Frida Kahlo: The Story of Her Life


Vanna Vinci - 2016
    The perfect subject for a graphic novel, Frida Kahlo's brief life was dramatic and romantic, tragic and painful. In this illustrated -biography-, Vanna Vinci captures the spirit of Kahlo's world in boldly colored, minutely detailed illustrations. Blending facts and history with dreamlike and surreal sequences, Vinci creates an intimate portrayal of an artist who incorporated her life experiences into her art. Burning love and crushing loss, incredible joy and deep despair--these were all part of Kahlo's life and part of the paintings that are some of the most celebrated art of all time. Filled with images that populated Kahlo's work--monkeys and parrots, traditional clothing and lush gardens--Vinci imbues her text and drawings with an artist's perception and sensitivity. The result is an evocative, fittingly passionate tribute to a legendary figure.

When I Was Puerto Rican


Esmeralda Santiago - 1993
    Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.

So Far from God


Ana Castillo - 1993
    Sofia and her fated daughters, Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and la Loca, endure hardship and enjoy love in the sleepy New Mexico hamlet of Tome, a town teeming with marvels where the comic and the horrific, the real and the supernatural, reside.

'Art'


Yasmina Reza - 1994
    The Tony Award-winning play that focuses on the meaning of art (in the form of a solid white painting) as well as the meaning of friendship, to both the man who bought the painting and the two friends who come to see it."

Black Futures


Kimberly Drew - 2020
    . . a blueprint for this moment and the next, for where Black folks have been and where they might be going."--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) What does it mean to be Black and alive right now? Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham have brought together this collection of work--images, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more--to tell the story of the radical, imaginative, provocative, and gorgeous world that Black creators are bringing forth today. The book presents a succession of startling and beautiful pieces that generate an entrancing rhythm: Readers will go from conversations with activists and academics to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful essays to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics.In answering the question of what it means to be Black and alive, Black Futures opens a prismatic vision of possibility for every reader.

Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist


Celia Stahr - 2020
    In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Still, leaving her family and her country for the first time was monumental.Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit.Frida in America is the first in-depth biography of these formative years spent in Gringolandia, a place Frida couldn't always understand. But it's precisely her feelings of being a stranger in a strange land that fueled her creative passions and an even stronger sense of Mexican identity. With vivid detail, Frida in America recreates the pivotal journey that made Senora Rivera the world famous Frida Kahlo.

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation


Damian Duffy - 2017
    Home is a new house with a loving husband in 1970s California that suddenly transformed in to the frightening world of the antebellum South. Dana, a young black writer, can't explain how she is transported across time and space to a plantation in Maryland. But she does quickly understand why: to deal with the troubles of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder--and her progenitor. Her survival, her very existence, depends on it. This searing graphic-novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's science fiction classic is a powerfully moving, unflinching look at the violent disturbing effects of slavery on the people it chained together, both black and white--and made kindred in the deepest sense of the word.

Everybody: A Book about Freedom


Olivia Laing - 2021
    In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of Joseph McCarthy’s America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century—among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

Bitch Planet #1


Kelly Sue DeConnick - 2014
    Are you non-compliant?Do you fit into your box?Are you too fat, too thin, too loud, too shy, too religious, too secular, too prudish, too sexual, too queer, too black, too brown, too whatever-it-is-they'll-judge-you-for-today?You may just belong on...Bitch Planet"A comic book love letter to non-compliant women."-VOX

Sophie Calle - True Stories


Sophie Calle - 2004
    Calle's projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book-part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings-is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary. The first section is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard, a bathrobe and a bed, or musings on the artist's body, such as "The Love Letter": "For years a love letter languished on my desk. I had never received a love letter, so I paid a public scribe to write one. Eight days later, I received seven beautiful pages of pure poetry penned in ink. It had cost me one hundred francs and the man said: '...as for myself, without moving from my chair I was everywhere with you.'" The second section of the book, "The Husband," is comprised of ten recollections of episodes from Calle's first marriage, by turns funny ("He was an unreliable man. For our first date he showed up one year late."), erotic and sad. A third section gathers various autobiographical tales, and the book closes with three interlinked stories titled "Monique." This new edition includes five new photo-text presentations and is the first English translation.Sophie Calle (born 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. Among her many publications are "The Address Book," "Blind," "Take Care of Yourself" and "Double Game."

The Rosary


Garry Wills - 2005
    Drawing together history and readings from scripture, Wills explains the beads on the rosary and the moments in Christ's life they represent, illustrating each mystery with a stunning Tintoretto painting. The result is an illuminating and poignant exploration of the power of prayer that will edify and inspire readers.

The Good Times are Killing Me


Lynda Barry - 1988
    In The Good Times Are Killing Me, Lynda Barry reveals her masterful way with story, memory, and feelings, and anyone who lingers in Edna Arkins's world will be the better for it.

Portraits


Steve McCurry - 1999
    In 1985, he photographed an Afghan girl for the National Geographic. The intensity of the subject's eyes and her compelling gaze made this one of the most widely and consistently celebrated portraits in the history of contemporary photography.This accompanies the other remarkable faces he has encountered whilst travelling throughout the world, collected together in an engaging and strangely moving series of unique street portraits: unposed, unstylized images of people that reveal the true universality of the depths of human emotion.Critically acclaimed and recognized internationally for his classic reportage, over the last twenty years he has worked on numerous assignments, travelling extensively throughout the Middle and Far East.McCurry has won first prize in the World Press Awards, and was named Magazine Photographer of the Year in 1984. He is most famous for his evocative color photography, which has captured stories of human experience that, in the finest documentary tradition, transcend boundaries of language and culture.

The Essential Gombrich


E.H. Gombrich - 1996
    Gombrich is acknowledged as one of the most influential scholars and thinkers of the 20th century. His writings include three major narrative works - The Story of Art, Art and Illusion and The Sense of Order - and ten volumes of collected essays and reviews. This anthology presents a selection from all these books, as well as six pieces which have previously not been published by Phaidon.

Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America


Dorothy Butler Gilliam - 2019
    When we read about the death of her father and other formative events of her life, we glimpse the crippling impact of the segregated South before the civil rights movement when slavery's legacy still felt astonishingly close. We root for her as a wife, mother, and ambitious professional as she seizes once-in-a-lifetime opportunities never meant for a "dark-skinned woman" and builds a distinguished career. We gain a comprehensive view of how the media, especially newspapers, affected the movement for equal rights in this country. And in this humble, moving memoir, we see how an innovative and respected journalist and working mother helped provide opportunities for others.With the distinct voice of one who has worked for and witnessed immense progress and overcome heart-wrenching setbacks, this book covers a wide swath of media history -- from the era of game-changing Negro newspapers like the Chicago Defender to the civil rights movement, feminism, and our current imperfect diversity. This timely memoir, which reflects the tradition of boot-strapping African American storytelling from the South, is a smart, contemporary consideration of the media.