Five Great Short Stories


Anton Chekhov - 1990
    This collection contains five of his most highly regarded stories, all from his maturity, and set in a variety of Tsarist Russian milieux.Included are "The Black Monk" (1894), "The House with the Mezzanine" (1896), "The Peasants" (1897), "Gooseberries" (1898), and "The Lady with the Toy Dog" (1899). In these incisive tales, readers will discover a master of character, nuance, and setting developing the basic themes of his oeuvre: the sociological and psychological obstacles in the way of human affection and satisfactory development of the personality.

Flight From Berlin


D.B. John - 2012
    Combining the suspense and atmosphere of Alan Furst’s spy novels with the exciting narrative drive of Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon adventures, John delivers an unforgettable masterwork of thrilling suspense set against the backdrop of one of the most monumental summers in history—a contest of champions, including the remarkable Jesse Owens, that captivated the world as the shadow of Nazi Germany continued to spread across the globe.

Melymbrosia


Virginia Woolf - 1981
    The story concerned the emotional and sexual awakening of a young Englishwoman traveling abroad, and bristled with social commentary on issues as varied as homosexuality, the suffrage movement, and colonialism. She was warned by colleagues, however, that publishing an outspoken indictment of Britain could prove disastrous to her fledgling career as a novelist. Moreover, the critical offensive from men would be especially harsh towards a woman author. Woolf thus revised the novel extensively, omitting much of the political candor until, in 1915, the quieter book was published under the title The Voyage Out. The original Melymbrosia offers a rare look into the formative mind of the modernist master who revolutionized twentieth century literature. Here, one sees the young Virginia Woolf learning her craft.Like James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, the original treatment of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published Juneteenth, Melymbrosia is a "lost classic" that owes its existence to the research of a devoted scholar, in this instance Louise DeSalvo, who spent seven years uncovering the original novel from Woolf’s papers in the archives of the New York Public Library.

Chanson Dada: Selected Poems


Tristan Tzara - 1975
    Translated as a labor of love over a ten year period the poems encompass the full range of Tzara's works, the results of which have brought Tzara's poetry to life for English language readers for over 25 years. Completely revised, updated edition of this classic survey.

Prostitute Laundry


Charlotte Shane - 2015
    In the months that followed, readership grew to over 4,500 subscribers who followed her candid, unstinting, sometimes heartbreaking meditations. Word spread quickly, garnering the project recognition from outlets such as The Washington Post and NPR.This intimate investigation is one young woman’s best attempt at understanding her own rich, conflicted life, and the forces that act upon it. The collection is a thoughtful serial memoir about love, sex, money, and identity—how those forces can break us, and how they can make us whole again.

Shocking Life


Elsa Schiaparelli - 2007
    This publication will coincide with 'Surreal Things' at the V&A in March 2007.

Journey to the East


Le Corbusier - 1966
    It is very much a story of awakening and a voyage of discoveries, recording a seven-month journey that took Le Corbusier from Berlin through Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Athos, Athens, Naples, and Rome, among other places. Le Corbusier considered this journey the most significant of his life; the compulsion he felt to record images and impressions established a practice he would continue for the rest of his career. For the next five decades, he would fill notebooks with ideas and sketches; he never stopped deriving inspiration from the memories of his first contact with the East, making this volume as much a historical document as a personal confession and diary. Ivan Zaknic's highly regarded translation was first published by The MIT Press in 1987 but has been unavailable for many years.

Cezanne: A Life


Alex Danchev - 2012
    Alex Danchev, with brisk intellect, rich documentation, and eighty color illustrations, tells the story of an artist who, during his lifetime, was considered a madman, a barbarian, and a revolutionary. Beginning with the restless teenager from Aix, Danchev carries us through the trials of a painter who believed that art must be an expression of temperament but who was tormented by self-doubt; whose work sold to no one outside his immediate circle until late into his thirties; who fiercely maintained the revolutionary belief that "to paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations." And Danchev shows us how the implications of this belief became the obsession of many other artists and writers, from Matisse to Samuel Beckett. The book delivers not only the fascinating life of this visionary artist and remarkable man but a complete assessment of his ongoing influence in the artistic imagination of our own time.

ATTA


Jarett Kobek - 2011
    Governments and mass media bombard us with words and images: desert radicals, -rogue states, - jihadists, WMDs, existential enemies of freedom. We labor beneath myths that neither address nor describe the present situation, monstrous deceptions produced by a sound bite society. There is no reckoning of actuality, no understanding of the individual lives that inaugurated this echo chamber.In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master's thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the -Islamic-Oriental city.- Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history's great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. Joined in this volume by a second work, -The Whitman of Tikrit---a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein's last day before capture--ATTA is a brutal, relentless, and ultimately fearless corrective to ten years of propaganda and pandering.

Collected Screenplays


Andrei Tarkovsky - 1999
    In his films, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker and The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky defined a new way of looking at the world. His non-realistic, highly-charged images are a continuing source of inspiration - not only for a new generation of film-makers, but also for poets, musicians and painters. This volume collects his great works for the first time in one volume, as well as three of his unproduced screenplays. This material provides a unique glimpse into the way Tarkovsky's vision evolved from the printed text to its final form on celluloid. The book also contains an extended essay by film critic and historian Ian Christie, who places Tarkovsky's work in the context of Soviet film-making practice.

Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day


Jack Boulware - 2009
    Gimme Something Better brings this outrageous and influential punk scene to life, from the notorious final performance of the Sex Pistols, to Jello Biafra's bid for mayor, the rise of Maximum RocknRoll magazine, and the East Bay pop-punk sound that sold millions around the globe. Throngs of punks, including members of the Dead Kennedys, Avengers, Flipper, MDC, Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, and AFI, tell their own stories in this definitive account, from the innovative art-damage of San Francisco's Fab Mab in North Beach, to the still vibrant all-ages DIY ethos of Berkeley?s Gilman Street. Compiled by longtime Bay Area journalists Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better chronicles more than two decades of punk music, progressive politics, social consciousness, and divine decadence, told by the people who made it happen.

The Keeper of Antiquities


Yury Dombrovsky - 1969
    Set far from Moscow in the remote Kazakhstan capital of Alma-Ata, The Keeper of Antiquities begins with a leisurely, almost scholarly air - like a devious story by Borges. But very soon we find ourselves watching with horror as professional rivalry between the keeper of the town's museum and the chief librarian turns into a deadly struggle for control over the meaning of the past - and therefore over the present.While Dombrovsky does not have the wit, the suave cynicism of Bulgakov, he is-or was-immensely drawn to the tragi-comic potential of the bureaucratic flap, endemically Russian. Water boils drearily for tea in noisily peopled conferences; lank-jawed, heavily smoking females whine and bark in outrage; minor officials threaten and soothe; mass grievances are unburdened. The narrator is an open-hearted, straightforward young man with the title of Keeper of Antiquities in the archaeological section of a museum in rural Soviet Central Asia. The Keeper is moderately happy in his eyrie of catalogues and modest displays, sharing varieties of pickling alcohol with an earthy old carpenter and enjoying a secret hoard of carnival views of ""Beauties of the World"" in their natural state. His aim is to go quietly on his way ""without interfering with anybody."" But ""Your business is history"" to prove and demonstrate, and there is no escape. An attempt to improve the local library by a critical comment; the friendship with a collective brigade leader whose brother was shot (unjustly?) as a traitor; the defense of a young archaeologist fired by the library-all forbode disaster. The keeper of pristine truths unsullied by expedient exploitation thinks of flight, but in the end simply waits for the closing in of ""history,"" party style. A spirited, often anguished, indictment of mindless officialdom wherever it appears.

Wendy's Revenge


Walter K. Scott - 2016
    Filled with sardonic wit and ample realness, Wendy has her eyes set on the art world and she's out for revenge.Walter Scott is an artist from Montreal, Quebec. His work has been exhibited across Canada and Wendy has been serialized on Random House Canada's literary digital magazine Hazlitt. The eponymous first volume of Wendy was released in 2014 and was nominated for the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel.

Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer


Frank Trocco - 2002
    Something radically new--an extraordinary rarity in musical culture--it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be--how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion--is the story told for the first time in "Analog Days," a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used--from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson--recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in "Switched-On Bach," from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, "Analog Days" conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.

The Art-Architecture Complex


Hal Foster - 2011
    He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.From the Trade Paperback edition.