Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective


Arthur C. Danto - 1992
    Danto argues that Andy Warhol's Brillo Box of 1964 brought the established trajectory of Westen art to an end and gave rise to a pluralism which has changed the way art is made, perceived, and exhibited. Wonderfully illuminating and highly provocative, his essays explore how conceptions of art–and resulting historical narratives–differ according to culture. They also grapple with the most challenging issues in art today, including censorship and state support of artists.

Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s


Otto Friedrich - 1972
    "The City of Nets," as Brecht called Berlin, before the deluge, and people who created and those who destroyed it.

The Insult


Rupert Thomson - 1996
    After work Martin Blom drives to the supermarket to buy some groceries. As he walks back to his car a shot rings out... When he wakes up he is blind. His neurosurgeon, Bruno Visser, tells him that his loss of sight is permanent and that he must expect to experience shock, depression, self-pity, even suicidal thoughts before his rehabilitation is complete. But it doesn't work out quite like that. And one spring evening, while Martin is practicing in the clinic gardens with his new white cane, something miraculous happens.

The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll


Charlie Gillett - 1970
    This comprehensive study of the rise of rock and roll from 1954 to 1971 has now been expanded with close to 100 illustrations as well as a new introduction, recommended listening section, and bibliography.

Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music


Gerri Hirshey - 1984
    Here are the recollections of many of the giants of soul—Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Mary Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Wilson Pickett. These and other interviews, many of them exclusive, add up to a brilliant anecdotal portrait of the music and the life. Gerri Hirshey is the author of We Gotta Get Out of this Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock; she has also written for Rolling Stone and the New York Times.

Interviews with Francis Bacon


David Sylvester - 1975
    His monumental, unsettling images have an extraordinary power to disturb, shock, and haunt the spectator, "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently".Eminent writer and curator David Sylvester provides the definitive account of the career of an artist whose friend and collaborator he was for more than forty years. Drawing on his unparalleled personal knowledge of Bacon's inspirations and intentions, he first offers a critical overview of the development of Bacon's work from 1933 to the early 1990s, and then addresses its crucial aspects. Sylvester also reproduces previously unpublished extracts from his celebrated conversations with Bacon in which the artist speaks about himself, modern painters, and the art of the past. Finally, he gives a brief account of Bacon's life, correcting errors that elsewhere have been presented as facts.Accompanying the incisive and revealing text are reproductions of almost every Bacon work discussed, including twelve triptych fold-outs. The most complete work on Bacon yet, this book constitutes a portrait of one of the creative geniuses of our age by a writer of comparable distinction.

Billy Liar


Keith Waterhouse - 1959
    It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying - especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by his boring job and working-class parents, Billy finds that his only happiness lies in grand plans for his future and fantastical day-dreams of the fictional country Ambrosia.

The Bridge


Hart Crane - 1930
    "Very roughly," he wrote a friend, "it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America' . . . The initial impulses of 'our people' will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity."

The Hidden Persuaders


Vance Packard - 1957
    Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today’s corporate-driven world began. Featuring an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders has sold over one million copies, and forever changed the way we look at the world of advertising.Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Status Seekers, which described American social stratification and behavior, The Waste Makers, which criticizes planned obsolescence, and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies.

Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir


Anatole Broyard - 1993
    In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance. Stylish written, mercurially witty, imbued with insights that are both affectionate and astringent, this memoir offers an indelible portrait of a lost bohemia.

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series


Malcolm Cowley - 1959
    Forster, Joyce Cary, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Thorton Wilder, William Faulkner, Georges Simenon, Frank O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Alberto Moravia, Nelson Algren, Angus Wilson, William Styron, Truman Capote, Francoise Fagan.

Silence: Lectures and Writings


John Cage - 1961
    Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called writing through).

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll


Greil Marcus - 1975
    Now, firmly established as a classic, the fourth edition features a completely new introduction as well as an entirely updated discography that includes CDs for the first time.

Copenhagen


Michael Frayn - 1998
    The popular image of the men who made the bomb is of dispassionate intellects who number-crunched their way towards a weapon whose devastating power they could not even imagine. But in his Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn shows us that these men were passionate, philosophical, and all too human, even though one of the three historical figures in his drama, Werner Heisenberg, was the head of the Nazis' effort to develop a nuclear weapon. The play's other two characters, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, are involved with Heisenberg in an after-death analysis of an actual meeting that has long puzzled historians. In 1941, the German scientist visited Bohr, his old mentor and long-time friend, in Copenhagen. After a brief discussion in the Bohrs' home, the two men went for a short walk. What they discussed on that walk, and its implications for both scientists, have long been a mystery, even though both scientists gave (conflicting) accounts in later years. Frayn's cunning conceit is to use the scientific underpinnings of atomic physics, from Schr?dinger's famous cat to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to explore how an individual's point of view renders attempts to discover the ultimate truth of any human interaction fundamentally impossible. To Margrethe, Heisenberg was always an untrustworthy student, eager to steal from her husband's knowledge. To Bohr, Heisenberg was a brilliant if irresponsible foster son, whose lack of moral compass was part of his genius. As for Heisenberg, the man who could have built the bomb but somehow failed to, his dilemma is at the heart of the play's conflict. Frayn's clever dramatic structure, which returns repeatedly to particular scenes from different points of view, allows several possible theories as to what his motives could have been. This isn't the first play to successfully merge the world

Blast #1


Wyndham Lewis - 1914
    A facsimile edition of the first issue of the 'Blast', which documents in its in original format the raw energy, violent humor, graphic inventiveness and intellectual hard edge of the most compelling and vital magazine project of the modernist movement.