My Life


Marc Chagall - 1923
    Although long out-of-print, it remains one of the most extraordinarily inventive and beautifully told of all autobiographies. The text is accompanied by twenty plates which Chagall prepared especially to illustrate his life story. Together, the words and pictures paint an incomparable portrait of one of the greatest painters of this century, and of the now vanished milieu which inspired him.

Nijinsky: A Life


Lucy Moore - 2013
    Like so many since, Rodin recognised that in Nijinsky classical ballet had one of the greatest and most original artists of the twentieth century, in any genre. And his life is the stuff of legends: a story of great beauty and great tragedy.Immersed in the world of dance from his childhood, he found his natural home in the Imperial Theatre and the Ballets Russes, and a powerful sponsor in Sergei Diaghilev - until a dramatic and public failure ended his career and set him on a route to madness. As a dancer, he was acclaimed as godlikefor his extraordinary grace and elevation, but the opening of Stravinsky'sThe Rite of Springsaw furious brawls between admirers of his radically unballetic choreography and horrified traditionalists.Though 2013 marks theRite's centenary, Nijinsky's story has lost none of its power to shock, fascinate and move. Adored and reviled in his lifetime, his phenomenal talent was shadowed by schizophrenia and an intense but destructive relationship with his lover, Diaghilev.'I am alive'he wrote in his diary,'and so I suffer'. In the first biography for forty years, bestselling author ofMaharanisLucy Moore examines a career defined by two forces - inspired performance and an equally headline-grabbing talent for controversy.

Master Builders of the Middle Ages


David Jacobs - 1969
    It is difficult for us now, even with all our engineering and architectural skills, to imagine the extraordinary ways these medieval houses of worship were constructed. Midway through the twelfth century, the building of cathedrals became a crusade to erect awe-inspiring churches across Europe. In their zeal, bishops, monks, masons, and workmen created the architectural style known as Gothic, arguably Christianity’s greatest contribution to the world’s art and architecture. The style evolved slowly and almost accidentally as medieval artisans combined ingenuity, inspiration, and brute strength to create a fitting monument to their God. Here are the dramatic stories of the building of Saint-Denis, Notre Dame, Chartres, Reims, and other Gothic cathedrals.

Slayer 66 2/3: The Jeff & Dave Years. A Metal Band Biography.


D.X. FerrisEster Segarra - 2013
    This full-length, exhaustively researched account of the thrash kings' career recaps and reevaluates the years guitar hero Jeff Hanneman and drum legend Dave Lombardo were in the group. Over the course of 59 chapters, 400 footnotes and three appendices, it profiles the members and presents dramatic scenes from 32 years in the Abyss: A fresh look at the group's early days. Reign in Blood tours. A European invasion. The Palladium riot. The seat cushion chaos concert. Newly unearthed details from Lombardo's turbulent history with the band. Historical artwork and photos never seen in public before. The entire diabolical discography. Hanneman’s hard times. The Big Four’s big year. Lombardo’s final exit. The top 11 Hanneman tributes. The mosh memorial service. Untold stories. Updates. And relevant digressions, including a contrasting look at other contemporaries and cutting-edge extreme bands. Over decades, Slayer experience triumph and loss, but never defeat, whether it's at the hands of rivals, peers, America's most infamous church, or the United States government itself. In addition to extensive archival material, this book features original content from the band, key affiliates, and firsthand witnesses, including Metal Blade CEO Brian Slagel, former tour manager Doug Goodman, engineer Bill Metoyer, former Metal Blade exec William "DJ Will" Howell, and cover artist Albert Cuellar (who went on to work with Tim Burton, Sublime, and Sir Mix-A-Lot). It also includes Jeff Hanneman's original diagram for the Live Undead picture disc (spoiler: it's a stick-figure sketch). Slayer fans will never see — or hear — the thrash metal champions the same way. 33 photos and 11 illustrations include lost artwork by Hell Awaits artist Albert Cuellar and stunning exclusive pictures by Harald Oimoen (of Murder in the Front Row renown). Written by D.X. Ferris, an Ohio Society of Professional Journalists Reporter of the Year and author of "Slayer's Reign in Blood," which is book no. 57 in Bloomsbury Academic's prestigious 33 1/3 series. The bargain-priced e-book edition features extensive interactive content, and can be read on any smart phone, tablet, computer, or portable communications device (with free Kindle software).

Paris


Julian Green - 1983
    Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards, alleys and hidden places. Whether evoking the cool of a deserted church on a hot summer's day, remembering Notre Dame in a winter storm in 1940, describing chestnut trees lit up at night like 'Japanese lanterns' or lamenting the passing of street cries and old buildings, his book is filled with unforgettable imagery. It is a meditation on getting lost and wasting time, and on what it truly means to know a city.

Alfred Stieglitz: Camera Work - The Complete Photographs 1903-1917


Pam Roberts - 1978
    Around the turn of the 20th century, he founded the Photo-Secession, a progressive movement concerned with advancing the creative possibilities of photography, and by 1903 began publishing Camera Work, an avant-garde magazine devoted to voicing the ideas, both in images and words, of the Photo-Secession. Camera Work was the first photo journal whose focus was visual, rather than technical, and its illustrations were of the highest quality hand-pulled photogravure printed on Japanese tissue. This book brings together all photographs from the journal’s 50 issues.

Charles Faudree's Country French Living


Charles Faudree - 2003
    Charles Faudree's Country French Living features his newest room designs. From the entryway to the dressing room to walls, dining rooms, and outdoor spaces, Charles teaches principles of design that make a house a Country French home:The importance of the bedroom and how to make it a soothing sanctuary, deserving as much attention to beauty and detail as the rest of the home.How to identify a pivotal fabric, a dominant color, or one magnificent antique that will dictate the style and design for a whole room.How books can create an inviting atmosphere and add a warmth all their own.How a valance is the ultimate decorating deceit, and how window treatments express the personality of a room and add a proper finish.How to use walls as they are meant--as a stage on which to display one's favorite collections.How to use symmetrical groupings that provide a sense if balance and order in a roomCharles Faudree's Country French Living also shows how to make the most of accessories like lamps, pillows, baskets, paintings, and more to finish a room and provide the charm and character so important in a well-designed French Country setting. Country French Living reveals that the true test of a beautiful room is in the details.Charles Faudree's clients are found throughout America as well as in Spain and Jamaica. Five individual homes designed by Charles, including his own, have been featured on HGTV. During his twenty-five-year career as an interior designer, his work has appeared in many design magazines and decorating books. Six of his own homes have been featured in Traditional Home magazine, where he was a Design Award Winner in 1995. He has also been featured in Better Homes & Gardens Special Interest Publications, Renovation Style, Veranda, Southern Accents, and House Beautiful. In 2002 he was named one of America's top 100 interior designers.

Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century


Ruth Harris - 2010
    Over the following years, attempts to correct this injustice tore France apart, inflicting wounds on the society which have never fully healed.But how did a fairly obscure miscarriage of justice come to break up families in bitterness, set off anti-Semitic riots across the French empire, and nearly trigger a coup d'état? How did a violently reactionary, obscurantist attitude become so powerful in a country that saw itself as the home of enlightenment? Why did the battle over a junior army officer occupy the foremost writers and philosophers of the age, from Émile Zola to Marcel Proust, Émile Durkheim, and many others? What drove the anti-Dreyfusards to persist in their efforts even after it became clear that much of the prosecution's evidence was faked?Drawing upon thousands of previously unread and unconsidered sources, prizewinning historian Ruth Harris goes beyond the conventional narrative of truth loving democrats uniting against proto-fascists. Instead, she offers the first in-depth history of both sides in the Affair, showing how complex interlocking influences—tensions within the military, the clashing demands of justice and nationalism, and a tangled web of friendships and family connections—shaped both the coalition working to free Dreyfus and the formidable alliances seeking to protect the reputation of the army that had convicted him. Sweeping and engaging, Dreyfus offers a new understanding of one of the most contested and significant moments in modern history.

Lily Tomlin: The Kindle Singles Interview (Kindle Single)


Tom Roston - 2015
    Of course, the 75-year-old actress and comedian has been turning out unforgettable roles for the better part of five decades, from Ernestine, the condescending telephone operator on “Laugh-In,” to Violet Newstead, the secretary in “9 to 5.” In this wide-ranging, intimate and often hilarious Kindle Singles Interview, Tomlin covers all aspects of her extraordinary life and career, turning a drab Manhattan hotel room into a one-woman show with tales of her childhood in Detroit, her early years in New York, and the origins of her classic characters.Tom Roston is a veteran journalist and author of two previous Kindle Singles Interviews, with Ted Allen and Ken Burns. Roston began his career at The Nation and Vanity Fair, before working at Premiere magazine as a senior editor. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and his book, I Lost It At The Video Store, a filmmakers' oral history, will be published by The Critical Press in September. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in New York City.Cover design by Adil Dara.

Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company


James R. Mellow - 1974
    In Charmed Circle, James R. Mellow has re-created this fascinating world and the complex woman who dominated it. His engaging narrative illuminates Stein’s writing—now celebrated along with the work of such literary giants as Joyce and Woolf—including her difficult early periods, which adapted cubism and abstraction to the written word. Rich with detail and insight, it conveys both the serene rhythms of daily life with her devoted partner, Alice B. Toklas, and the radical pulse and dramatic upheavals of her exciting era.Spanning the years from 1903, when Stein first arrived in Paris, to her final days at the end of the Second World War, Charmed Circle is a penetrating and lively account of a writer at the heart of modernity.

The Road to Villa Page: A He Said/She Said Memoir of Buying Our Dream Home in France


Cynthia Royce - 2020
    Our story begins with falling in love with France, specifically the enchanting Dordogne. We weren’t the first and we won’t be the last. The region was an inspiration to prehistoric man, as the earliest known works of art are to be found in the nearby caves of Lascaux. From the 1000 chateaux perched on towering cliffs overhanging the meandering Dordogne River to the countless plus beaux villages (most beautiful villages) dotting the region, it is truly a magical place.The first book is a roller-coaster ride of the ups and downs of making the dream a reality, beginning with, Oh my God, are we really doing this?! To looking for the home, getting a loan, wading through the red tape of actually moving, and studying French! Finally, the most important part of making “our” dream come true, adopting a baby girl to make the journey complete.

Paintings in the Louvre


Lawrence Gowing - 1994
    Superbly reproduced in full color, here are all of the most important paintings in the Louvre. The works of the great French masters - which amount to over half of the collection - are well represented, with paintings by Poussi, Fragonard, David, Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, and Corot, to name only a few. The Mona Lisa is included, together with a good selection of Leonardo da Vinci's other paintings. Many other great Italian masterpieces are reproduced - from the early gilded panels of Giotto to altarpieces by Fra Angelico, from frescoes by Botticelli to canvases by Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, and their successors. Here too are fine examples from the Flemish, Dutch, German, English, and Spanish schools, including Bosch, Durer, Vermeer, Turner, and El Greco.

Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono


Lisa Crystal Carver - 2012
    A must-read for art and music fans interested in going beyond the stereotyped observations of Yoko as a Lennon hanger-on or inconsequential avant noisemaker.

Love on the Left Bank


Ed van der Elsken - 1999
    Elsken focuses on the Left Bank of Paris in the 1950s—a time when it was recognised as a centre of creative ferment which would determine the cultural agenda of a generation. With its unconventional, gritty, snapshot-like technique the work has been acclaimed as expanding the boundaries of documentary photography.

Fabritius and the Goldfinch


Deborah Davis - 2014
     Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novel, The Goldfinch, introduced millions of readers to a painting that becomes a lifelong obsession. Painted in 1654 by Carel Fabritius, the work is of a small bird, chained to its perch. This mysterious portrait, a masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age, has been lost and found, adored and abandoned, for nearly four centuries. Now more famous than ever, this painting is the subject of its own book—a look behind the scenes at its creation and the tumultuous life of its creator. This gripping, true story of adventure, romance, and artistic fervor has never before been told and will enthrall readers of the now famous novel. Set against the vibrant backdrop of Holland in the seventeenth century, when it was the economic capital of the world, the book is populated by a glittering crowd of the wealthy and young, high society with appetites for success and excess. Holland was the center of the art world as well, boasting both Rembrandt, (Fabritius' mentor), and Vermeer (his rival). And there is Carel Fabritius himself—handsome, talented, hell-bent on greatness, but unable to escape tragedy. Yet through The Goldfinch, he achieves immortality. Deborah Davis is the author of the best-selling Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X, Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball, Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America, and the prize-winning Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation. Cover design by Adil Dara