Bachelard takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories, and dreams."A magical book. . . . The Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the new foreword by John R. Stilgoe

    punk rocker into a universal soldier.  His enemies: slackers and hypocrites.  His mission: to steel your soul and rock your world."Rollins was frontman for the seminal punk band Black Flag, and since 1987 has led the Rollins Band, whose ninth album, Come In and Burn, was just released by DreamWorks.As a spoken-word artist, he regularly performs at colleges and theaters worldwide and has released eight spoken-word audiotapes.  His album Get in the Van won the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for 1995.  As an actor, he has appeared in The Chase, Johnny Mnemonic, Heat, and David Lynch's forthcoming film, Lost Highway.  From his days as front man for the band Black Flag and the current Rollins Band to his books and spoken-word audiotapes, Henry Rollins is the music, the attitude, and the voice that takes no prisoners.  In his twelve books, he has led us on a hallucinatory journey through the decades--and his mind--with poems, essays, short stories, diary entries, and rants that exist at "the frayed edges where reality ends and imagination begins" (Publishers Weekly).  For the first time, the best of his legendary, no-holds-barred writings are available.  This collection includes new photos and works from such seminal Rollins books as:High Adventure in the Great OutdoorsArt to Choke HeartsBang!Black Coffee BluesGet in the VanDo I Come Here Often?SolipsistPlus never before released stories and more...

    International bestselling author Adam Gopnik does for this storied season what he did for the City of Light in the New York Times bestseller Paris to the Moon. Here he tells the story of winter in five parts: Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, and Remembering Winter. In this stunningly beautiful meditation, Gopnik touches on a kaleidoscope of subjects, from the German romantic landscape to the politics of polar exploration to the science of ice. And in the end, he pays homage to what could be a lost season — and thus, a lost collective cultural history — due to the threat of global warming. Through delicate, enchanting, and intricate narrative detail, buoyed by his trademark gentle wit, Gopnik draws us into another magical world and makes us look at it anew.

    His fascination with myth is evident in pieces on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the separate odysseys that make up Homer's Odyssey. Three intertwined essays on French utopian socialist Fourier present him as a precursor of Women's Lib, a satirist and visionary thinker whose scheme for a society in which each person's desires could be satisfied deserves to be taken seriously. In other pieces, Calvino brings a fresh, unpredictable approach to why we should reread the classics, how cinema and comic strips influence writers, and the cartoon universe of Saul Steinberg. His message is that writers need to establish erotic communion with the humdrum objects of everyday reality.

    As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations.Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.Humanism --Reformation --Grace --Servanthood --Givenness --Awakening --Decline --Fear --Proofs --Memory --Value --Metaphysics --Theology --Experience --Adam --Limitation --Realism

    Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin , Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Villon's Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.

    But although he lived in the German golden age of Goethe, Schiller and Mozart, he also believed that art was in terminal decline.To resolve this apparent paradox, as Michael Inwood explains in his incisive Introduction, we must understand the particular place of aesthetics in Hegel's vast intellectual edifice. Its central pillars consist of logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Art derives its value from offering a sensory vision of the God-like absolute, from its harmonious fusion of form and content, and from summing up the world-view of an age such as Homer's. While it scaled supreme heights in ancient Greece, Hegel doubted art's ability to encompass Christian belief or the reflective irony characteristic of modern societies. Many such challenging ideas are developed in this superb treatise; it counts among the most stimulating works of a master thinker.Table of ContentsIntroductory Lectures on Aesthetics Introduction A Note on the Translation and CommentaryINTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON AESTHETICSChapter I: The Range of Aesthetic Defined, and Some Objections against the Philosophy of Art Refuted[α Aesthetic confined to Beauty of Artβ Does Art merit Scientific Treatment?γ Is Scientific Treatment appropriate to Art?δ Answer to βε Answer to γ]Chapter II: Methods of Science Applicable to Beauty and Art[1. Empirical Method - Art-scholarship(a) Its Range(b) It generates Rules and Theories(c) The Rights of Genius2. Abstract Reflection3. The Philosophical Conception of Artistic Beauty, general notion of]Chapter III: The Conception of Artistic BeautyPart I - The Work of Art as Made and as Sensuous1. Work of Art as Product of Human Activity[(a) Conscious Production by Rule(b) Artistic Inspiration(c) Dignity of Production by Man(d) Man's Need to produce Works of Art]2. Work of Art as addressed to Man's Sense[(a) Object of Art - Pleasant Feeling?(b) Feeling of Beauty - Taste(c) Art-scholarship(d) Profounder Consequences of Sensuous Nature of Art(α) Relations of the Sensuous to the Mind(αα) Desire(ββ) Theory(γγ) Sensuous as Symbol of Spiritual(β) The Sensuous Element, how Present in the Artist(γ) The Content of Art Sensuous]Part II - The End of Art3. [The Interest or End of Art(a) Imitation of Nature?(α) Mere Repetition of Nature is -(αα) Superfluous(ββ) Imperfect(γγ) Amusing Merely as Sleight of Hand(β) What is Good to Imitate?(γ) Some Arts cannot be called Imitative(b) Humani nihil - ?(c) Mitigation of the Passions?(α) How Art mitigates the Passions(β) How Art purifies the Passions(αα) It must have a Worthy Content(ββ) But ought not to be Didactic(γγ) Nor explicitly addressed to a Moral Purpose(d) Art has its own Purpose as Revelation of Truth]Chapter IV: Historical Deducation of the True Idea of Art in Modern Philosophy1. Kant[(a) Pleasure in Beauty not Appetitive(b) Pleasure in Beauty Universal(c) The Beautiful in its Teleological Aspect(d) Delight in the Beautiful necessary though felt]2. Schiller, Winckelmann, Schelling3. The IronyChapter V: Division of the Subject[1. The Condition of Artistic Presentation is the Correspondence of Matter and Plastic Form2. Part I - The Ideal3. Part II - The Types of Art(α) Symbolic Art(β) Classical Art(γ) Romantic Art4. Part III - The Several Arts(α) Architecture(β) Sculpture(γ) Romantic Art, comprising(i) Painting(ii) Music(iii) Poetry5. Conclusion]Commentary

    Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the world's greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonius Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and Dyer brings it to life in luminescent and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician’s style.

    It is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts and useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between the verbal and the visual, and the limitless resources of the human mind. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters, all this material is presented in a wonderfully inventive series of pages that are themselves masterly demonstrations of the expressive use of type, space, color and imagery.This book does not set out to teach lessons, but it is full of wisdom and insight collected from all over the world. Describing himself as a visual jackdaw, master designer Alan Fletcher has distilled a lifetime of experience and reflection into a brilliantly witty and inimitable exploration of such subjects as perception, color, pattern, proportion, paradox, illusion, language, alphabets, words, letters, ideas, creativity, culture, style, aesthetics and value.The Art of Looking Sideways is the ultimate guide to visual awareness, a magical compilation that will entertain and inspire all those who enjoy the interplay between word and image, and who relish the odd and the unexpected.

    In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: Theology, historiography, reportage, and memoir--among many others--are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today.97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own.

    The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. “My city that once was had vanished,” he writes: “I was a foreigner in my hometown.” The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions that sparked Open Up, City Gate. In this lyrical autobiography of growing up—from the birth of the People’s Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution—Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another Beijing, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book are his parents and siblings, and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Open Up, City Gate is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet’s childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and the danger, of a boy’s coming of age during a time of enormous change and upheaval.

    Scott Moncrieff from an early and unreliable French edition, Proust’s masterpiece has now been flawlessly translated by Terence Kilmartin in this acclaimed version.

    Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable with prints selling for as much as $45,000.

    These sixteen essays reveal Hervert's discriminating artistic eye and poetic sensibility, one that revels in irony, humor, and a satirist's appreciation of the absurd. An inveterate museum-goer, he focuses on the art of the Dutch masters, using it as a stepping-off point for a thoroughly individual and entertaining examination of the foibles, genius, and character of the Dutch people as a whole. The result is an unorthodox and revealing glimpse into the past that gives us a keener understanding not only of a distant people, but of ourselves as well.

    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.