Art Biography

Steve Parish was never one to walk the straight-and-narrow, even during his childhood growing up in Flushing Meadow, Queens. Busted as a teenager for selling acid in the summer of 1968, Parish landed in Riker's Island. The experience changed him, and after getting out, he did his best to stay out of trouble, securing a job moving music equipment at the New York State Pavilion. The first show he worked was a Grateful Dead concert in July of 1969, and Parish was captivated by the music. A life seemingly headed nowhere had suddenly found its calling.

The distinguished filmmaker chronicles his life, from his birth in 1910 to the worldwide success in 1950 of his film Rashomon, and provides a provocative account of the Japanese film industry.

Prodigy Akiane Kramarik shares her artwork, poetry, and the fascinating story surrounding her talent. Growing up in a home with an atheistic mother and a non-participating Catholic father did not stop four-year-old Akiane Kramarik from finding God. This girl's dreams began a conversation in the home that has eventually brought them all to Christianity and the world's attention. Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry is a collection of the best of Akiane's full-color paintings and poetry created from ages 4 to 10.

​Diane von Furstenberg, entrepreneur and philanthropist, presents her words to live by. In an easy-to-navigate A-Z dictionary format, designed to be browsed or listened to as a whole, Own It offers listeners Diane’s well-earned wisdom for enjoying both personal and professional growth at any age.

Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature - his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being - while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great - his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination, and showmanship - finally destroyed him.

Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1940, grew up an outsider despised by his peers. But he formed a band, and had a number-one hit with "To Know Him Is to Love Him". He quickly became the top producer of early rock and roll and the originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes. Hit followed hit, and for all of them he used a new recording style called the "wall of sound". But the reign of the boy-man who owned pop music was doomed, and Spector spiraled into paranoid isolation and peculiar behavior.

Ah, 55. Gateway to the golden years! Professional submitting. Emotional maturity. Easy surfing toward the glassy blue waters of retirement...Or maybe not? Middle age, for Sandra Tsing Loh, feels more like living a disorganized 25-year-old's life in an 85-year-old's malfunctioning body. With raucous wit and carefree candor, Loh recounts the struggles of leaning in, staying lean, and keeping her family well-fed and financially afloat - all those burdens of running a household that still, all-too-often, fall to women.

Lauren Weedman is not okay. She's living what should be the good life in sunny Los Angeles. After a gig as a correspondent with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she scored parts in blockbuster movies, which led to memorable recurring roles on HBO's Hung and Looking. She had a loving husband and an adorable baby boy. In these comedic essays, she turns a piercingly observant, darkly funny lens on the ways her life is actually not okay.

Blindness in the 1950s was a social stigma. Stephen's mother wanted a normal life for him, so he fought desperately to uphold the illusion of sight. For a child frantic to fit in, each day was an exhausting pretence. He managed to ride a bike, when even reading involved pressing his nose to the page and painfully forcing his eyes to concentrate. Head up, he strode through a carefully memorized labyrinth of streets, hoping to fool passers-by that he could actually see.

Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this best-selling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.

In this extraordinary memoir, Vidal recalls his accomplishments and defeats, discusses the friends and enemies he has made, and contemplates the nature of mortality. In the Navy, Vidal was forced to use point to point navigation whenever compasses failed. It is an apt analogy for his life, which has been filled with triumphs as well as controversies. Vidal has had relationships with innumerable luminaries, including President Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, and Greta Garbo.

The American pianist Jonathan Biss is known to audiences throughout the world for his artistry, musical intelligence and deeply felt interpretations. What is less known until now is that Jonathan Biss writes about music in a most compelling and engaging way. For anyone who has ever enjoyed a Beethoven concert or a Beethoven recording or one of the many films about Beethoven, this audiobook is an inspiring listening experience. For those of you who have heard Beethoven in concert or listened to a Beethoven recording, Jonathan Biss takes you behind the scenes of those performances.

The story of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair begins with Michael Lang, a kid out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who liked to smoke a joint and listen to jazz. He would find his way to Florida, open a head shop, and produce his first festival - Miami Pop, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and others - then travel to Woodstock, where, after meeting Artie Kornfeld, his vision for a festival where folks could come and stay for a few days amid the rural beauty of upstate New York would become a reality.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

Over 60 years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology, and folklore. Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

Charlie Chaplin made an amazing 71 films by the time he was only 33 years old. He was not only known as the world’s first international movie star, but as a comedian, film director, and a man ripe with scandal, accused of plagiarism, communism, pacifism, liberalism, and anti-Americanism. He seduced young women, marrying four different times, each time to a woman younger than the next. In this animated biography of Chaplin, Joyce Milton reveals to us a life riddled with gossip and a struggle to rise from an impoverished London childhood to the life of a successful American film star.

Doomed to Fail explores the heaviest music the world has ever heard, tracing doom, sludge, and post-metal as their own distinct (and incredibly loud) traditions. Anselmi covers the bands and musicians that have impacted those styles most - Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Melvins, Eyehategod, Godflesh, Neurosis, Saint Vitus, and many others - while diving into the cultural doom that has spawned such music, from the bombing of Birmingham and hurricane devastation of New Orleans to glaring economic inequality, industrial alienation, climate change, and widespread addiction.

In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than thirty years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles; strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of America's shifting political gales.

Who is Elmyr? Simply put, Elmyr de Hory is known by many as the most notorious art forger of all time. He believed that if a forgery hangs in a museum for long enough - as he claimed many of his works did - it eventually becomes real. Yet, as with many fraudsters, much of the myth is exaggeration or invention.

Cuando El chavo del ocho se estrenó en los años 70, el programa ofrecía un retrato poco común de la vida de la clase trabajadora que resonó en la gente de toda América Latina. En el pico de su popularidad, 350 millones de personas lo sintonizaban cada semana. Y durante casi 50 años, el legado de “el chavo” se mantuvo vivo a través de una creciente base de fans multigeneracional y sus retransmisiones diarias. Hasta 2020, cuando El Chavo dejó de emitirse repentinamente.