Now, in this funny and necessary book, he turns round to look at men with a clear eye and ask, what sort of men would make the world a better place, for everyone?What would happen if we rethought the old, macho, outdated version of manhood, and embraced a different idea of what makes a man? Apart from giving up the coronary-inducing stress of always being 'right' and the vast new wardrobe options, the real benefit might be that a newly fitted masculinity will allow men to have better relationships - and that's happiness, right?Grayson Perry admits he's not immune from the stereotypes himself - as the psychoanalysts say, 'if you spot it, you've got it' - and his thoughts on everything from power to physical appearance, from emotions to a brand new Manifesto for Men, are shot through with honesty, tenderness and the belief that, for everyone to benefit, upgrading masculinity has to be something men decide to do themselves. They have nothing to lose but their hang-ups.

    A Handbook of Disappointed Fate highlights a decade of Anne Boyer’s interrogative writing on poetry, death, love, lambs, and other impossible questions.

    In clear, understandable language, Jourdian expertly guides the reader through a continuum of musical experience: sound, tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, performance, listening, understanding—and finally to ecstasy. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdian's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claims to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. Here is a book that will entertain, inform, and stimulate everyone who loves music—and make them think about their favorite song in startling new ways.

    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."

    Spanning the Middle Ages through the twenty-first century, the text offers a thorough introduction to the elements of music, a broad overview of the history of musical styles, and fascinating cultural contexts and perspectives. The Ninth Edition of this classic text features a stunning new design, exciting new repertory, and an unmatched ancillary and media package.

    Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.

    A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants’ perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies and the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance. It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, “Beneath the paving stones, the beach.” Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects and lunatics has a real-life equivalent and that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them.

    Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized. Michael O’Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, here takes a comprehensive look at the feature of Camelot that remained largely under the radar during the White House years: Kennedy’s womanizing. Indeed, O’Brien writes, Kennedy’s approach to women and sex was near pathological, beyond the farthest reaches of the media’s imagination at the time. The record makes for an astonishing piece of presidential history.---Michael O’Brien was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He is the author of the widely praised John F. Kennedy: A Biography, a full-scale study based on eleven years’ research into letters, diaries, financial papers, medical records, manuscripts, and oral histories; and a concise analytical life of the president, Rethinking Kennedy. He is now emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley, and lives in Door County, Wisconsin.

    Listen in on the words of Ganga, Satyavati, Kunti, Gandhari, Amba and Draupadi as they open their hearts to their companions. - What did Draupadi think during her last moments of life? - How did Kunti feel on the day she abandoned Karna? - Why did Amba burn with revenge so, and did it satiate her when she got it? - What is it like to be mother to the greatest hero of the age? - What is Satyavati's secret? Find out answers to these and many more questions when you read 'Dear Sakhi'. If you're a mythology fan, this is a must-have.

    In setting performance art on an equal footing with the traditional art object, she heralds a new aesthetics.The peculiar mode of experience that a performance provokes - blurring distinctions between artist and audience, body and mind, art and life - is here framed as the breeding ground for a new way of understanding performing arts, and through them even wider social and cultural processes.With an introduction by Marvin Carlson, this translation of the original Asthetik des Performativen addresses key issues in performance art, experimental theatre and cultural performances to lay the ground for a new appreciation of the artistic event.

    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

    The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight, and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.

    For five months I hiked through the California desert, the snows of the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and Washington. My goal was to succeed in an epic challenge: to hike 2,650 miles and reach Canada before the October snows. It was an unforgettable summer of sunrises, river crossings, and high mountain passes; of physical and mental challenges and peaceful wilderness camps under the stars. In the fall colors of September I reached the border of Canada.This is the story of my thru-hike.

    His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

    In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments.Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.