Urban City

Found wandering the Witch Woods as a child, everything about Sophia is a mystery. With no memories and no family, she’s raised in secret by the professors of Nighthelm Academy...all of whom know far more about her than they’re letting on. But Sophia does know one thing: she’s a contritum, a magical being with a broken soul. Her very existence is illegal, and until she finds the other piece of her soul, her uncontrollable magic will only grow more deadly and untamed. Then she discovers three men who hold a mysterious sway over not just her soul, but also her heart.

Welcome to Sunder City. The magic is gone, but the monsters remain. I'm Fetch Phillips, just like it says on the window. There are a few things you should know before you hire me: 1. Sobriety costs extra. 2. My services are confidential. 3. I don't work for humans. It's nothing personal - I'm human myself. But after what happened, to the magic, it's not the humans who need my help.

The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year. But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities.

Bailey has learned much and grown over the years, but the greatest challenges, the richest joys, and the deepest heartaches are still to come. As she enjoys the beginning of her new career and time spent with Brandon, Cody faithfully coaches his team on and off the field. Torn between her feelings for both of them, she has a difficult decision to make.

Dangerous, filthy, and falling apart, garbage piled on its streets and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; New York’s terrifying, if liberating, state of nature in 1978 also made it the capital of American culture. Over the next thirty-plus years, though, it became a different place - kinder and meaner, richer and poorer, more like America and less like what it had always been.

Salsa is one of the most popular types of music listened to and danced to in the United States. Until now, the single comprehensive history of the music - and the industry that grew up around it, including musicians, performances, styles, movements, and production - was available only in Spanish.

Over the past 10 years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places?

John Taylor is the name. I work the Nightside. Only in that dark heart of London where it's always three A.M., where human and inhuman can feed their darkest desires, do I feel at home. Probably because I was born there. What I do is find things - people, objects - and in this case, the truth about the origins of the Nightside. That's what Lady Luck has hired me to investigate. But the more I dig, the more I discover, not about the Nightside but about the great question in my life: exactly who - and what - was my long-vanished mother.

Natalia Chase just wants the first family Christmas with her husband and his pride of unruly lion shifter brothers to be perfect. But a simple trip to pick out a Christmas tree turns into a rescue mission when they discover three shifter wolf cubs abandoned in the forest. Between finding the cubs' parents, a surprise Christmas Eve visit from Mama Chase, and Natalia's increasingly difficult pregnancy, will the Chase pride get everything they've asked for from Santa, or will their perfect holiday be a perfect disaster?

The day Stacey Grant loses her job feels like the last day of her life. Or, at least, the only life she'd ever known. For who was she if not a City high-flyer, Senior Partner at one of the top private equity firms in London? As Stacey starts to reconcile her old life with the new - one without professional achievements or meetings but instead long days at home with her dog and ailing mother, waiting for her successful husband to come home - she at least has The Girls to fall back on. Beth, Melissa and Gaby.

Fifteen years ago, Lęina’s mother, Yuliana, went searching for a mythical place called the Garden and never returned. Determined to learn the truth about what happened, Lęina travels to Brazil to search for the hidden realm, with Yuliana’s journal and a local tour guide leading the way. But Lęina soon begins to wonder if she’s looking for answers—or if what she truly wants to find is herself.

Esteban Faraday lives a quiet life in a suburb of London. One day, he receives a certified letter announcing a mysterious inheritance in Buenos Aires. In this totally unexpected trip he will meet Zoé, an attractive tango dancer. He will be in some adventures that he may not get out of alive, and he will discover a secret about himself that will change his life forever.

How did the preaching of a peasant carpenter from Galilee spark a movement that would grow to include over two billion followers? Who listened to this "good news," and who ignored it? Where did Christianity spread, and how? Based on quantitative data and the latest scholarship, preeminent scholar and journalist Rodney Stark presents new and startling information about the rise of the early church, overturning many prevailing views of how Christianity grew through time to become the largest religion in the world.

Every vampire has heard rumor of the mythical place where their kind can daywalk. But what no vampire knows is that this City of Eternal Night actually exists. And its name is New Orleans. For centuries, the fae have protected the city from vampire infestation. But when the bloodsuckers return, the fragile peace in New Orleans begins to crumble.

Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes listeners from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities.

After serving a 10-year bid in prison, Taye "City" Savage was finally freed. However, once he was released, there was no time to chill and enjoy the riches that his brothers had acquired at his left and right hand at the king’s throne of the Savage empire. No sooner than City was released, complete mayhem ensued. His brother, Shon, and his greed causes the Savage empire to be in debt with the Columbian cartel of over a million dollars.

By early 1977, New York City was in the grip of hysteria caused by a murderer dubbed "Son of Sam". And on a sweltering night in July, a citywide power outage touched off an orgy of looting and arson that led to the largest mass arrest in the city's history. As the turbulent year wore on, the city became absorbed in two epic battles: the fight between Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson and team manager Billy Martin, and the battle between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo for the city's mayoralty.

Eyes on the Street is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates - all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets.

Beatrice Kizza, a woman in flight from a homeland that condemned her for daring to love, flees to London. There, she shields her sorrow from the indifference of her adopted city and navigates a nighttime world of shift work and bedsits. Howard Pink is a self-made millionaire who has risen from Petticoat Lane to the mansions of Kensington on a tide of determination and bluster. Yet self-doubt still snaps at his heels, and his life is shadowed by the terrible loss that has shaken him to his foundations.

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems. On the forefront of this discipline is Marina Alberti, whose innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth.