Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity returns to and reflects on the spatial and architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity spaces and a creative exploration of those we use today. Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the book—in the mode of creative practice research—presents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking that travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The book assesses the transformation of maternity spaces—from the female bedchamber of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century marital homes, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purposely built by man-midwives, to the late twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wing—and the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spaces are not treated as mute or neutral backdrops to maternal history but as a series of vital, entangled atmospheres, materials, practices and objects that are produced by, and, in turn, produce particular social and political conditions, gendered structures and experiences. Moving across spaces, systems, protagonists and their subjectivities, the book shows how hospital design and protocol altered ordinary birth at home and continues to shape maternal spatial experience today. As such, it will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from architectural historians, theoreticians, designers and students to medical humanities historians, to English Literature, humanities and material studies scholars, as well as those interested in creative-critical writing.

Completely updated for the twenty-first century, this reference presents definitions and origins of thousands of words, idioms, catchphrases, slogans, nicknames, and events from TV, literature, music, comic strips, and computer games.

By the acclaimed Dutch author of Beyond Sleep: a thriller set in Nazi occupied Holland: “fast-moving, frighteningly real yet verging on the incredible” (Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being). During the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by a mysterious man named Dorbeck—a man who bears a strangely striking resemblance to Osewoudt himself. Dorbeck recruits him to perform simple, but top-secret missions on orders from London. But as the assignments keep coming, they get increasingly dangerous. Soon Osewoudt is being asked to commit murder in the name of Gestapo resistance. After the war, Osewoudt is taken for a traitor and captured. To prove his sacrifices for the Resistance, he must find the untraceable doppelgänger in an existential thriller “crackling with tension . . . bringing to mind Camus and the Sartre of Les Chemins de la Liberté” (The Telegraph). “Striking, suspenseful . . . Brilliant.” —The Observer

In this acclaimed psychological mystery, Jinx Kingsley, a prominent photographer and millionaire’s daughter, wakes up in an exclusive hospital suffering from amnesia. Not only can she not remember the car accident that caused her memory loss, but she doesn’t remember that her impending wedding has been called off or that her former fiancé and his girlfriend have been brutally murdered in the same way her first husband had been ten years before. Now she must try to piece together her memories in order to determine her innocence. With deft psychological explorations and shocking twists, Walters brings the story to an awe-inspiring conclusion.

A guide to darkroom technique, equipment and formulas. Includes information on pyro and amidol development, monobath development, and push processing.

“A strange and dreamy voice . . . , like an Italo Calvino short story, curiously translated from some lost, obscure language.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love An utterly charming study of the history of lying down—which is more complicated than you might think We spend a good third of our lives lying down: sleeping, dreaming, making love, thinking, reading, and getting well. Bernd Brunner’s ode to lying down is a rich exploration of cultural history and an entertaining collection of tales, ranging from the history of the mattress to the “slow living movement” to Stone Age repose—when people did not sleep lying down—and beyond. He approaches the horizontal state from a number of directions, but never loses his keen sense for the odd or unusual detail. Far from being a pose of passivity or laziness, lying down can be a protest, a chance to gather thoughts or change your point of view—the other side to our upright, productive lives. Brunner makes an eloquent case for the importance of lying down in a world that values ever-greater levels of activity, arguing that time spent horizontally offers rewards that we’d do well not to ignore.