Based on the 1999 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture, this book uses the work of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers to argue that the specifity of mediums, even modernist ones, can never be simply collapsed into the physicality of their support.

    Belief is a technology for softening the landscape. The world becomes more beautiful when God is in it. Here is what happens inside a person's body when they starve.Written in the shadow of Georg Buchner's Lenz at razor pitch, Aliens & Anorexia, first published in 2000, defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. The book unfolds like a set of Chinese boxes, using stories and polemics to travel through a maze that spirals back into itself. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness, the artist Paul Thek, Kraus herself, and "Africa," her virtual S&M partner who's shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest Woods for the winter to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus argues for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor "self-esteem." Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism this culture hands us through its food.

    Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005, was Oliver's partner for many years, a pioneer gallery owner and photographer. Our World weaves forty-nine of Cook's photographs and selections from her journals with Oliver's extended writings, both reminiscence and reflection, in prose and in poetry. The result is an intimate revelation of their lives and art.Within the art world, Molly Malone Cook made her reputation as an early advocate of photography as an art form; she was a champion of the work of now-famous photographers, including Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, and W. Eugene Smith. There are famous faces here as well, captured by Cook's camera, among them Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum.Cook and Oliver also lived among writers, and Cook caught several on film, including Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer. Other artists and dozens of wonderful characters and scenes are also immortalized by Cook's unfailing eye for telling detail and composition. Oliver writes of Cook's work, the people they knew, and the places they visited or lived. The poet's beautiful text captures not only the vivifying qualities of her partner's work, but the texture of their shared world. In Mary Oliver's words, Cook taught the beginner poet "to see, with searching attention and compassion."

    Drawing readers into the imaginative world of William Blake, Frye succeeded in making Blake's voice and vision intelligible to the wider public. Distinguished by its range of reference, elegance of expression, comprehensiveness of coverage, coherence of argument, and sympathy to its subject, Fearful Symmetry was immediately recognized as a landmark of Blake criticism. Fifty years later, it is still recognized as having ensured the acceptance of Blake as a canonical poet by permanently dispelling the widespread notion that he was the mad creator of an incomprehensible private symbolism.For this new edition, the text has been revised and corrected in accordance with the principles of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye series. Frye's original annotation has been supplemented with references to currently standard editions of Blake and others, and many new notes have been provided, identifying quotations, allusions, and cultural references. An introduction by Ian Singer provides biographical and critical context for the book, an overview of its contents, and an account of its reception.

    This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement.

    Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.”     In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth‑century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.

    From the ultimate David Bowie expert comes an exploration of the final four decades of his musical career, covering every song he wrote, performed or produced.From the ultimate David Bowie expert comes this exploration of the final four decades of the popstar's musical career, covering every song he wrote, performed or produced from 1976 to 2016.Starting with Low, the first of Bowie's Berlin albums, and finishing with Blackstar, his final masterpiece released just days before his death in 2016, each song is annotated in depth and explored in essays that touch upon the song's creation, production, influences and impact.

    These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.

    

    Yoel Hoffmann explores the attitudes and customs surrounding death in historical and present-day Japan and gives examples of how these have been reflected in the nation's literature in general. The development of writing jisei is then examined—from the poems of longing of the early nobility and the more "masculine" verses of the samurai to the satirical death poems of later centuries. Zen Buddhist ideas about death are also described as a preface to the collection of Chinese death poems by Zen monks that are also included. Finally, the last section contains three hundred twenty haiku, some of which have never been assembled before, in English translation and romanized in Japanese.

    H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the act of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid-queer stuff-but not bad."