In these pages, I’ve tried to do this.” —Bruce Springsteen, from the pages of Born to RunIn 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs. He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as “The Big Bang”: seeing Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work, and shows us why the song “Born to Run” reveals more than we previously realized. Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks, or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll. Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs (“Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “The Rising,” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.

    A hotbed for hip hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy, it spawned some of the most significant art of the 20th century. It was where Jean-Michel Basquiat became an avant-garde street artist and painter, swiftly achieving worldwide fame. During the years before his death at the age of 27, he shared his life with his lover and muse, Suzanne Mallouk. A runaway from an unhappy home in Canada, Suzanne first met Jean-Michel in a bar on the Lower East Side in 1980. Thus began a tumultuous and passionate relationship that deeply influenced one of the most exceptional artists of our time. In emotionally resonant prose, award-winning author Jennifer Clement tells the story of the passion that swept Suzanne and Jean-Michel into a short-lived, unforgettable affair. A poetic interpretation like no other, Widow Basquiat is an expression of the unrelenting power of addiction, obsession and love.

    McGreevey of New Jersey made history when he stepped before microphones, declared "My truth is that I am a gay American," and announced his resignation. The story made international headlines—but what led to that moment was a human and political drama more complex and fascinating than anyone knew. Now, in this extraordinarily candid memoir, McGreevey shares his story of a life of ambition, moral compromise, and redemption.From childhood, McGreevey lived a kind of idealized American life. The son of working-class Irish Catholic parents, named for an uncle who died at Iwo Jima, he strove to exceed expectations in everything he did, meeting each new challenge as though his "future rode on every move." As a young man he was tempted by the priesthood, yet it was another calling—politics—that he found irresistible. Plunging early into the dangerous waters of New Jersey politics, he won three elections by the age of thirty-six, and soon thereafter nearly toppled the state's popular governor, Christie Todd Whitman, in a photo-finish election. Four years later, he won the governorship by a landslide.Throughout his adult life, however, Jim McGreevey had been forced to suppress a fundamental truth about himself: that he was gay. He knew at once that the only clear path to his dreams was to live a straight life, and so he split in two, accepting the traditional role of family man while denying his deepest emotions. And he discovered, to his surprise, that becoming a political player demanded ethical shortcuts that became as corrosive as living in the closet. In the cutthroat culture of political bosses, backroom deals, and the insidious practice known as "pay-to-play," he writes, "political compromises came easy to me because I'd learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them." His policy triumphs as governor were tempered by scandal, as the transgressions of his staff came back to haunt him. Yet only when a former lover threatened to expose him did he finally confront his divided soul, and find the authentic self that had always eluded him.More than a coming-out memoir, The Confession is the story of one man's quest to repair the rift between his public and private selves, at a time in our culture when the personal and political have become tangled like frayed electric cables. Teeming with larger-than-life characters, written with honesty, grace, and rare insight into what it means to negotiate the minefields of American public life, it may be among the most honest political memoirs ever written.

    Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art.Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings.This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.

    In his search for what went wrong in the comedian's life, the author uncovers the seedier side of the American star system. A film based on the book has been made.

    His technique-which earned him a reputation as "The Norman Rockwell of cheesecake"-involved photographing models and then painting them into gorgeous hyper-reality, with longer legs, more flamboyant hair and gravity-defying busts, and in the process making them the perfect moral-boosting eye-candy for every homesick private.

    While many of these are among his most famous, others may be less well known, but they are all essential to the development of Dalis artistic philosophy.

    Cologne's Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to international photography. The L. Fritz Gruber collection, from which this book is drawn, is one of the most important in Germany and one of the most representative anywhere in the world, constituting the core of the museum's holdings. This book provides a fascinating insight into the collection's rich diversity; from conceptual art to abstraction to reportage, all of the major movements and genres are represented via a vast selection of the century's most remarkable photographs. From Ansel Adams to Piet Zwart, over 850 works are presented in alphabetical order by photographer, with descriptive texts and photographers' biographical details.

    Inside the walls of Polo Ralph Lauren, though, he was long seen by some as a narcissist, an insecure ditherer, and, at times, a rampaging tyrant.Michael Gross, author of the bestsellers Model and 740 Park, lays bare the truths of this fashion emperor's rise, and reveals not only the secrets of his meteoric success in marketing our shared fantasies, but also a widely unknown side that's behind the designer’s chic façade.

    After all, both authors engaged in a profoundly ambivalent excoriation of their native Ireland. And while O'Brien's sexual politics can make Joyce seem like a fusty Edwardian by comparison, both novelists got a certain amount of flack for their erotic frankness. So this latest match from the Penguin Lives series seems like a good one--and largely lives up to its promise. O'Brien makes no pretense of competing with Richard Ellmann's immense, magisterial portrait. Instead she has concocted in James Joyce something that resembles one of her own novels: a spirited, lyrical, and acerbic narrative that just happens to feature the author of Ulysses in the starring role. Having experienced the constrictions of Irish life firsthand, O'Brien is particularly good on Joyce's downwardly mobile childhood. Was his resulting hatred of his native land exaggerated? Apparently not: No one who has not lived in such straitened and hideous circumstances can understand the battering of that upbringing. All the more because they had come down in the world, a tumble from semi-gentility, servants, a nicely laid table, cut glasses, a piano, the accoutrements of middle-class life, relegated to the near slums in Mountjoy Square, the gaunt spectral mansions in which children sat like mice in the gaping doorways. The author also gives a vivid sense of her subject's devotion to his art, an altar upon which he happily sacrificed his family, health, friends, and even his eyesight. She is stubborn in her defense of Joyce's sublime irresponsibility, which she ascribes to all writers: "It is a paradox that while wrestling with the language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glisteningly depict." O'Brien's own wrestling match in James Joyce has, to be honest, its share of pins and minor pratfalls: there are some embarrassing repetitions and punctuational oddities, and her occasional assimilation of Joyce's own language is an awkward (if heartfelt) form of homage. Still, when she sticks to her own inflections, her account of this "funnominal man" is an eminently readable and entertaining dose of Irish bitters. --James Marcus

    This apotheosis of banal, everyday objects simultaneously constituted a criticism of the traditional elitist understanding of art. Almost alone among artists, Lichtenstein pursued the question of how an image becomes a work of art. Wholly in keeping with the spirit of the Classical Modern, he held that it was not the "rank" of the picture's subject that lends the picture its artistic character, but rather the artist's formal treatment of it. To Lichtenstein, however, this position seemed far too broad to be seriously pursued. Developed in the early 60s, Lichtenstein's grid technique, with its allusion to the mass-production of graphic art, allowed the painter to give vent to his own artistic scepticism. In the 60s and 70s, Lichtenstein expanded his formal repertoire of techniques for creating distance and irony by means of an idiosyncratic process of abstraction and especially by his use of his numerous art quotations.

    London is a vast sprawling metropolis, constantly evolving and growing, yet throughout its complex past and shifting present, the humor, unique character, and bulldog spirit of the people has stayed constant. This book salutes all those Londoners, their city, and its history. In addition to the wealth of images included in this book, many previously unpublished, London’s history is told through hundreds of quotations, lively essays, and references from key movies, books, and records. From Victorian London to the Swinging 60s; from the Battle of Britain to Punk; from the Festival of Britain to the 2012 Olympics; from the foggy cobbled streets to the architectural masterpieces of the millennium; from rough pubs to private drinking clubs; from Royal Weddings to raves, from the charm of the East End to the wonders of the Westminster; from Chelsea girls to Hoxton hipsters; from the power to the glory: in page after page of stunning photographs, reproduced big and bold like the city itself, London at last gets the photographic tribute it deserves. Photography by: Eve Arnold, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Donovan, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton, Bert Hardy, Evelyn Hofer, Tony Ray Jones, Nadav Kander, Roger Mayne, Linda McCartney, Don McCullin, Norman Parkinson, Martin Parr, Irving Penn, Rankin, Grace Robertson, Lord Snowdon, William Henry Fox Talbot, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans, and many, many others.

    The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away...Although his childhood in Middlesbrough was normal on the surface, it was tinged by the loss of his dad, and his own various misadventures (now infamous from his appearances on Would I Lie to You?), from burning down the family home to starting a short-lived punk band called Dog Dirt. As an adult, he trained as a solicitor and moved to London. Though he was doing pretty well (the South London Press once crowned him 'The Cockroach King' after a successful verdict), a chance encounter in a pub in the 1980s with a young comedian going by the name Vic Reeves set his life on a different track. And now, six years on, the heart condition that once threatened his career has instead led to new success on BBC2's Gone Fishing.Warm, profound, and irrepressibly funny, And Away... is Bob's full life story (with a few lies thrown in for good measure).

    Here was a group that looked as though it came not only from another era, but from another planet - a band in which art, fashion and music would combine to create, in Bryan Ferry's words, 'above all, a state of mind'. Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay, and Phil Manzanera, Re-make/Re-model tells how Pop Art, the 1960s underground, and Swinging London were transformed into a unique sound and look - theatrical, arch, literate. clever, sexy, thrilling. In the tradition of Jean Stein and George Plimpton's Edie, Re-make/Re-model is the story of extraordinary individuals and exceptional creativity - and nothing less than the history of an era in music and pop culture.""Exquisitely written...as much a work of art as its subject." - The Observer"Innovative and intelligent." - Publishers Weekly"Michael Bracewell is the most adroitly gifted writer of his generation." - Morrissey

    That’s why Claire Wineland’s memoir, Every Breath I Take, Surviving and Thriving With Cystic Fibrosis, is so important. With her co-author, Chynna Bracha Levin, Claire describes with precision, honesty, and a remarkable sense of humor just what it’s like to live with an illness that is so often fatal. The book is a must read for anyone who feels compassion for a child, a relative, or friend going through an intense or even life-threatening illness. Claire explains exactly what it’s like to live as normal a life as possible while taking care of a condition that requires constant treatment and frequent hospitalization. Yet there’s nothing grim about Claire’s journey as she describes it. Claire finds the sunny side of life and the spirituality of her experiences in ways that captivate and amaze the reader. It’s impossible to come away from the book without a renewed sense of compassion and sensitivity toward anyone suffering from a serious illness. The book is required reading for anyone—adult or child—who wants to understand how it truly is possible to survive and thrive, no matter what.