Prospect Park West

Presents the stories of four Brooklyn mothers during a summer when one becomes an actress-turned-kleptomaniac, another has an affair with a celebrity, a third spies on others via real estate walkthroughs, and a fourth forges an intense friendship with a fellow mother.

In Amy Sohn’s smart, sexy, satirical peek into the bedrooms and hearts of Prospect Park West, the lives of four women come together during one long, hot Brooklyn summer. The lives of these four Brooklynite women look basic on the outside—but inside, each woman feels a building frustration with life that could burst any second. Frustrated Oscar-winning actress Melora Leigh, eager to relieve the pressures of raising her adopted toddler, feels the seductive pull of kleptomania; Rebecca Rose, missing her formerly robust sex life, begins a dangerous flirtation with handsome neighborhood celebrity Lizzi O’Donnell, so-called "former" lesbian, wonders what draws her to women despite her sexy husband and adorable baby; and Karen Bryan Shapiro consumes herself with a powerful obsession that is sure to complete her perfect life—snagging the ultimate three-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained, P.S. 321–zoned co-op building. As the women’s paths intertwined (and sometimes collide), each must struggle to keep her man, her sanity...and her playdates.

Stop, look, and discover—the streets and parks of Manhattan are filled with beautiful historic monuments that will entertain, stimulate, and inspire you. Among the 54 monuments in this volume are major figures in American history: Washington, Lincoln, Lafayette, Horace Greeley, and Gertrude Stein; more obscure figures: Daniel Butterfield, J. Marion Sims, and King Jagiello; as well as the icons of New York: Atlas, Prometheus, and the Firemen's Memorial. The monuments represent the work of some of America's best sculptors: Augustus Saint Gaudens’ Farragut and Sherman, Daniel Chester French’s Four Continents, and Anna Hyatt Huntington’s José Martí and Joan of Arc. Each monument, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, is located on a map of Manhattan and includes easy-to-follow directions. All the sculptures are considered both as historical mementos and as art. We learn of furious General Sherman court-martialing a civilian journalist, and also of exasperated Saint Gaudens’ proposing a hook-and-spring device for improving his assistants' artistic acuity as they help model Sherman. We discover how Lincoln dealt with a vociferous Confederate politician from Ohio, and why the Lincoln in Union Square doesn't rank as a top-notch Lincoln portrait. Sidebars reveal other aspects of the figure or event commemorated, using personal quotes, poems, excerpts from nineteenth-century periodicals (New York Times, Harper's Weekly), and writers ranging from Aeschylus, Washington Irving, and Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi to Mark Twain and Henryk Sienkiewicz. As a historical account, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide is a fascinating look at figures and events that changed New York, the United States and the world. As an aesthetic handbook it provides a compact method for studying sculpture, inspired by Ayn Rand’s writings on art. For residents and tourists, and historians and students, who want to spend more time viewing and appreciating sculpture and New York history, this is the start of a unique voyage of discovery.

An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself. No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter. In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul. These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight. Contents All Souls’ The Eyes Afterward The Lady’s Maid’s Bell Kerfol The Triumph of Night Miss Mary Pask Bewitched Mr. Jones Pomegranate Seed A Bottle of Perrier

In the Vale of Cashmeremarks the culmination of acclaimed photographer Thomas Roma'sfour-year odyssey into a densely wooded, secluded corner of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, where gay cruising dominates the footpaths and trails. The Vale ofCashmere, a name that dates back to the 1890s, has long been a meeting place for gay men. and currently, mostly Black men. However, encounters occur between men of all walks of life, as well as gender and sexual identities. With his large, tripod-mounted, hand-made camera, Roma stepped into the center of this community, an obvious but mostly ignored presence. Understandably, many of the menRoma approached to photograph in a formal portrait were not interested, butsurprisingly, many were. After they agreed to be photographed, Roma would offer themen time and the opportunity to show him something of themselves they might nothave the chance to otherwise. Although originally conceived solely as a portrait project, the more time Romaspent in the Vale of Cashmere, the more the physical beauty of the Vale becameinseparable from the portraits, and many landscape photographs were made to beincluded in the book. In addition to the landscapes, Roma utilized a custom modified miniaturecamera to provide sequential pictures depicting the steady march of themostly solitary men as they cruised the paths and roadways of the Vale. These candidphotographs, which run along the bottom of the pages of landscape photographs, arereproduced in small scale so as to make it impossible to identify any individual. Roma's motivation for doing the project camefrom his wish to honor the memory of a dear friend who died of AIDS in 1991, andwho introduced him to the Vale of Cashmere.