The Last American Valentine: Illustrated Poems to Seduce and Destroy


Derrick BrownCristin O'Keefe Aptowicz - 2008
    The Last American Valentine is a unique anthology of non-sappy love poetry and flash fiction. Poet Laureates, rock musicians, actors, famed prose writers and a few talented American barfly's have been handpicked, hunted down and crammed together with an artist the world has never met.

Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare


Octavio Paz - 1968
    The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.

'Pataphysics: A Useless Guide


Andrew Hugill - 2005
    Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, 'pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of 'pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously. Drawing on more than twenty-five years' research, Hugill maps the 'pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects 'pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of 'pataphysical history. In a Jarryesque touch, he provides these in reverse chronological order, beginning with a survey of 'pataphysics in the digital age and working backward to Jarry and beyond. He looks specifically at the work of Jean Baudrillard, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, J. G. Ballard, Asger Jorn, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Pr?vert, Antonin Artaud, Ren? Clair, the Marx Brothers, Joan Mir?, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and many others.

Harvest Poems: 1910-1960


Carl Sandburg - 1960
    “[Sandburg’s poetry] is independent, honest, direct, lyric, and it endures, clamorous and muted, magical as life itself” (New York Times). Introduction by Mark Van Doren.

Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972


Lucy R. Lippard - 1972
    Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology into which is woven a rich collection of original documents—including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period.

Quit Your Day Job, A Guide for the Self Published Author


H.P. Mallory - 2011
    HP demonstrates: * What is the best approach to take when creating book covers* How to optimize your book's description page* Choosing the category of your book* The question of pricing your book* The importance of Social Media and, more specifically, Facebook, Twitter and Blogging* How to get reviews including interviews with leading Review websites such as Dear Author* What to feature on your website* The importance of Search Engine Optimization* A Q&A with the people from Pubit!, the self publishing platform of Barnes and Noble* The seven steps of self publishing success from the owner of Smashwords, one of the largest and most well known self-publishing platforms* Tips and tidbits from Goodreads, the world's largest online book club website* And so much more!

Seychelle Collection Boxed Set Books 1-4


Christine Kling - 2012
    When boats break down, wreck or call for help, Seychelle and her tug Gorda are on the scene. Accidents do happen, but in South Florida, when somebody dies at sea, all too often it is murder. The Seychelle Collection Boxed Set Books #1-4 brings readers the opportunity to buy the entire Seychelle Sullivan series at one low price.Book #1 SURFACE TENSION On a steamy Florida morning Seychelle is answering a Mayday call launched from the five-million-dollar Broward yacht called Top Ten. Seychelle has a personal stake in this rescue: her former lover, Neal Garrett, is the yacht’s hired skipper. But being the first to reach Top Ten leads to a bloody payday. A beautiful woman has been stabbed to death onboard. And Garrett is nowhere to be found. T o find out what really happened to Neal Garrett, Seychelle must retrace his last steps, through two murders and a horrific crime wave, to a final confrontation with someone who may want to kill her . . . or be her salvation.Book #2 CROSS CURRENTFor Seychelle Sullivan, life is all about making a living, making love, and keeping her eye on the beauty that still remains in her beloved Florida. Then her life takes a turn when her tug intercepts with a swamped fishing boat in the Gulf Stream. Inside the boat are a murdered woman and a little girl in a white dress.Seychelle returns to shore with a traumatized Haitian girl named Solange. Determined to protect Solange, and somehow keep her from being sent back to Haiti, Seychelle becomes obsessed with the forces that nearly killed the girl. To get the answers she needs, Seychelle must return to where it all started: in the waters of the Gulf Stream, where people died for their dreams of freedom– and a man with a machete did the work of the devil himself.Book #3 BITTER ENDThe third book in the Seychelle Collection is loosely based on the real South Florida murder of Greek immigrant tycoon Gus Boolis, once the owner of South Florida's Sun Cruz Casino Gambling boats. Seychelle didn’t see the sniper who picked Nick Pontus off at the helm of his yacht, but she knows that there are plenty of people in South Florida who wanted to see the gambling-boat tycoon dead: the Russian mobsters looking for a piece of his casino action, the Indian gamers who resent his competition, and the ecological activists fighting his plans to develop Fort Lauderdale’s waterfront. But it’s Molly, Seychelle’s former childhood best friend and Nick’s ex-wife whom the cops zero in on. And despite her bitter feelings and against her better judgment, when her back-from-the-blue friend asks for help, Seychelle can’t just weigh anchor and cruise. She’s got to dive in.Book #4 WRECKERS’ KEYIn the 1800s, Key West was built by wrecking skippers who in feats of derring-do raced to shipping disasters to save valuable cargos from the ocean depths. Today, as too many boats chase too few wrecks, salvage has turned into a cutthroat corporate enterprise. And when a friend is killed, Seychelle begins to suspect a chilling scenario: that modern-day wreckers are causing yachts to crash onto the reefs–and killing off whoever gets in the way.Nestor Frias was piloting a billionaire’s luxury power yacht on its maiden voyage when it ran aground. A few days later, Frias was dead. His eight-months-pregnant widow is distraught, and a host of questions surround both Frias’s death and the ship’s accident. When another man dies while asking questions, Seychelle navigates the dangerous shoals and channels of the case and her life, unaware that a greater danger is looming: a murderous human storm designed perfectly for her.About the AuthorChristine Kling is the author of five nautical thrillers and one anthology of short stories. She lives aboard her 33-foot sailboat Talespinner and travels wherever the wind and

The Little Black Book of Marijuana: The Essential Guide to the World of Cannabis


Steve Elliott - 2011
    Learn about cannabis history and the issues around its legalization. Includes full-color photos of marijuana varieties.

Love, Poetry


Paul Éluard - 1929
    This bilingual edition translates Eluard's Love, Poetry (L'amour la poesie, 1929) for the first time into English. This popular work cemented Eluard's reputation internationally as one of France's greatest 20th century poets. Never out of print in France, this is it's debut in the English language.

Mondrian (Basic Art)


Susanne Deicher - 1994
    His main pictorial elements are horizontals and verticals, his preferred colours yellow, red and blue. Throughout his life, Mondrian (1872-1944) applied these elements in his quest for 'universal harmony'. This album presents his work.

De Kooning: An American Master


Mark Stevens - 2004
    In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s.The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene.Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.This is an authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master.

Critical Play: Radical Game Design


Mary Flanagan - 2009
    Here, the author provides a lively historical context for critical play through 20th-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art.

Autobiography


Andrew Wyeth - 1995
    The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist's work ever produced.

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists


Robert Hughes - 1990
    From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.   As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art.  In this book:  nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject.   For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists.  He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.”  He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic).   Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded.  His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture.  There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate.  And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s.   A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.

Amedeo Modigliani, 1884-1920: The Poetry of Seeing


Doris Krystof - 1996
    As an artist, the scandalous Modigliani made his name chiefly with his celebrated pictures of women, with almond eyes and long necks and bodies. His style had ancient roots that lay deep in classical antiquity or Africa. But his portraits of intellectual giants of the age, friends such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau or Diego Rivera, were inimitable also. In Doris Krystof's study, the scene Modigliani was the hero of comes alive, and his sensitive paintings and sculptures speak in tongues.