Showing titles in Art & Literature

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

A flicker of light almost appears at the end of the tunnel for prisoner FF8282, as he is transferred to North Sea Camp near Boston, Lincolnshire, a D-category prison. Under a less strict regime, the prisoners can enjoy a more relaxed set of rules, while slowly preparing to someday rejoin the world outside the walls. However, a minor breach of conditions gets him sent off to the notorious HMP Lincoln facility for twenty-two days, where more traumatic experiences await. "Heaven" is the third book in Jeffrey Archer’s bestselling series The Prison Diaries.

Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering.

A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.

A passionate advocate for preserving wilderness and fighting the bureaucratic and business forces that would destroy it, Edward Abbey (1927-1989) wrote fierce, polemical books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang that continue to inspire environmental activists.

From the #1 bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry—a contagiously funny, heartwarming, shocking, twisted, and absolutely magical collection. True stories that give voice to the thoughts we all have but dare not mention. It begins with a Tang Instant Breakfast Drink television commercial when Augusten was seven. Then there is the contest of wills with the deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. Dating an undertaker. And much more.

In Calvin Trillin's antic tales of family life, Alice was portrayed as the wife who had "a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day" and the mother who thought that if you didn't go to every performance of your child's school play, "the county would come and take the child". Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page.

Hailed by readers/listeners and critics across the country, this engrossing biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo reveals a woman of extreme magnetism and originality, an artist whose sensual vibrancy came straight from her own experiences: her childhood near Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution; a devastating accident at age eighteen that left her crippled and unable to bear children; her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera and intermittent love affairs with men as diverse as Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky; her association with the Communist Party.

From Joan Juliet Buck, former editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue, comes a dazzling memoir: a fabulous account of four decades spent in the creative heart of London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, chronicling Buck's quest to discover the difference between glitter and gold, illusion and reality, and what looks like happiness from the thing itself.

For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

First published in 1906, The Mirror of the Sea was the first of Joseph Conrad’s two autobiographical memoirs. Discussing it, he called the book “a very intimate revelation...I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life"....

How It Feels To Be Colored Me was first published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece that focuses on race and 1920s America, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life where she felt "different." Hurston focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. "Through it all," she says, "I remain myself."

Lara Marlowe first met Robert Fisk in 1983, in Damascus. He was already a famous war correspondent; she was a young American reporter who would soon become a renowned journalist in her own right. This is at once a portrait of a remarkable man by a woman who loved him, the story of a Middle East broken by its own divisions and outside powers and a moving account of a relationship in dark times.

When Billy Reilly vanished, his parents embarked on a desperate search for answers. Was their son’s disappearance connected to his mysterious work for the FBI, or was it a personal quest gone wrong? Only when Wall Street Journal reporter Brett Forrest embarks on his own investigation does a picture emerge: of the FBI's exploitation of US citizens through a secretive intelligence program, a young man's lust for adventure within the world's conflicts, and the costs of a rising clash between Moscow and Washington.

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression

Scritta tra il 1943 e il 1944, durante la sua militanza nel Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, viene pubblicata nel 1945, a guerra ormai conclusa...

Drawing from the author's original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin's journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo More, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.

One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography that Peter Ackroyd in the Times of London calls "energetic and magnificently researched" - a book from which "a true picture of Salinger emerges". Filled with new information and revelations garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records, J. D. Salinger: A Life presents an extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire 20th century.

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a sweeping critical analysis of Western colonialism, its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America. Valentine focuses on the “dark arts” of empire: the black bag of CIA covert operations, including bribery, right-wing coups, assassinations, disinformation, and intimate relationships with drug, sex, and artifact traffickers.