High Art

When Anna Broinowski learned that fracking had invaded downtown Sydney, she had a brilliant idea: she would seek guidance for a kryptonite-powerful, anti-fracking movie from the world's greatest propaganda factory - apart from Hollywood. After two years of trying, she was allowed to make her case in Pyongyang and was granted full permission to film. She worked closely with the leading lights of North Korean cinema, even playing an American in a military thriller.

Margarett Sargent was an icon of avant-garde art in the 1920s. In an evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of a spirited and gifted woman committed at all costs to self-expression.

Sixteen-year-old Petula de Wilde is anything but wild. A former crafting fiend with a happy life, Petula shut herself off from the world after a family tragedy. She sees danger in all the ordinary things, like crossing the street, a bug bite, or a germy handshake. She knows: Life is out to get you. The worst part of her week is her comically lame mandatory art therapy class with a small group of fellow misfits. Then a new boy, Jacob, appears at school and in her therapy group.

Everest and K2 are among the Earth's most dangerous places, yet the world's best climbers can't stay away from them. This audio program offers a unique perspective on climbing these two peaks, from early exploration disasters, to the modern tragedies. You'll hear writing from Matt Dickinson, Chirs Bonington, David Roberts, and others whose stories remind us, in vivid accounts, why Everest and K2 are so feared yet so irresistable to climbers.

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby - war hero and Oxford man - at the beginning of the Jazz Age, when the City of Dreaming Spires attracted an astounding array of intellectuals, including the Inklings, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot.

Since its publication on September 30, 1868, Little Women has been one of America's favorite stories. While we now think of it as a girls' book, it was initially read by both boys and girls, men and women of all ages. Professor Anne Boyd Rioux, who read it in her 20s, tells us how Louisa May Alcott came to write the book and drew inspiration for her story from her own life. Rioux sees the novel's beating heart in its honest look at adolescence and its inspiring vision of young women's resilience and hope.

THRONE OF DECEIT is fast-paced young adult fantasy filled with magic, betrayal, slow-burn romance, and a promises of an epic quest. Did I mention a sexy demigod? Mmm. Destan. ~ USA TODAY Bestselling Author Raye Wagner The lord of the underworld wants one thing. The wizard king's daughter. When danger calls, the gods of old unite to protect the innocent. Elise thought she was just another ordinary bastard daughter--even if her father was the powerful wizard king of the largest kingdom in all of Titania. While she prepares for her winter ball, where she can position herself in an advantageous...

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith learned and/or honed their craft in television before going on to major success in feature films.

Since 2001, the US Department of State has been sending hip hop artists abroad to perform and teach as goodwill ambassadors. There are good reasons for this: Hip hop is known and loved across the globe, acknowledged and appreciated as a product of American culture. Hip hop has from its beginning been a means of creating community through artistic collaboration, fostering what hip hop artists call building.

With Stanley Crouch's untimely death in 2020, American literature lost "a critic without peer" (Ta-Nehisi Coates). Born in Los Angeles in 1945, Crouch—a towering stylist, fearless columnist, and without question, one of the finest jazz critics of all time—was Rabelaisian both in stature and in intellectual appetite. Beloved yet cantankerous, Crouch delighted and enflamed the passions of his readers in equal measure, whether writing about race, politics, literature, or music.

From the author of My Past Lives and How They Came Back to Haunt Me comes another book that will help you in deepening your spiritual search and understanding why you are here on earth at this time. Daily Doses of Inspiration – Volume 1: For Spiritual Seekers is for readers who enjoy motivation while they journey on their path of inner awareness, self-love, expansion and self-sovereignty. The book is broken into sections on conscious creation (manifestation), health and body, internal healing, love, and soul mission/purpose. Acacia has used all of the techniques, methods and teachings on ...

"Why do conservatives hate comedy? Why is there no right-wing Jon Stewart?" These sorts of questions launch a million tweets, a thousand op-eds, and more than a few scholarly analyses. That's Not Funny argues that it is both an intellectual and politically strategic mistake to assume that comedy has a liberal bias. Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx take listeners—particularly self-described liberals—on a tour of contemporary conservative comedy and the "right-wing comedy complex."

In the mid-1950s, Kurt Vonnegut takes a job in the PR department at General Electric in Schenectady, where his older brother, Bernard, is a leading scientist in its research lab - or "House of Magic". Kurt has ambitions as a novelist, and Bernard is working on a series of cutting-edge weather-control experiments meant to make deserts bloom and farmers flourish.

Pat Conroy was America's poet laureate of family dysfunction. A larger-than-life character and the author of such classics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, Conroy was remembered by everybody for his energy, his exuberance, and his self-lacerating humor. Michael Mewshaw's The Lost Prince is an intimate memoir of his friendship with Pat Conroy, one that involves their families and those days in Rome when they were both young - when Conroy went from being a popular regional writer to an internationally best-selling author.

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.

There has never been a show business book quite like The Show Won't Go On, the first comprehensive study of a bizarre phenomenon: performers who died onstage. From the comedy magician who dropped dead on live television to the amateur thespian who expired during a play called The Art of Murder, the book is a celebration of lives both famous and obscure, as well as a dramatic and accurate recounting of events leading to the moments they died "doing what they loved."

Fun, bright, and playful, Power Pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, Power Pop has meant many things to many people. In Go Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

Through the ages, sensual massage has been a widely practiced form of intimate connection between those who know its secrets. With a long and fascinating past, sensual massage is found all over the world, its secrets delighting the initiated with a whole new level of touch. Tantric massage, especially, is an erotic font of mutual delight and ecstasy.

Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., were towering figures who argued publicly about every major issue of the 1960s: the counterculture, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, the Cold War. Behind the scenes, the two were close friends and trusted confidantes who lived surprisingly parallel lives. In Buckley and Mailer, historian Kevin M. Schultz delves into their personal archives to tell the rich story of their friendship, arguments, and the tumultuous decade they did so much to shape.

Thanks to a successful interview with the painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful, 19-year-old, blue-eyed blonde from the cornfields of Iowa lands a job as a receptionist at The New Yorker magazine. There she stays two decades, becoming general all-around factotum - watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the 18th floor. Though she dreamed of becoming a writer, she never advanced at the magazine.