave enough to fall in love when they return home?

Operetta developed in the second half of the 19th century from the French opéra-comique and the more lighthearted German Singspiel. As the century progressed, the serious concerns of mainstream opera were sustained and intensified, leaving a gap between opéra-comique and vaudeville that necessitated a new type of stage work. Jacques Offenbach, son of a Cologne synagogue cantor, established himself in Paris with his series of opéras-bouffes. The popular success of this individual new form of entertainment light, humorous, satirical and also sentimental led to the emergence of operetta as a separate genre, an art form with its own special flavour and concerns, and no longer simply a "little opera". Attempts to emulate Offenbach's success in France and abroad generated other national schools of operetta and helped to establish the genre internationally, in Spain, in England, and especially in Austria Hungary. Here it inspired works by Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss II (the Golden Age), and later Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán (the Silver Age). Viennese operetta flourished conterminously with the Habsburg Empire and the mystique of Vienna, but, after the First World War, an artistically vibrant Berlin assumed this leading position (with Paul Lincke, Leon Jessel and Edouard Künnecke). As popular musical tastes diverged more and more during the interwar years, with the advent of new influences—like those of cabaret, the revue, jazz, modern dance music and the cinema, as well as changing social mores—the operetta genre took on new guises. This was especially manifested in the musical comedy of London's West End and New York's Broadway, with their imitators generating a success that opened a new golden age for the reinvented genre, especially after the Second World War. This source book presents an overview of the operetta genre in all its forms. The first volume provides an introduction, a representative chronology of the genre from 1840 to 2013, and a survey of the national schools of France and Austria-Hungary. The principal composers are considered in chronological sequence, with biographical material and a list of stage works, selected synopses and some commentary.

In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Las Vegas, where someone's playing the odds and everyone's playing to win, the stakes have never been higher. Paris' options are almost impossible: lose his new wife to horror beyond imagining, or endanger his Family and defy the Council. Caught in the middle, he's playing for time, time that's quickly running out. Who can you trust when you're all-in and it's time to reveal the cards? Is his new father-in-law a traitor? Or a pawn in a greater game perpetrated by a master spy. A man known only as 'Shadoe'; an enigmatic figure who rules a spy network whose sole aim is to destroy the Shadow People. Why would Edward betray the Family? Is there some traumatic episode in his past that could explain it? In the dangerous city below Sin City, Paris faces agonizing choices. With few allies, he must guard a secret so powerful the Shadow People fear it above it all else, while protecting and strengthening his new Family. Anything less spells disaster for all of them. Beware of Shadows.