By turns passionate and ironic, "Aunt Fay" makes Alice think--not only about books and literature, but also life and culture.

    It is packed with fascinating information that I didn't know... I shall give it to lots of friends." —Jonathan Lynn, comedy legendA fascinating field guide from neuroscientist and opera singer Indre Viskontas that investigates what music is and how it can change us for the better—from deep in our neurons to across our entire society. Learn how certain songs carry us through a tough workout, comfort us after a breakup, or unite 50,000 diverse fans. A vibrant and smart gift for any audiophile—hip-hop fans, classically trained pianists, or vinyl collectors—readers will think about their favorite songs in a whole new way by the end of this book. • Find out how your mind transforms sounds into human experiences• Discover how music connects us, heals us, and changes us for the better • Learn from renowned musicians, neuroscientists, and authors"Indre Viskontas, combining her deep knowledge of neuroscience and music, has lifted the veil on the mysterious effects of music to move us, showing us not only how the human brain creates the magical patterns of music but also why music has the power to affect us like no other form of communication. An extremely important and inspiring book." —Robert Greene, best-selling author of The 48 Laws of PowerReaders of How Poetry Can Change Your Heartor The Psychology of Music will love this book• Music lovers and audiophiles• Musicians • Anyone interested in neuroscience

    Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinema vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator’s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.

    Over more than four decades, he built a reputation writing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and, later, arguing onscreen with rival Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel and later Richard Roeper about the movies they loved and loathed. But Ebert went well beyond a mere “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Readers could always sense the man behind the words, a man with interests beyond film and a lifetime’s distilled wisdom about the larger world. Although the world lost one of its most important critics far too early, Ebert lives on in the minds of moviegoers today, who continually find themselves debating what he might have thought about a current movie.The Great Movies IV is the fourth—and final—collection of Roger Ebert’s essays, comprising sixty-two reviews of films ranging from the silent era to the recent past. From films like The Cabinet of Caligari and Viridiana that have been considered canonical for decades to movies only recently recognized as masterpieces to Superman, The Big Lebowski, and Pink Floyd: The Wall, the pieces gathered here demonstrate the critical acumen seen in Ebert’s daily reviews and the more reflective and wide-ranging considerations that the longer format allowed him to offer. Ebert’s essays are joined here by an insightful foreword by film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, the current editor-in-chief of the official Roger Ebert website, and a touching introduction by Chaz Ebert. A fitting capstone to a truly remarkable career, The Great Movies IV will introduce newcomers to some of the most exceptional movies ever made, while revealing new insights to connoisseurs as well.

    Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons.Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant: a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.

    With eight sections ranging from Food Fights to Fast Food, The World's Kitchen to Why I Cook, this stellar collection features both established food writers and rising stars who serve up their culinary forays, musings, and discoveries. By turns luminous, nostalgic, witty, sensual, and sometimes just plain funny, this delectable sampler will invoke your imagination and tantalize your taste buds-whether you're in the mood for tartare-or tacos.Food fights --Waiting for asparagus / by Barbara Kingsolver --Local heroes? / by Barry Estabrook --Rare tuna / by Todd Kliman --French revolution / by Violaine Charest-Sigouin --Do recipes make you a better cook? / by Daniel Patterson --You may kiss the chef's napkin ring / by Frank Bruni --Discovering new worlds / by Francis Lam --Feast of burden / by Sara Deseran --Organicize me / by Michael A. Stusser --Home cooking --Kitchen existential / by David Leite --Cast iron skillet / by Andrea King Collier --Death by lobster pad Thai / by Steve Almond --Alabama's best covered-dish dinner / by John T. Edge --The age of casseroles / by Irene Sax --Someone's in the kitchen --The great carrot caper / by Dan Barber --Spoon-fed / by John Grossmann --The Harveys circus / by Marco Pierre White and James Steen --The best chef in the world / by Alan Richman --Building the perfect pizza / by Laurie Winer --Sharing in the feast with Johnny Apple / by Adam Noagourney --Dining around --My Miami / by Anthony Bourdain --Then there were none / by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl --Precision cuisine : the art of feeding 800 a night in style / by Melissa Clark --The greatest restaurant on earth / by Ivy Knight --Are you lonesome tonight? / by Gail Shepherd --Mood food / by Tim Gihring --Wedded bliss / by Jason Sheehan --Post-it love / by Brett Anderson --Fast food --Don't call it a hot dog / by Joe Yonan --In search of the transcendent taqueria / by Bill Addison --Porno burrito / by Jonathan Gold --Las fabulosas taco trucks / by Robb Walsh --The world's kitchen --The soulful crêpes of Brittany / by Nancy Coons --Shanghai high / by Adam Sachs --Old school Madrid / by Anya Von Bremzen --Visiting the old city / by Madhur Jaffrey --Waiting for a cappuccino / by Carolyn Thériault --The Japanese paradigm / by John Kessler --The insidious rise of cosmo-cuisine / by Salma Abdelnour --The meat of the matter --Meat / by James Sturz --What's a stake at the butcher shop / by Pete Wells --The best burger / by Raymond Sokolov --Steak, well done / by Colman Andrews --Personal tastes --A memorable fruit / by Shuna Fish Lydon --A sugar binge / by Charles Ferruzza --The centerpiece / by Rita Williams --A grandchild of Italy cracks the spaghetti code / by Kim Severson --Why I cook --The frying of latke 49 / by Steven Shaw --Around the world to our kitchen table / by Ame Gilbert --Give me credit / by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall --Cooking for a crowd / by Matthew Amster-Burton --Simple cooking, then and now / by John Thorne

     Letters to a Young Sister unfolds as a series of letters written by older brother Hill to a universal Young Sistah. She’s up against the same challenges as every young woman: from relating to her parents and dealing with peer pressure, to juggling schoolwork and crushes and keeping faith in the face of heartache. In his straight-talking style, Hill helps his young sister build self-confidence, self-reliance, self-respect, and encourages her on her journeys towards becoming a strong and successful woman. The book also includes contributions from admirable women like Angela Basset, Ciara, Michelle Obama, Tatyana Ali, Nikki Giovanni, Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrikck, Eve, Malinda Williams, Kim Porter, and more.

    With insight and wit, it lays bare her journey to reclaiming her creativity and power, inviting readers to reflect on theirs.Advocating for ‘misfits’ everywhere, this timely, necessary book is a rousing and bold case against fitting in.

    When customers noticed and began telling her the drawings brightened their days, Mari realized she could use that hobby to connect with people. She hit a professional rough patch in her late 20s and began to chronicle her work on Instagram. Nearly overnight, she became a sensation. Now when Mari Andrew posts something new, the Internet rejoices. This book is organized by universal themes of becoming an adult--for example, loss, adventure, ambition. Within each chapter, Mari shares her personal experiences in never-before-seen essays, accompanied by spreads of her signature illustrations, 90 percent of which are brand new. Readers are bound to see some of themselves in this book, whether seeking advice on how to handle growing up, or just looking for a friend who can commiserate.

    The young artist asked a selection of his heroes, Is it possible to maintain one's integrity and freedom of thought and still participate in the art world? Responding artists--including Gregory Amenoff, Jo Baer, John Baldessari, Jimmie Durham, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, William Pope Lawrence Weiner and Richard Tuttle wrote back with advice (Gregory Amenoff: Keep away from art fairs.); encouragement (Joan Jonas: The answer is the Work. To Work. To care about the Work.); and cautionary tales (Adrian Piper: Young artist, it is highly unlikely that you will be rewarded professionally for reaching this point. Nor will it make you popular. On the contrary: you will develop a reputation for being 'difficult, ' 'uncooperative, ' 'inflexible, ' or even 'self-destructive;' and treated [or mistreated, or ostracized, or blacklisted] accordingly.). Twelve of these letters were originally published in Art on Paper. This book expands considerably upon that proje

    In Shit, Actually, Lindy returns to those roots, re-examining beloved and iconic movies from the past 40 years with an eye toward the big questions of our time: Is Twilight the horniest movie in history? Why do the zebras in The Lion King trust Mufasa-WHO IS A LION-to look out for their best interests? Why did anyone bother making any more movies after The Fugitive achieved perfection? And, my god, why don't any of the women in Love, Actually ever fucking talk?!?!From Forrest Gump, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and Bad Boys II, to Face/Off, Top Gun, and The Notebook, Lindy combines her razor-sharp wit and trademark humor with a genuine adoration for nostalgic trash to shed new critical light on some of our defining cultural touchstones-the stories we've long been telling ourselves about who we are. At once outrageously funny and piercingly incisive, Shit, Actually reminds us to pause and ask, "How does this movie hold up?", all while teaching us how to laugh at the things we love without ever letting them or ourselves off the hook.Shit, Actually is a love letter and a break-up note all in one: to the films that shaped us and the ones that ruined us. More often than not, Lindy finds, they're one and the same.

    In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

    LAUGH. LOVE. or EXIST. SMIRK. LURK. Julie Houts has cultivated a devoted Instagram following by satirizing the conflicting messages and images women consume and share with the world every day. Literally Me chronicles the exploits of “slightly antisocial heroines” (Refinery29) in vivid, excruciatingly funny detail, including: —The beauty routine of a deranged bride who aspires to be “truly without flaws” on her wedding day —What happens when Kylie Jenner has an existential crisis and can no longer “step out” —A journey to Coachella by the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse —The true dating confessions of a fembot —The terrifying description for Alice Staunch’s book How to Be a Perfect Feminist —The diary of Fiddle Ficus, a tree that lives inside a C É L I N E store …and much more. Literally Me marks the launch of a brilliant new social satirist. Julie’s singular voice and beautiful illustrations reveal the truth about the absurdity of life in the social media age, showing us that the line between becoming a total “Girlboss” and a twenty-first century American Psycho is razor-thin.

    Peggy's visionary Art of This Century gallery in New York, which brought together the European surrealist artists with the American abstract expressionists, was an epoch-shaking "happening" at the center of its time. Dearborn's unprecedented access to the Guggenheim family, friends, and papers contributes rich insight to Peggy's traumatic childhood in German-Jewish "Our Crowd" New York, her self-education in the ways of art and artists, her caustic battles with other art-collecting Guggenheims, and her legendary sexual appetites: her lovers included Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a mere few. Here too is a poignant portrait of Peggy's last years as l'ultima dogaressa -- the last duchess -- in her palazzo in Venice, where her collection still draws thousands of visitors every year. Mistress of Modernism is the first definitive biography of a woman whose wit, passion, and provocative legacy come compellingly to life.

    Now the author of America's best-selling art instruction book for young children provides a complete course for older children, teens and adult beginners.In Part I, you'll discover the many different styles you can choose to draw in and how to develop your own personal style.In Part II, you'll discover a unique way of seeing that allows you to draw any shape you observe. You'll learn the basics (from buying art supplies to planning your compositions) and all the good stuff- proportion, scale, perspective, contrast shading and special effects. Lastly, Mona provides essential information on drawing the human form, animals, still, landscapes, and buildings.It's all here. Now nothing can prevent you from discovering the joys of drawing. Open this book and you'll see what creative possibilities await you! Special NoteDrawing For Older Children & Teens includes special sections for art teachers and educators.