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Paint it Black
Janet Fitch - 2006
But when she receives a call from the coroner, asking her to identify her lover's body, her bright dreams all turn to black. As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts distrust and blind need.With the luxurious prose and fever pitch intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence.
Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present
Klaus Biesenbach - 2010
Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that documents approximately 50 of the artist's ephemeral time- and media-based works from throughout her career. The book also discusses a unique element of the Museum's retrospective, live performance: a new work created for the occasion, and performed by Abramovic herself; and re-creations of the artist's works by other performers-the first such to be undertaken in a museum setting. The book spans over four decades of Abramovic's early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances and collaborative performances made with the Dutch artist Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator of Media and performance art at MoMA, and four distinguished scholars examine Abramovic's ideas of time, duration and the reperformance of performance art as a way to extend it into posterity. The Artist Is Present also includes a CD with audio commentary by the artist that guides the reader through the publication. The artist is present not only in the exhibition but also in the experience of the book.Born in Belgrade just after the end of the Second World War, Marina Abramovic was raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church (her great uncle was a Patriarch and a canonized saint in the Church) and left Yugoslavia in 1976, having already established herself as a performance artist, living in Amsterdam and eventually New York, where she presently lives.
The Gold Bug Variations
Richard Powers - 1991
A national bestseller, voted by Time as the #1 novel of 1991, selected as one of the "Best Books of 1991" by Publishers Weekly, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award--a magnificent story that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art, by the brilliant author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.
Pink Steam
Dodie Bellamy - 2004
"PINK STEAM is not kitschy, it is a culturally astute document of the real written by a master at the height of her powers"--Jennifer Moxley. The intimate secrets of Dodie Bellamy's life--sex, shoplifting, voyeurism, and writing are illuminated in Bellamy's incredibly tailored latest work where true confession bleeds into high theory into trash cinema. PINK STEAM barges beyond the cliches of gendered experience; unafraid of the personal, unabashed by politics and sex, Bellamy makes confusion her OK Corral. Dodie Bellamy is the author of CUNT-UPS and FEMININE HIJINX, both available at SPD.
Feeling the Shoulder of the Lion: Poetry and Teaching Stories
Rumi - 2000
The lion represents the fierce intensity that recognizes no authority except the highest truth. At the same time, Rumi's lion is full of heart and devotion. Through these poems the reader will explore the qualities that are vital to the spiritual aspirant who seeks to overcome the imprisonment of ego.
Sounds
Wassily Kandinsky - 1912
Wassily Kandisnsky’s Sounds (Klänge), a volume of poems written and illustrated by the Russian artist and pioneer of abstract painting, was originally published in a limited edition in Munich in 1912. Although it was highly regarded by such artists as Hugo Ball and Jean Arp and acclaimed by the Zurich Dadaists, it remains one of the least known of Kandinsky’s major writings. This is the first complete English translation of Kandinsky’s text. Sounds is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a twentieth-century livre d’artiste and a rare instance of a book in which text and illustrations are the work of a single artist. The poems, alternately narrative and expressive in quality, are witty, simple in structure and vocabulary, and often startling in content. They repeatedly treat questions of space, color, physical design, and the act of seeing in a world that offers multiple and often contradictory possibilities to the viewer. The woodcuts range from early Jugendstil-inspired, representational designs to vignettes that are purely abstract in form. Published in the same year as his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Sounds sheds a different but equally significant light on Kandinsky’s movement toward abstraction—a movement that was to exercise a profound influence on future directions in art. In addition to the 38 poems and 56 woodcuts, which are arranged as in the original edition, the volume includes an introduction, the German text of the poems, and the artist’s chronology.
Karoo
Steve Tesich - 1998
He is a successful Hollywood script doctor, a fixer of flawed films. He is fifty, overweight, a heavy drinker and chain smoker. He is at an age when things break down, but he has no health insurance. His separation from his wife, Dinah, has become another form of marriage. His relationship with his son, Billy, a college student, is one of pure avoidance. He cannot free himself from the grip of the powerful producer Jay Cromwell, who wants him to recut the last great film of the legendary director Arthur Houseman and make it more commercial. After seeing the film, Karoo considers refusing the job. But he soon becomes obsessed with Leila Miller, an unknown actress whom he has spotted in a small scene. In fact Karoo becomes convinced that she is the mother of his adopted son, Billy, and he becomes determined to track her down.Karoo finds Leila in Venice Beach (where she's one of thousands of Hollywood hopefuls), working as a waitress and haunted by the memory of the baby she gave up for adoption. Karoo falls in love with her, and in the grip of his newfound devotion uses every cheap screenwriter's trick to change Houseman's poignant masterpiece into an outrageous comedy that will make Leila a star. And, he plans to unite the long-lost mother and child at the film's premiere. But Billy, not knowing that Leila is his mother, also falls for her and she for him. The triangle ends in an auto accident, with Karoo driving, in which Billy and Leila are killed and the recut film, becomes a huge success. Devastated by the personal disaster he has helped to create, Karoo winds up being hired by Cromwell to transform a journalistic expose of his own tragic machinations into a screenplay.Steve Tesich has grounded his story in the highly recognizable world of New York in the late-eighties, a milieu of unscrupulous West Coast producers, dry cleaning, divorce and fantasies of escape. Karoo is a haunting, highly human, deliciously realistic novel of decline, fall, and rejuvenation.
The Red Notebook
Antoine Laurain - 2014
There's nothing in the bag to indicate who it belongs to, although there's all sorts of other things in it. Laurent feels a strong impulse to find the owner and tries to puzzle together who she might be from the contents of the bag. Especially a red notebook with her jottings, which really makes him want to meet her. Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?The Red Notebook has already been sold in twelve different languages. French TV is making a film of The President's Hat and the movie rights of The Red Notebook have been sold to UGC.Antoine Laurain was born in Paris. He is the author of five novels, including The President's Hat.
The 25th Hour
David Benioff - 2000
Wall Street speculators, the Manhattan downtown club scene, Russian gangsters, immigrant neighborhoods - all the elements in the urban turf of this finely crafted contemporary crime novel wed danger with excitement and possibility. They're the rewards that Monty Brogan, who stands at the center of the moral glare in this tale, has already lost, just as he's lost his Corvette, and the "sway" that opened the doors of exclusive night spots and guaranteed him courtside seats at Madison Square Garden. Tomorrow Monty's traveling by bus, to the federal prison in Otisville, for seven years. He's afraid, and all he'd ever really wanted when he grew up was to be a fireman. With the pulse of the city in its prose, this debut novel follows Monty through the twenty-four hours of his last day out. At the same time, it illuminates the worlds, and souls, of his two best friends: Frank Slattery, an edgy bond trader who gambles daily with financial ruin, and Jakob Elinsky, an English teacher who clings to illusions as he compromises his ideals. Friends since their high school days, the three of them nostalgically share a past, but warily they confront a future that can no longer accommodate their adolescent dreams. They meet. They drink, and talk, go clubbing, dance, drink, and remember. What neither Slattery nor Jakob know, however, is that Monty has a plan. It's a shocker.Originally published: New York: Carroll & Graf Pub., 2000.
Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs
Jay Farrar - 2013
Recollections of Farrar's father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the final word since music has been the creative impetus and driving force for the past 35 years of his life.In writing these stories, he found a natural inclination to focus on very specific experiences; a method analogous to the songwriting process. The highlights and pivotal experiences from that musical journey are all represented as the binding thread in these stories, illustrated throughout with photography from his life. If life is a movie, then these stories are the still frames.
Novels in Three Lines
Félix Fénéon - 1906
This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.
For the Time Being
Annie Dillard - 1999
Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.
Locus Solus
Raymond Roussel - 1913
One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.
The Gift of Everything
Lang Leav - 2021
In addition, this beautifully conceived clothbound anthology includes 35 new poems as well as original and arresting illustrations by the author.Lang’s evocative words of love, loss, and self-empowerment have inspired millions across the globe to seek their own voice through the healing power of poetry. A definite must-have collection for all lovers of poetry and prose. The Gift of Everything will thrill and delight fans of Lang Leav as well as those yet to discover the enchanting world of one the most celebrated poets in modern history.
The Revisionist
Miranda Mellis - 2007
The title character of THE REVISIONIST conducts covert surveillance on a city whose inhabitants are subject to uncanny transformations as a result of catastrophic weather, political corruption, invasive technologies and environmental degradation. Hired to spin, or "revise," the facts, the revisionist's perceptions in turn become detached and distorted--inevitably unreliable yet all the same, revealing. This civil scientist of a narrator sardonically observes a distressed landscape inhabited by mutant children, a seeing-eye dog, a centenarian with iguanas and constellations beneath her dress, brooding frigate birds, insurance love clones, a terrorist curator, a private investigator, and a little girl who's discovered the world's largest conch. "THE REVISIONIST is at once a beautifully simple fable and a wonderfully lyrical apocalyptic tale"--Brian Evenson.