In none of them would he find the wife to seal the emotional bond that he so perfectly imagined and ardently desired. He described it, too, in his correspondence, not only in the remarkable, justly famous letters exchanged with his brother Theo, but also in heartfelt missives to his aggrieved mother, his loyal sister Wil, and his devoted sister-in-law Johanna. Focusing especially on van Gogh’s letters to these three steadfast women he called his sisters, award-winning author Derek Fell examines Vincent’s interior life and poignantly documents his emotional decline. Indeed, the blows that Vincent’s psyche suffered—like his rejection by Kee and a dramatic showdown with her father in which the devastated Vincent held his hand in a lantern’s flame—continually undermined his self-worth. In a sensitive reading and astute interpretation of van Gogh’s own written words, Fell illuminates the passions that at once commanded Vincent’s genius and tormented his heart. Many illustrations are included in this revealing life of the artist, as seen through the lens of his loves and losses.

    To survive in the most sophisticated - and the most scathing - nation on Earth you will need to understand the many peculiarities of the (very peculiar) French culture. And for that you need A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi.If you want to fit in with the French you'll have to know how to deal with sardonic waiters; why French children hate Charlemagne; the etiquette of kissing, joke-telling and drinking songs, what to do with a bidet, the correct recipe for a salade nicoise and, of course, how to convey absolute, shattering indifference with a single syllable (Bof!).Charles Timoney, the author of Pardon My French, provides a practical, pleasurable guide to the charms of the Gallic people - from their daily routines to their peerless gesticulations, from their come-ons to their put-downs. Read on and put the oh la la back into your French vacances. Your inner gaul will thank you for it.

    The "Getting Started" section will give you a great overview and help explain some things for the very beginner. Next, learn some easy stitch patterns in the section "Basic Stitches." When you're ready to try your first project, take a look at the "Potholder Patterns" section, but make sure to read the "Pattern Information & Notes" first for some important stuff that pertains to all the patterns. The ebook is also filled with photos to help you along your way.Why Potholders?Potholders are a great project to work with Tunisian crochet because:• The back/wrong side is hidden between the two layers• Tunisian crochet makes a very thick final product• Working square shapes is easy for the beginnerHave fun, and happy hooking to you!

    But it's not a world populated by pinstriped men waiting to rob you, steal your savings and do nasty things to small kittens. You can win. (And you never have to pay a penny in tax!) This book shows you how. Robbie Burns, bestselling author of The Naked Trader, has been spread betting for years. He explains why it's an indispensable tool to use alongside normal investing or trading. Especially as you can make money even if the market goes down. Robbie takes you through everything from how it works, to managing your risk, working out exposure, and how, often, doing nothing is the best move! He explains the ins and outs of successfully betting on shares in his trademark down-to-earth style, covering everything you need to know. From the simple stuff through to proven strategies, including those that can be used in different markets - it's all here. There are also behind-the-scenes visits to two top spread betting firms. But it's a big, bad old world out there, and there are a whole heap of mistakes you can make, an awful lot of money you can lose. Rounding up spine-chilling traders' tales of spread bets gone wrong, and using all he has learnt from making silly mistakes himself, Robbie also helps you learn what not to do. This is the ultimate guide to spread betting - how to do it, have fun and hopefully make a few quid.

    His novels are fantastic, brooding and violent.As a journalist, he is solid and well-formed. He has an approachable informality, unawed by massive celebrity His straightforward interviews with Leonardo Di Caprio, Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Mould disarm their subjects to find an urgent, everyday humanity. The feature articles on AIDS, youth culture, and contemporary art take their subjects passionately. But the obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William Burroughs are as bracing as a stoic's evaluation of a dead god.All Ears for the first time collects this major 20th-Century novelist's lesser-known work. It will also include several new unpublished piece. All Ears pours necessary critical insight onto the time's leading cultural luminaries.

    

    But outside the lab, Herzog also devoted himself to what was, at the time, an unusual and even frowned-upon medium, at least artistically: color photography. Laboring away as a virtually anonymous pioneer in this field, some 20 years before William Eggleston's watershed show at the Museum of Modern Art, Herzog was quietly documenting in rich Kodachrome the streets of Vancouver: its supermarkets, gas stations, bars, urban scenery and above all its working class culture. Herzog used slide film to make his photographs, which limited his ability to exhibit them and further marginalized his work; but in recent decades, happily, this color pioneer has drawn great acclaim, and this volume, the largest Herzog monograph yet published, does marvelous justice to his rich oeuvre.

    James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the minutiae of Leopold Bloom’s day, including its unspeakable details, unfold with careful precision in its pages. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately banned the novel as "obscene, lewd, and lascivious.” Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933.   Literary historian Kevin Birmingham follows Joyce’s years as a young writer, his feverish work on his literary masterpiece, and his ardent love affair with Nora Barnacle, the model for Molly Bloom. Joyce and Nora socialized with literary greats like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Beach. Their support helped Joyce fight an array of anti-vice crusaders while his book was disguised and smuggled, pirated and burned in the United States and Britain. The long struggle for publication added to the growing pressures of Joyce’s deteriorating eyesight, finances and home life.   Salvation finally came from the partnership of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a dogged civil liberties lawyer and founder of the ACLU. With their stewardship, the case ultimately rested on the literary merit of Joyce’s master work. The sixty-year-old judicial practices governing obscenity in the United States were overturned because a federal judge could get inside Molly Bloom’s head.   Birmingham’s archival work brings to light new information about both Joyce and the story surrounding Ulysses. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say yes to Ulysses.

    Examining visual art from 1980 to the present, it takes an intriguing and accessible approach that motivates students and other readers to think actively about and discuss contemporary art--what it means and how it means what it does. The opening chapter provides a concise overview of the period, analyzing how four key changes (the rise of new media, a growing awareness of diversity, the influence of theory, and interactions with everyday visual culture) have resulted in an art world with dramatically expanded boundaries. Reflecting the paradigm shift from a formalist way of teaching studio art to more varied and open-ended concepts, the remaining six chapters each deal with a key theme--time, place, the body, language, identity, and spirituality. Each chapter features an introduction to the thematic topic; a brief look at historical precedents and influences; a detailed analysis of how contemporary artists have responded to and embodied aspects of the theme in specific works; and an in-depth and fascinating profile of an artist who has extensively explored aspects of the theme in his or her work. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 shows how art can be interpreted from several different angles: techniques and materials, historical circumstances, aesthetic qualities, theoretical issues, and an artist's ideas and intentions. Writing in a lucid and engaging style, the authors skillfully reveal the multiple levels of meaning in artworks, drawing connections between contemporary art, art of the past, and everyday existence. The volume is enhanced by 87 illustrations--19 in full color--that demonstrate an immense variety of materials, subjects, and styles. These well-chosen examples will help readers learn to critically describe, interpret, and evaluate contemporary visual art. A bibliography and a timeline that situates contemporary art in the context of major events in world history, art, and popular culture are also included. An ideal core text for courses in contemporary art history, Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 can also be used as a supplement in modern art, art appreciation, art criticism/theory, and studio art courses.

    

    For parents helping with their children’s homework, casual theatre-goers who want to enhance their enjoyment of the most popular plays and the general reader who feels they should probably know more about Britain’s most splendid scribe, Shakespeare for Grown-ups covers Shakespeare's time; his personal life; his language; his key themes; his less familiar works and characters; his most famous speeches and quotations; phrases and words that have entered general usage, and much more. With lively in-depth chapters on all the major works including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Richard II, Henry V, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth, Shakespeare for Grown-ups is the only guide you’ll ever need.

    The satisfaction of seeing your finished quilt spread out on your bead or draped over the back of your couch will make every hour of stitching worth it ten times over!! A well-made quilt can last for a life time, while serving to not only warm your bed at night, but to brighten up your home with colors, patterns, and beauty. In this book, you will learn how to create striking and unique quilting pieces. Making quilts is easy, fun, and maybe even addicting. Even the smallest patchwork idea can quickly to become a big, full, colorful projects Start making your own quilts today, and open up a world of color, creativity, and personal expression that you may not have even knew existed. Included in this book are 10 beautiful quilt projects, so you can kick-start the learning process! These projects include pictures and a detailed step by step method to assist beginner's in their quest to master the art! Here is a preview of what you will learn… The proper way to think through the quilting process, before starting a project The materials and tools needed to complete a quilting project How to combine colors and techniques to create beautiful patterns Finishing techniques that will make you look like a pro 10 original projects to practice all that is taught in this book Download your copy today!

    The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and nonfiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.

    As a black musician himself, Arthur Taylor was able to ask his subjects hard questions about the role of black artists in a white society. Free to speak their minds, these musicians offer startling insights into their music, their lives, and the creative process itself. This expanded edition is supplemented with previously unpublished interviews with Dexter Gordon and Thelonious Monk, a new introduction by the author, and new photographs.Notes and Tones consists of twenty-nine no-holds-barred conversations which drummer Arthur Taylor held with the most influential jazz musicians of the ’60s and ’70s—including:

    It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.