The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

    What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such as Sharon Olds and Jane Kenyon. Unlike the earlier confessional poetry of Plath, Lowell, Sexton et al., Howe's writing is not so much a moan or a shriek as a song. It is a genuinely feminine form . . . a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation" (Boston Globe).

    Lily Shields grows up amid the fragrance of night-jasmine and burning sugar cane, and the heady atmosphere of her mother's madness. For if Anna Shields is an island unto herself--fragile, glamorous, and fearfully needy--Lily is the bridge that connects her to reality. But now Lily is a young woman and a mother herself, self-exiled from Hawaii but still attached to Anna's tragedy. And as she tries to untangle those threads of love and loyalty, Moore gives us a novel of shimmering beauty and sadness. My Old Sweetheart is a small classic, perfectly formed and mysteriously wise.<

    The story is told by Mary’s sister Lydia, as she poses for five of her sister’s most unusual paintings, which are reproduced in, and form the focal point of each chapter. Ill with Bright’s disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world with courageous openness, and asks important questions about love and art’s capacity to remember.

    Nicolaes Tulp" was the first major work by Rembrandt to be proclaimed a masterpiece. The novel opens on the morning of the medical dissection, and, as they prepare for that evening's big event, it follows several characters: a one-handed coat thief called Aris the Kid, who is awaiting his turn at the gallows; Flora, the woman pregnant with his child who hopes to save him from the noose; Jan Fetchet, a curio collector who also moonlights as an acquirer of medical cadavers; René Descartes, who attended the dissection in the course of his quest to understand where the human soul resides; and the 26-year old young master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about his assignment. Then there's Pia, an art restorer who is examining the painting in contemporary times. As the story builds to its dramatic and inevitable conclusion, the events that transpire throughout the day sway Rembrandt to change his initial composition in a fundamental way.Bringing to life the vivid world of Amsterdam in 1632, The Anatomy Lesson offers a rich slice of history and a textured story by a masterful young writer.

    A fresh, revealing look at the artist who continues to inspire new generations of women.

    The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her.In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor. . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires—her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies.Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.

    Now, in The Forest Lover she traces the courageous life and career of Emily Carr, who, more than Georgia O'Keeffe or Frida Kahlo, blazed a path for modern women artists. Overcoming the confines of Victorian culture, Carr became a major force in modern art by capturing an untamed British Columbia and its indigenous peoples just before industrialization changed them forever. From illegal potlatches in tribal communities to artists studios in pre World War I Paris, Vreeland tells her story with gusto and suspense, giving us a glorious novel that will appeal to lovers of art, native cultures, and lush historical fiction.

    But after sending every man she meets to the hospital, she finds herself falling for the one she cannot stand. This is the intriguing and hilarious love story of Naina Kashyap and her arch enemy.

    Catalogue to accompany the "Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings" exhibition at The Mayor Gallery in London (2nd November - 17th December 2011).

    Tests are similar to recent actual GREs in length, question types, and degree of difficulty. The manual also reviews all GRE test topics: antonym, analogy, and sentence-completion questions, reading comprehension, analytical writing, quantitative comparison questions, data interpretation, and math.

    Years later, a terminally ill Kello asks Mona to revisit their native island and reclaim the property that their family had left behind. As Mona returns to the Caribbean to confront her family's turbulent past, the reader travels back in time—to nineteenth-century India, to British Trinidad, where her ancestors lived as indentured workers in the cane fields, and finally to urban North America.Steeped in the lyrical rhythms of Caribbean life, this exquisite, richly layered novel explores the immigrant experience with compassion and humour. It is a moving story of race and displacement, of love and betrayal, of endings and beginnings—a swinging bridge of the universal search for self.Praise forThe Swinging Bridge"Beautiful, luminous and an utter pleasure to read. A writer as necessary as Ramabai Espinet should be treasured by us for her unique voice and the unique world she shares with us."—Jamaica Kincaid"The Swinging Bridge is a sweeping story . . . of rich heritage—a blend of Indian and Caribbean sounds, scents and celebrations."—NOW Magazine"An extraordinary achievement in the exercise of remembering. . . . Highly charged with moral intent."—George Lamming

    Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating.In her new book--which gathers together the best of her writing, from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1962 on le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard, to essays in the New York Review of Books, to more recent writing in the Wall Street Journal--Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century's best--and worst--architectural masters and projects.With a perspective of more than four decades, Huxtable examines the century's modernist beginnings and then turns her critic's eye to the seismic shift in style, function, and fashion that occurred midcentury--all leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century. Much of the writing in On Architecture has never appeared in book form before, and Huxtable's many admirers will be delighted to once again have access to her elegant, impassioned opinions, insights, and wisdom."Looking back, I realize that my career covered an extraordinary period of change, that I was writing at a time in which architecture was changing slowly but radically--a time when everything about modernism was being incrementally questioned and rejected as we moved into a new kind of thinking and building." And while it was a quiet, nearly stealth revolution, it was a absolutely a revolution in which the past was reaccepted and reincorporated, periods and styles ignored by modernism were reexamined and reevaluated. History and theory, once considered irrelevant, became central to the practice of architecture again."

    One year later, the Fordham family arrived as Seventh-day Adventist missionaries.Fordham narrates her childhood with lush, observant prose that is at times quite funny. She describes her family’s insular faith, her mother’s Finnish heritage, the growing conflict between her parents, the dangerous politics of Uganda, and the magic of living in a house in the jungle. Driver ants stream through their bedrooms, mambas drop out of the stove, and monkeys steal their tomatoes.At its heart, Wait for God to Notice is a memoir about mothers and daughters. As teens, Fordham and her sister, Sonja, considered their mother overly cautious. After their mother dies of cancer, the author begins to wonder who her mother really was. As she recalls her childhood in Uganda―the way her mother killed snakes, sweet-talked soldiers, and sold goods on the black market―Fordham understands that the legacy her mother left her daughters is one of courage and capability.Fordham's vivid, unsentimental prose observes how it is possible to love someone you disagree with and how a place that doesn't belong to you can turn you into who you are. Reminiscent of The Poisonwood Bible and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Wait for God to Notice, explores the complex terrain of being a mzungu in Africa, and ultimately being a stranger everywhere on Earth.

    . . . [Signs of Resistance is] visually fascinating. . . . [and] there is bigly wit here, too.”—The Washington Post In hundreds of iconic, smart, angry, clever, unforgettable images, Signs of Resistance chronicles what truly makes America great: citizens unafraid of speaking truth to power. Two hundred and forty images—from British rule and women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War; from women’s equality and Black Lives Matter to the actions of our forty-fifth president and the Women’s March—offer an inspiring, optimistic, and visually galvanizing history lesson about the power people have when they take to the streets and stand up for what’s right.