Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs


Jay Farrar - 2013
    Recollections of Farrar's father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the final word since music has been the creative impetus and driving force for the past 35 years of his life.In writing these stories, he found a natural inclination to focus on very specific experiences; a method analogous to the songwriting process. The highlights and pivotal experiences from that musical journey are all represented as the binding thread in these stories, illustrated throughout with photography from his life. If life is a movie, then these stories are the still frames.

The Critic as Artist


Oscar Wilde - 1891
    Published originally in 1881, The Critic As Artist is one of Oscar Wilde's major aesthetic statements.

Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum


Brook Davis Anderson - 2001
    The trove included massive, multi-volume illustrated manuscripts, double-sided nine-foot-long watercolor murals, photo-enlarged tracings, and hundreds of sketches. Depicting a turbulent world, these works are the product of the fertile yet tormented imagination of a secretive Chicago janitor who has since been recognized as one of the supreme self-taught artists of the 20th century.Cataloguing in full color the American Folk Art Museum's recent acquisition of 37 paintings, among other Darger works, this informative yet affordable volume offers a general introduction to a controversial self-taught artist.

The Secret Life of the Love Song and The Flesh Made Word: Two Lectures by Nick Cave (King Mob Spoken Word CDs)


Nick Cave
    Originally conceived for the Vienna Poetry Festival (1998) and performed to great success and a capacity audience at The Royal Festival Hall, London earlier in 1999, this is a special studio recording. It includes five new and unique recordings of his songs 'West Country Girl', 'People Ain't no Good', 'Sad Waters', 'Love Letter', and 'Far From Me'. The Word Made Flesh is a wholly spoken-word piece, re-recorded, originally conceived and executed for the BBC Religious Services Department in 1996.

The Ship of Fools


Sebastian Brant
    It provoked a vast number of imitations and remained steadily in print through the eighteenth century (with sporadic reprints after that). It still possesses an enormous vigor and vitality.The book owes its long life to an imagination, wit, and humor rich with insights into human nature, yet neither bitter nor namby pamby. Its commentary on the boasting, pedantry, false learning, gambling, gluttony, medical folly, adultery, greed, envy, hatred, pride and other failings that mark humanity are sharp and telling, and, sadly, as relevant today as they were 450 years ago.This translation by Professor Edwin H. Zeydel is the only accurate English translation ever published. (Barclay's version is really a pastiche written in imitation of Brant.) The form Professor Zeydel uses is verse, like the original, and he even retains the original rhyme scheme and meter. The achievement is remarkable, for it captures all the charm and movement of the original German while sacrificing nothing to readability and fluidity.Published now with the 114 original Renaissance woodcuts and with Professor Zeydel's annotations, a biography of Brant, a publishing history, and a survey of the work's influence, this will unquestionably remain the definitive edition of The Ship of Fools in English. The illustrations are part of Dover's Pictorial Archive Series and may be used by commercial artists free of charge.

Painting Portraits and Figures in Watercolor


Mary Whyte - 2011
    Going beyond the practical application of techniques, Whyte helps new artists capture not just the model's physical likeness, but their unique personality and spirit. Richly illustrated, the book features Mary Whyte's vibrant empathetic watercolors and works by such masters of watercolor as Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Rodin on Art and Artists


Auguste Rodin - 1971
    Auguste Rodin spoke candidly to his protégé, Paul Gsell, who recorded the master's thoughts not only about the technical secrets of his craft, but also about its aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings.Here is the real Rodin—relaxed, intimate, open, and charming—offering a wealth of observations on the relationship of sculpture to poetry, painting, theater, and music. He also makes perceptive comments on Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other great artists, and he shares revealing anecdotes about Hugo, Balzac, and others who posed for him. Seventy-six superb illustrations of the sculptor's works complement the text, including St John the Baptist Preaching, The Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and many others, along with a selection of exuberant drawings and prints.

Why Is That Art?: Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art


Terry Barrett - 2007
    Introducing students to a variety of established theories of art, he presents the traditional sets of criteria of Realism, Expressionism, and Formalism, which are in turn updated by recent sources of Poststructuralism. Barrett applies each of these theories to challenging works of contemporary art, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each mode of interpretation. He encourages students to consider many criteria when evaluating an artwork, to critically examine judgments made by others, and to make informed judgments of their own. Ideal for courses in aesthetics, art theory, art criticism, and the philosophy of art, Why Is That Art? is organized chronologically according to the history of aesthetics. It features sixty-seven illustrations (twenty-six in a full-color insert), discusses a wide range of American and European artists, and includes an exceptional overview of postmodern pluralism. This unique book will provide students with a newfound appreciation for contemporary art, scholarship, and reasoned argumentation, giving them the confidence to join the fascinating discourse on contemporary art.

चुनी हुई कविताएँ


Atal Bihari Vajpayee - 2012
    Prabhat Prakashan has a glorious history of fifty years of publishing quality books on almost all streams of literature, viz. children books, fiction, science, quiz, humanities, personality development, health, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. For the last fifteen years, Prabhat Prakashan has been continuously winning accolades for excellence in book publication.

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel


Tom Phillips - 1980
    H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began cutting and pasting the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, 'I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. I began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties.' After its first publication in book form in 1980, A Humument rapidly became a cult classic. This new fourth edition follows its predecessors by incorporating revisions and re-workings -- over half the pages in the 1980 edition are replaced by new versions -- and celebrates an artistic enterprise that is nearly forty years old and still actively a work in progress.

The Oil Painting Course You've Always Wanted: Guided Lessons for Beginners and Experienced Artists


Kathleen Staiger - 2006
    Or maybe you weren’t afraid—maybe you just didn’t know what to ask or where to start. In The Oil Painting Course You’ve Always Wanted, author Kathleen Staiger presents crystal clear, step-by-step lessons that build to reinforce learning. Brush control, creating the illusion of three dimensions, foolproof color mixing, still-life painting, landscapes, and portraits—every topic is covered in clear text, diagrams, illustrations, exercises, and demonstrations. Staiger has taught oil painting for more than thirty-five years; many of her students are now exhibiting and selling their paintings. Everyone from beginning hobby painters, to art students, to BFA graduates has questions about oil painting. Here at last are the answers!

The Roots of Romanticism


Isaiah Berlin - 1965
    A published version has been keenly awaited ever since the lectures were given, and Berlin had always hoped to complete a book based on them. But despite extensive further work this hope was not fulfilled, and the present volume is an edited transcript of his spoken words.For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men's outlook in modern times.In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our own outlook. Combining the freshness and immediacy of the spoken word with Berlin's inimitable eloquence and wit, the lectures range over a cast of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. Berlin argues that the ideas and attitudes held by these and other figures helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, individual self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art. This is the record of an intellectual bravura performance--of one of the century's most influential philosophers dissecting and assessing a movement that changed the course of history.

Ars Botanica


Tim Taranto - 2017
    Through examinations of the ways in which various cultures and religions carry grief, Taranto discovers the emotional instincts that shape his own mourning. He seeks solace in the natural elements of our world, divining meaning from the Iowa fields that stretch around him, the stones he collects, the plants he discovers on walks through the woods. His letters, then, are the honest wanderings of someone earnestly seeking meaning and belonging, ultimately resulting in a field guide for love, grief, and celebrating life. At times astonishingly personal and even painful, Ars Botanica is also playfully funny, a rich hybrid of memoir, poetry, and illustration that delightfully defies categorization."Ars Botanica is a gorgeous hybrid: a memoir in letters to a phantom addressee, an introduction to life on this planet, a primer for how to live, a meditation on family. It also winds up being a beautiful and highly personal field guide to the natural world. It’s one of the most wrenching and honest accounts of falling in and out of love, of moving through a season of grief, that I’ve ever read."—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!Tim Taranto is a writer, visual artist, and poet from New York. His work has been featured in Buzzfeed, FSG’s Works in Progress, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and The Saint Ann’s Review. Tim is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

From The Murks Of The Sultry Abyss


Brandon Boyd - 2007
    The second book from Brandon Boyd which follows up the successful White Fluffy Clouds, From the Murks of the Sultry Abyss comes in a special outer box, a limited edition #d sheet of stickers of artwork from Boyd, and the book itself comes sealed.

The Beauty of Everyday Things


Soetsu Yanagi - 2017
    These objects are our constant companions in life. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe - the aesthetic result of wholeheartedly fulfilling utilitarian needs. They should, in short, be things of beauty.In an age of feeble and ugly machine-made things, these essays call for us to deepen and transform our relationship with the objects that surround us. Inspired by the work of the simple, humble craftsmen Yanagi encountered during his lifelong travels through Japan and Korea, they are an earnest defence of modest, honest, handcrafted things - from traditional teacups to jars to cloth and paper. Objects like these exemplify the enduring appeal of simplicity and function: the beauty of everyday things.