The massage therapist who struggles to help a veteran who's biggest regret is tattooed in living detail across his back. The retired CIA operative, now a mother of two, who is still packing heat for the just-in-case scenario that has her trigger finger itching...With award-winning reportage, memoir, fiction and photography, Granta has illuminated the most complex issues of modern life through the refractory light of literature. Feel the sting of betrayal via new writing by Ben Marcus, Janine di Giovanni, Karen Russell, Samantha Harvey, Colin Robinson, Jennifer Vanderbes, Callan Wink, John Burnside and a host of others, including debut author Lauren Wilkinson, whose heroine moves through decades with the forward lean of Richard Yates and the grace of Garcia Marquez.

    This exquisite book, now in softcover, is the result of that bold and immensely personal project. Through the accompanying essay, Brandenburg shares his innermost thoughts and passions as he witnesses the cycle of nature near his home in the northwoods of Minnesota.Brandenburg also contributes new photos and an Epilog that illustrates and discusses the devastating summer wind storm that wreaked havoc on the locations photographed for the original project.

    Featuring brutally compassionate photographs taken from 1990-99, inspired by an overwhelming belief in the human possibility of change, this volume is a definitive selection from Nachtwey's astonishing portfolio. It documents today's conflicts and their victims, from Somalia's famine to genocide in Rwanda, from Romania's abandoned orphans and 'irrecoverables' to the lives of India's 'untouchables', from war in Bosnia to conflict in Chechnya. Inferno is an evocative visual insight into modern history, bringing it disturbingly close to our consciousness.

    Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaces them with a substantial, admirably informed introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development, as well as his work and his life in dark times. Reflections the companion volume to this book, is also available as a Schocken paperback.Unpacking My Library, 1931The Task of the Translator, 1913The Storyteller, 1936Franz Kafka, 1934Some Reflections on Kafka, 1938What Is Epic Theater?, 1939On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939The Image of Proust, 1929The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936Theses on the Philosophy of History, written 1940, pub. 1950

    We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.

    

    Posing is truly a crucial skill that photographers need to have in order to create great photographs. If you're looking to improve your ability to pose your subjects--whether they're men, women, couples, or groups--best-selling author and photographer Lindsay Adler's The Photographer's Guide to Posing: Techniques to Flatter Everyone is the perfect resource for you.In the first half of The Photographer's Guide to Posing, Lindsay discusses how the camera sees, and thus how camera angle, lens choice, and perspective all affect the appearance of your subject. Lindsay then covers the five most important things that ruin a pose--such as placement of the hands, and your subject's expression and posture. If you can look out for and avoid these five things, your skills (and your images) will quickly improve. Next, Lindsay dives into -posing essentials, - outlining her approach to start with a -base pose, - then build on that to create endless posing opportunities. She also discusses posing the face--with specific sections dedicated to the chin, jaw, eyes, and forehead--as well as posing hands.In the second half of the book, Lindsay dedicates entire chapters to posing specific subject matter: women, men, couples, curvy women, families and small groups, and large groups. In each chapter, Lindsay addresses that subject matter's specific challenges, provides five -go-to poses- you can always use, and covers how to train the eye to determine the best pose for your subject(s). In the final chapter of the book, Lindsay brings it all together as she teaches you how to analyze a pose so that you can create endless posing opportunities and continuously improve your work

    Keegan Allen is a Hollywood native, growing up in a world that millions visit and many more imagine. With an avid fan base that follows him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and a busy career that includes seven years on the hit series Pretty Little Liars as well as films directed by James Franco and Gia Coppola, Allen also is a lifelong photographer whose first book, life.love.beauty, was a national bestseller. Now Keegan turns his eye and camera to the place he knows best. Hollywood captures the beauty and glamour of the place itself--with unusual angles of the famous sign, the glint of sidewalk stars stamped into the entrance of the Grauman's TCL Chinese Theater in the rain, the Chateau Marmont at twilight, secret local hideaways, red carpets and more--but also the darker side of dreams unrealized in the faces, hands, eyes, and footsteps of those who live on the fringe of celebrity. His photos are enhanced by revealing, intimate captions, lyrics, and other writing, as well as hand-drawn illustrations, exciting parodies, and iconic emulations. A book that will engage and surprise Keegan's legions of fans and followers, Hollywood is an essential gift for anyone who has visited or imagined this storied place.

    M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes a telling detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is Realism realistic? Why do some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh?James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.

    A handbook for the happy, and a bible for the broken-hearted, The Alphabet of the Human Heart is an enchanting and enriching journey through the upside and the downside of what it means to be human – our hopes and our fears, our strengths and our weaknesses, our highs and our lows.

    The tussle between the father and the son was the most poignant and pathetic stories of their lives. Gandhi,who was busy attending meetings and conferences where the fate of forty crore Indians was to be decided, would often find headlines in a newspaper screaming 'Police arrested drunk Harilal for creating a scene on the road'. And sometimes, Harilal himself from the dias of the fundamentalist Muslim organization's meeting - 'I shall continue fighting till Ba and Bapu embrace Islam.'In this book the author tries to make an ardent effort to understand yet another enigmatic facet of human life.

    

    Sixteen performance artists discuss human sexuality, racism, sexism, and the ways in which art can be used to break down taboos and dogma.

    In 1994 we published the first English-language translation of the classic French edition of 1975, which accompanied an exhibition of Virilio's photographs at the Centre Pompidou. In Bunker Archeology, urbanist Paul Virilio turns his attentionand camerato the ominous yet strangely compelling German bunkers that lie abandoned along the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompted Virilio to consider the nature of war and existence, in relation to both World War II and contemporary times. Virilio discusses fortresses and military space in general as well as the bunkers themselves, including an examination of the role of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, in the rise of the Third Reich.

    Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real; to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites; If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation; and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.