Les Genies du chocolat, refered to as "the bible" is the most comprehensive work on the highest quality chocolate in the world today. Crafted with great sensitivity with meticulous editing, this pioneering masterpiece unravels an undiscovered territory of French gastronomy.
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Choc Lit is an award-winning publisher of women's fiction - romance, historical and crime fiction. We hold world rights for all our titles.
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A disturbingly accurate novel about today's global issues In a society were bees have disappeared and drinking water is near impossible to find, Humankind has to look for drastic alternatives. Some have to become pollinator, whereas others leave the planet to explore new ones, in search for water. While a power struggle sets between two interdependent continents, a climatic catastrophe shakes the populations. Nathanael, migrant and father of two. Ellyn, model worker. Fates cross, lifes entwine, soon the political intrigues will stop to count the victims. What consequences will emerge from their choices and those of two peoples at war ?
Everyone has heard of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier – but hardly anybody knows anything about his journey to F sharp major.In March of 1700, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach set off on his journey. His destination: to create perfect music, music that unites heaven and earth in harmony. His search finally brought him to Lübeck, where he became acquainted with Andreas Werckmeister and the well-tempered tuning. In this tempering – and that is new! – you can play everything, all keys, in major and minor. But perfection has its price: All notes are "tempered" a bit, which means falsified; the music has a touch of artificiality from now on. And not only the notes and pitches – nature and people are also being tempered. Gardens are laid out with geometric precision, rivers are canalized, cities redesigned. Night becomes day thanks to street lighting, the pocket watch makes it possible to take along the time with you, the tuning fork enables choral pitch. The journey into an artificial world has begun. When Bach completed the Well-Tempered Clavier, he was overcome with profound doubt: Is not his work "only of this world" – perfect, artificial, profane?
After earning his theology degree from Union Seminary in New York, Lloyd Pfautsch (1921–2003) found his true calling in church music. He was invited to Southern Methodist University in 1958 to start their graduate program in sacred music and remained there for 34 years. Outside the university, he formed the Dallas Civic Chorus and led it for 25 years. He was nationally known for his conducting and the quality of the musicians he produced as well as for his compositions, many of which are illustrated here with his handwritten notations. This is the first biography of this important figure, and it is told from the viewpoint of a longtime colleague and friend. Aligned with the biography, Hart analyzes some of Pfautsch's hundreds of compositions. This is the definitive work on one of the most influential American choral musicians of the twentieth century. "The combination of biographical facts, history, and anecdotal accounts makes this work unique. Pfautsch was a powerful choral figure, and many conductors mentored under his guidance."--Tim Sharp, Executive Director, American Choral Directors Association
To console someone to be a source of meaning and understanding amidst the pain and loss of life is one of the hardest things a person can do. More and more it's being sought after, not in religious institutions, but through individuals and personal networks. Less and less it's being associated with political traditions, particularly those on the left that tell us to fight, to resist the status quo rather than to accept. Michael Ignatieff explores how those of us who live in a secular world, without the comforting thought of an afterlife free from suffering, have found a modern form of consolation through the religious structures of the past. Using the history of the psalms from the Jewish and Christian traditions, Ignatieff revives these masterpieces to understand the power of their words, and their limits. On Consolation is tragically relevant to our current age, but that is what makes it all the more necessary. Through this book, we learn what it means to find consolation to balance struggle with submission, acceptance of defeat with the lasting light of hope.
MicroDosis is a diary written during the last two years in which Enrique Bunbury decides to experiment in his conscience the ingestion of microdoses of psilocybin. The genre chosen by the author to narrate this inner journey is poetry. In this way Bunbury consolidates his incursion into literature after the appearance in 2021 of his first collection of poems Exilio Topanga (La Bella Varsovia) adding to the aesthetic features present in that one an atmosphere of psychedelia and a critique of "the mental norm" of the system. MicroDosis is an experiential and intimate book that contemplates the daily routine with eyes that open without hesitation the doors of another perception. Space and time acquire a new depth, just as they do in Krishnamurti's diaries, grafting onto its passages the heritage of the American beat generation, the oneirism of David Lynch and a very filmic plasticity that runs through Los Angeles with a neural network in flames. Taking the words of Vicente Gallego in his prologue: "Of that extinction of oneself in the cosmic amplitude, of those inner journeys where the familiar becomes unacceptable and the prodigious dawns to its prodigality the pages of this book written with his underpants off, but full of affection for everything, including the always vain spectacle of this world, speak to us." Four editions since March 2023 6000 copies sold
In 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar (Germany): a place for construction. The project was born as a utopian school in which to train, integrating various artistic disciplines through the object and architecture, the new craftsmen that would be demanded for a sweeping beginning of the century. An idea that would evolve into design from its headquarters in Dessau with the famous "art and technology: a new unity". However, the intellectual recognition of the Bauhaus is a fact that historically focused on its male protagonists, forgetting a number of women artists, designers, set designers, painters or architects trained there who contributed decisively to this "revolution", and whose work in the imaginary about the Bauhaus has remained invisible, despite developing their respective careers with an unquestionable international impact. With this work, Marisa Vadillo fills this gap, completing the reality of the school by recounting the outstanding role of these fundamental authors in an unrepeatable episode of twentieth-century art.
Kincón is the story of an obsession, a tale that was born in the early 1960s as a short story and that became, in the mid-1970s, a polyphonic, choral, bloody and vital novel. The story of Bentos Márquez Sesmeao, a real character of the town where the author was born, explodes in multiple, infinite stories that weave a web of points of view.
Music in Ohio offers a comprehensive and ambitious look at music as it has been practiced throughout the state during the last two centuries—from folk to jazz to rock to polka. Author William N. Osborne also examines the music of the Moravians, Mormons, and Welsh, as well as other religious music and choral music. He discusses the state’s two major symphony orchestras, the Cincinnati Opera, and the May Festival. He also includes an overview of public school music-education programs and those of the principal collegiate institutions.
Eerie violin music, flashing lights, a battered security guard, a dead music teacher….more than Susan Wiles bargained for when she flew to Florida to meet her newly-found birth mother, Audrey Roberts, for the first time. Audrey is in charge of Hemingway High School for the Performing Arts, a tony private school in Banyan Beach, Florida. The bad publicity surrounding the school jeopardizes its existence when donors threaten to withhold funding, and parents begin withdrawing their children. Luckily for Audrey, Susan happens to be a retired music teacher…and an amateur sleuth extraordinaire. Against the wishes of Susan’s detective daughter, who has accompanied her on the trip, Susan volunteers to substitute for the dead choral teacher, and uses her new position to work on solving the case. Can Susan solve the murder at this private school? Or will her detective work get her in more trouble than she can handle? Find out in Diane Weiner’s hot new cozy mystery MURDER IS PRIVATE.
«Born around the same time as we were, democracy and the Constitution told us that we all had the right to do whatever we liked. The whole society, conniving to protect our wishes and desires, was in agreement. We were going to be what we wanted to be, and they were constantly asking us what we wanted to be when we were grownup». In this choral novel, narrated in first-person plural, the characters share something more than the voice that speaks in all their names: they live in a single symbolic space, that of a generation not yet lost but gone astray because of waiting for a sign that would indicate the decisive moment to do the job or make the decision that would give sense to their lives. Maturity has brought to these accidental emulators of Beckett’s burlesque characters an awareness that nobody is going to give them this sign, that nobody expects anything of them. If they have some opportunity to give purpose to their lives, perhaps it is to live them for themselves alone, in other words, simply act without an audience.
The rose that is destroyed in the wind lets its petals fly in a burnt light, we read in this hallucinated novel by Sara Gallardo, the last one she published, an extraordinary arrival point for a dazzling work, always accurate, always singular, always captivating. In La rosa en el viento all the characters move around, undertake journeys that are sometimes physical and sometimes emotional, but in all cases take them far from who they were in the beginning. Olaf, a Swedish immigrant who has escaped from a terrible episode in Italy, becomes a sheep breeder in Patagonia with Andrei, a Russian journalist who seeks, in turn, to conquer an unconquerable woman, whose story reaches us in flashes, just like Oo's, the Indian bought by Andrei, or that of Lina, who follows Andrei to the south, and that of Olga, who two generations before has followed Alexis the revolutionary to an America that, for these characters, is both a land of promise and of forgetfulness that in truth never materializes. Kaleidoscopic, choral, synthetic and modern, The Rose in the Wind brings together all the talent of Sara Gallardo to narrate and move, and cries out for us to read it again.
With an agile, precise and sustained style Música Contra los Muros explores the influence of music on the human being in extreme circumstances. Different choral voices immerse the reader in the geopolitical labyrinth of the Middle East and tell a true and little-known story: that of famous musicians who canceled all their commitments and voluntarily traveled to Israel to encourage their compatriots who were fighting at the front. Against this backdrop, suggestive narrative threads are woven: the passionate romance of the pianist Daniel Barenboim with the cellist Jacqueline du Pré during the Six Day War; the account of Israeli soldiers, whose voices were censored for forty years, forced to participate in a war in which they did not believe; or the torn lives of thousands of Palestinians who, since the occupation, lost the right to a decent and dignified life. Hand in hand with a narrative strategy that recalls the New Journalism that emerged in the sixties, a reconciliation proposal is offered: the case of the West-Eastern Divan orchestra, made up of Arab, Israeli and Palestinian musicians, shows that thanks to music, coexistence is possible. Edward Said, a Palestinian thinker and philosopher, asked himself: Who knows how far we are going to be able to change the thoughts and convictions of these young people thanks to music? The energy of this interrogation continues to challenge the possibilities of the present, while confirming the success of an experience as unusual as it is fascinating.
"To those who think Europe matters, and even more so, to those who don’t”… Michael Tracy’s “Memoirs” recount his experiences from boyhood in wartime Scotland, through hi life in “public school” and university, to postings in various international organisations and a senior position within the European Union in Brussels; then to involvement in Russia and other Central/European countries in the 1990s. The book concludes with an assessment of current issues facing both the EU and Russia; also Britain in its relations with the EU. . . . . . Michael Tracy grew up in Scotland during the war of 193945. After gaining scholarships to Fettes College in Edinburgh, then to Cambridge University (studying Modern Languages, then Economics), he worked in international organisations and for ten years was a Director in the Council Secretariat of the European Union. He also pursued an academic career, writing on agricultural policy and economics and lecturing in various European universities, including Wye College in England and the College of Europe in Bruges. In Moscow in 1991 he witnessed at close quarters the collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequently was involved in a new institute in St. Petersburg. Subsequently he had advisory and teaching roles in the countries of Central/Eastern Europe during their transition to market economies and accession to the European Union. His final chapter assesses the issues currently facing both the European Union and Russia. Taking the story up to May 2010, it discusses the prospects for the eurozone, and the implications of Britain’s new coalition government for Britain’s relations with the EU (a subject which he has followed from the outset in the late 1950s). This is not a history: it is a personal, lively and often humorous account of Michael Tracy’s experiences, in which personal contacts figure largely. Nor is it a tract for or against the European Union; on the other hand, it sheds a more human light on proceedings in “Brussels”. Graham Dalton of the University of Aberdeen admires the depth of knowledge at the heart of Michael Tracy’s memoir and concludes: “His thoughts on Europe are wellfounded, rounded and are to be taken seriously.” Michael Tracy has been President of the British Agricultural Economics Society and is an honorary member of the Académie d’Agriculture de France. His other main works are: Government and Agriculture in Western Europe, 18801988 (3rd edn. 1989); Food and Agriculture in a Market Economy – an introduction to theory, practice and policy (1993); and in retirement: The World of the Edwardian Child, as seen in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopædia 19081910 (2008). c After retirement, Michael continues to live mainly in Belgium, where he and his wife have a “hobby farm” with pedigree sheep. He also spends time in an Andalucian mountain village. His main hobby in both places is as an amateur pianist, is making music with friends.
