The story of the rise and fall of the Catskill Mountain House is a compelling tale of steamboat and railroad empires, bitter rivalries, exclusive private preserves, fabulous art and picturesque landscapes that celebrate the Catskills as part of the American Grand Tour and as America's first wilderness.

The Hudson River Valley was the first iconic American landscape. Beginning as early as the 1820s, artists and writers found new ways of thinking about the human relationship with the natural world along the Hudson. Here, amid the most dramatic river and mountain scenery in the eastern United States, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper created a distinctly American literature, grounded in folklore and history, that contributed to the emergence...

"Known for her childhood role as Laura Ingalls Wilder on the classic NBC show Little House on the Prairie, Melissa Gilbert has spent nearly her entire life in Hollywood. From Dancing with the Stars to a turn in politics, she was always on the lookout for her next project. She just had no idea that her latest one would be completely life changing. When her husband introduces her to the wilds of rural Michigan, Melissa begins to fall back in love with...

Discover the ghosts who wander these upstate New York mountains-includes photos! Washington Irving called the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York a "spellbound region"-and the ghosts that linger from more than four hundred years of history provide proof of Irving's intuition. In Hudson, Maggie Houghtaling's ghost haunts the Register-Star building, where she was hanged in 1817 for murdering her child-a crime for which she was later cleared. The...

"While New York's Catskill Mountains region remains a popular destination for snow skiing, hunting, trout fishing and hiking, its history as a booming summer resort, which began in the nineteenth century and continued through a period when a portion of it was known as the Borsch Belt, stimulated the construction of a number of structures that today serve as remnants of an earlier time. While that era is mostly extinct now, railroads that once transported...

A stunning new edition of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and other stories including Rip Van Winkle, with deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. First published in The Sketch Book in 1819 20, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow tells the story of schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, who comes to live in Sleepy Hollow, a...

"Claire Pedersen and her husband are relocating from NYC to the Catskills-they have found a terrific deal on a property in foreclosure. The house has been in April Ives' family for three generations, but the single mother of three children from two different fathers needs the money. Claire and April are instantly antagonistic, but the sale proceeds, and renovations begin. Soon after, Claire's husband develops an erotic fascination with Anna, a young...

Susan Wiggs's Lakeshore Chronicles series has captivated thousands of readers with its relatable characters, warm humor and engaging stories. Return to the tranquil shores of Willow Lake with The Winter Lodge. On the longest night of the year, Jenny Majesky loses everything in a devastating house fire. But as she finds comfort in the predictability of running the family bakery, she's surprised by the ongoing support of the Avalon community, especially...

"When a Catskill house-hunting weekend turns up two dead bodies, New York hipsters Serena and Jeffrey Gale find themselves at the center of a dark conspiracy that follows them back to their familiar Brooklyn neighborhood. What brought an environmentalist minister and a redneck white supremacist together to die in the woods of Bone Hollow? Who shot them? And why are three ex-cons and a gas drilling company so interested? The state police don't know,...