High Art

Matt Pinfield is the ultimate music fan. He's the guy who knows every song, artist, and musical riff ever recorded, down to the most obscure band's B-side single on its vinyl-only EP import. As a child, music helped Pinfield make sense of the world. Later he would approach his music idols after concerts and explain why he loved their music. As an adult, rock music inspired his career, fueled relationships, and, at times, became a life raft.

The Hatchback of Notre Dame includes many memorable Car Talk classics, including Morley Safer of CBS' Sixty Minutes displaying a downright embarrassing obsession with his Peugeot and space shuttle astronaut John Grunsfeld, who calls from Hawaii. (Well, 700 miles over Hawaii, actually). And there's one of Click and Clack's all-time favorite callers - their pal, Dave from Bemidji - sharing the sordid tale of his journey to Alaska.

Following the adventures of two brothers who investigate deeply strange and paranormal mysteries in their never-ending road trip, the TV show Supernatural has many fans eager to better understand the psychology behind the series' themes and characters. Featuring cast and crew interviews, this collection examines issues at the heart and soul of Supernatural's heroes and foes.

It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: In their gray surroundings, where everyone's future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy - quite literally, as it turned out.

In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country's most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak's much anticipated first novel, entrusted to him with these words from the author: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak knew his novel would never be published in the Soviet Union, where the authorities regarded it as an assault on the 1917 Revolution, so he allowed it to be published in translation all over the world.

In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures.

He hired me to capture his soul on canvas. I never expected to hand him my own. I’m Sienna Vale—an artist who reads people with a single brushstroke. My latest commission: Nico Moretti, Dallas’s reclusive “philanthropist.” One look at him and every color on my palette turns to danger. His mother wants a portrait. Nico wants me. The FBI wants dirt on his empire—using my studio as the perfect listening post. Now I’m trapped between the man who ruins me with a glance and the agents who can ruin us both. If I spy on Nico I could finally learn what really happened to my family. If ...

When Belle Boggs' "The Art of Waiting" was published in Orion in 2012, it went viral, leading to republication in Harper's Magazine and an interview on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show. In that heartbreaking essay, Boggs eloquently recounts her realization that she might never be able to conceive. She searches the apparently fertile world around her - the emergence of 13-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo - for signs that she is not alone.

Sales Rizz is the ultimate playbook for uncovering your purpose, mastering emotional intelligence, and achieving extraordinary success—your way. This modern guide fuses cutting-edge strategies in personal development, emotional mastery, and practical sales techniques to help you thrive in every area of life. Whether you're striving to boost self-awareness, strengthen relationships, or crush your professional goals, this book delivers the insights and tools to make it happen.Inside, You’ll Discover How To: Master emotional intelligence to tackle challenges with confidence. Redefine ...

Acacia Santos excels at her job as concierge at the prestigious Hotel Victoire in Paris. When her superior, Marcel, is attacked in a supposed random mugging, she is tasked with serving one of the hotel's most mysterious and attractive guests. Nicholas Cassirer checks into the hotel under an assumed name every three months. Usually, he stays in the penthouse suite with a beautiful female companion but on this occasion, he arrives alone.

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter - political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm - and Levy's work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.

Internationally best-selling author Lyndsay Faye became enamored with tales of Sherlock Holmes and his esteemed biographer, Dr. John Watson, as a child and later began spinning these quintessential characters into her own works of fiction - from her acclaimed debut novel, Dust and Shadow, which pitted the famous detective against Jack the Ripper, to a series of short stories for the Strand Magazine, whose predecessor published the very first Sherlock Holmes short story in 1891.

The celebrated author of over twenty-five books, Vollmann's equally ambitious and prolific career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter reflects the artist's deep interest in people existing on the margins, a profound empathy for his subjects, and the humility and generosity to meet them on their terms. In Shadows of Love, Shadows of Loneliness, a series of essays commissioned especially for this book lays out Vollmann's views on what photographs can and should say.

Fifteen years ago, Alice Hoffman received a diagnosis that changed everything about the life she'd been living. Most significant - aside from the grueling physical ordeal she underwent - was the way it changed how she felt inside and what she thought she ought to be doing with her days. Now she has written the book that she needed to read then. In this honest, wise, and upbeat guide, Alice Hoffman provides a road map for the making of one's life into the very best it can be.

Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to see a high school production of Les Misérables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Broadway turns to Truman High when trying out controversial shows such as Rent and Spring Awakening before they move on to high school theater programs across the nation. Volpe’s students from this blue-collar town go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders.

It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just 32 days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favourite film, celebrating moral fortitude.

John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary and later secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous as "Mark Twain", grew up 50 miles apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in the same rural antebellum stew of race, class, and want. This shared history drew them together in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences.

As Paris rediscovers its joie de vivre, Tabitha Knight, recently arrived from Detroit for an extended stay with her French grandfather, is on her own journey of discovery. Thanks to her neighbor and friend Julia Child, another ex-pat who's fallen head over heels for Paris, Tabitha is learning how to cook for her Grandpere and Oncle Rafe and Tabitha's sojourn is proving thoroughly delightful. That is, until the cold December day they return to Julia's building and learn that a body has been found in the cellar.

Mallory Storm knows one thing for certain: trust is a luxury she can’t afford. With her abusive husband dead under suspicious circumstances, Mallory escapes the shadows of her past by taking on a high-stakes undercover assignment in Italy. Her target? Dylan Hyde... a seductively mysterious Englishman with a reputation as dangerous as his smile. As Mallory infiltrates his world, their chemistry ignites, threatening to derail her carefully guarded plans. Beneath the glittering world of high-stakes auctions exists a maze of lies, and Dylan seems to be holding the map. But when a twist of ...

Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, plays a game called, "I can feel it coming in the air tonight", in which he responds to questions about musician Phil Collins. Al Gore tries to match his former boss’ mastery of the My Little Pony children’s show in a game called "Maybe you can beat Bill Clinton at this". Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee rhymes with "cursy", so she is invited to play a game called "May Thunder Blast Your Head!" about curses from around the world. Of course.