Book picks similar to
A Balthus Notebook by Guy Davenport
art
american
france
memoir-autobiography-diary
Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story
Amanda Vaill - 1998
In Everybody Was So Young--one of the best reviewed books of 1998--Amanda Vaill brilliantly portrays both the times in which the Murphys lived and the fascinating friends who flocked around them. Whether summering with Picasso on the French Riviera or watching bullfights with Hemingway in Pamplona, Gerald and Sara inspired kindred creative spirits like Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night were modeled after the Murphys). Their story is both glittering and tragic, and in this sweeping and richly anecdotal portrait of a marriage and an era, Amanda Vaill "has brought them to life as never before" (Chicago Tribune).
Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction
Gabrielle Selz - 2014
What followed was a whirlwind childhood spent among art and artists in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Gabrielle grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the day: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti, and Christo, among others.Poignant and candid, Unstill Life is a daughter’s memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father known to the world as Mr. Modern Art. Selz offers a unique window into the glamour and destruction of the times: the gallery openings, wild parties and affairs that defined one of the most celebrated periods in American art history. Like the art he loved, Selz’s father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on family life. When her father left MoMA and his family to direct his own museum in California, marrying four more times, Selz’s mother, the writer Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian artist community Westbeth. Her parents continued a tumultuous affair that would last forty years.Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints an unforgettable portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of modern artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.
Becoming Hannah: A Personal Journey
Hannah Yeoh - 2014
There is great hope for Malaysia if many more Hannahs could be replicated in politics.Dr. Daniel HoSenior Pastor, DUMC, Petaling JayaHannah’s story grips you with its refreshing honesty. From finding God to rediscovering her confidence, to the miracle of her marriage proposal and her amazing journey into politics, it speaks about God. It fired me to pray for such a generation to rise up and rebuild our land! It will inspire you to always seek God’s best in the face of many “good” options; for it is in surrender to Him that the best will be given to us.Dr. Philip LynSenior Pastor, Skyline SIB, Kota KinabaluHannah Yeoh Tseow Suan is the Speaker of the Selangor State Legislative Assembly and State Assemblyman for Subang Jaya, Selangor. Hannah won the N31 state seat in the General Elections 2008 as a DAP candidate at the age of 29. She was elected as the Speaker at the age of 34, making her the first woman and youngest Speaker in Malaysia. She obtained her Bachelor of Laws from University of Tasmania. She is married to Ramachandran M, an IT entrepreneur. They are now proud parents of two baby girls Shay Adora Ram and Kayleigh Imani Ram. The couple is passionate about nation-building and seeks to inspire Malaysians to play their respective parts in establishing a righteous nation free from corruption and racial discrimination.
Create Dangerously
Albert Camus - 1957
Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Days of Reading
Marcel Proust - 1905
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) is now generally viewed as the greatest French novelist and perhaps the greatest European novelist of the 20th century. He lived much of his later life as a reclusive semi-invalid in a sound-proofed flat in Paris giving himself over entirely to writing In Search of Lost Time.
Dancing with the Gods: Reflections on Life and Art
Kent Nerburn - 2018
Tender and joyous, it is a celebration of art's power to transform the darkest of human experience and give voice to the grandest of human hopes.
On Writing
Ernest Hemingway - 1984
In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived…This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.—From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips
The Courage to Create
Rollo May - 1975
May draws on his experience to show how we can break out of old patterns in our lives. His insightful book offers us a way through our fears into a fully realized self.
Tim Burton
Ron Magliozzi - 2009
With a visual style inspired by the aesthetics of animation and silent comedy, Burton's work melds the exotic, the horrific and the comic, manipulating expressionism and fantasy with the skill of a graphic novelist. Published to accompany a major career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, this affordable volume considers Burton's career as an artist and film-maker. It narrates the evolution of his creative practices, following the current of his visual imagination from his earliest childhood drawings through his mature oeuvre.Illustrated with works on paper, moving-image stills, drawn and painted concept art, puppets and maquettes, storyboards and examples of his work as a graphic artist for his non-film projects, this volume sheds new light on Burton and presents previously unseen works from the artist's personal archive.Acclaimed American film-maker Tim Burton (born 1958) is known for his dark, gothic films about quirky outsiders, many of which are both Hollywood blockbusters and cult classics. To date they have been nominated for 16 Academy Awards and have won six. They include Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), Beetle Juice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Ed Wood (1994), Sleepy Hollow, (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride (both 2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), among others. Alice in Wonderland is slated for 2010. Burton has collaborated extensively with composer Danny Elfman and with actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.
How New York Breaks Your Heart
Bill Hayes - 2018
Now he presents an exquisite collection that captures the full range of his work and the magic of chance encounters in New York City. Hayes's "frank, beautiful, bewitching" street photographs "unmask their subjects' best and truest selves" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times): A policeman pauses at the end of a day. Cooks sneak in cigarette breaks. A pair of movers plays cards on the back of a truck. Friends claim the sidewalk. Lovers embrace. A flame-haired girl gazes mysteriously into the lens. And park benches provide a setting for a couple of hunks, a mom and her baby, a stylish nonagenarian . . . How New York Breaks Your Heart reveals ordinary New Yorkers at their most peaceful, joyful, distracted, anxious, expressive, and at their most fleeting--bringing the texture of the city to vivid life. Woven through with Hayes's lyric reflections, these photos will, like the city itself, break your heart by asking you to fall in love.
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Susan Buck-Morss - 1989
In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.
"A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition
Rosalind E. Krauss - 2000
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.
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998
Fredric Jameson - 1998
Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism’s prominent friends and foes.Fredric Jameson has had an immense impact on our understanding of postmodernism. However, until now, his key writings on the subject have been unavailable in an accessible and affordable form. This book is designed as a short and convenient introduction to Jameson's thought for both the student and the general reader.
An Elemental Thing
Eliot Weinberger - 2007
With the wisdom of a literary archaeologist-astronomer-anthropologist-zookeeper, he leads us through histories, fables, and meditations about the ten thousand things in the universe: the wind and the rhinoceros, Catholic saints and people named Chang, the Mandaeans on the Iran-Iraq border and the Kaluli in the mountains of New Guinea. Among the thirty-five essays included are a poetic biography of the prophet Muhammad, which was praised by the London Times for its "great beauty and grace," and "The Stars," a reverie on what's up there that has already been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, and Maori.
Babble
Charles Saatchi - 2013
From 'The hideousness of the art world', 'Being thick is no obstacle to being a successful artist' and 'Painting is a blind man's obsession'; to 'Socialising for party duds', 'Love may be blind, but marriage is an eye-opener' and 'If it can't be explained by science, try a seance'.