All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers


Alana Massey - 2017
    These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard. But it is, above all, a paean to the celebrities who have shaped a generation of women - from Scarlett Johansson to Amber Rose, Lil' Kim, Anjelica Huston, Lana Del Rey, Anna Nicole Smith and many more. These reflections aim to reimagine these women's legacies, and in the process, teach us new ways of forgiving ourselves.

Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays


Linda Nochlin - 1988
    Women, Art, and Power—seven landmark essays on women artists and women in art history—brings together the work of almost twenty years of scholarship and speculation.

Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology


Amy Kesselman - 1995
    It presents a multidisciplinary collection of academic essays and analyses, personal narratives, and fiction and poetry about women's lives. The selections illustrate the variety of women's experiences, primarily in the United States, considering both commonalities and differences among women and appreciating women's diverse approaches to living and fostering change.

Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and the Birth of Modern Art


Dan Franck - 1998
    In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a vivid and magical tour of the Paris of 1900-1930, a hotbed of artistic creation where we encounter the likes of Apollinaire, Modigliani, Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, working, loving, and struggling to stay afloat. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations are also featured.

Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World


Kathleen Ragan - 1998
    Gathered from around the world, from regions as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe, from North and South American Indian cultures and New World settlers, from Asia and the Middle East, these 100 folktales celebrate strong female heroines.Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters is for all women who are searching to define who they are, to redefine the world and shape their collective sensibility. It is for men who want to know more about what it means to be a woman. It is for our daughters and our sons, so that they can learn to value all kinds of courage, courage in battle and the courage of love. It is for all of us to help build a more just vision of woman.

Views


Roger Dean - 1975
    Views (1975) went straight to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list and went on to sell over a million copies. Magnetic Storm (1984) sold over 650,000 copies. These new editions, reworked to accompany the publication of the third book in the trilogy, Dragon's Dream, showcase the instantly recognizable work of Roger Dean. Views showcases the first seven years of Roger Dean's work after his graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1968. It includes paintings and graphics; branding such as the Yes typography and the first Virgin Records logo; groundbreaking stage sets; and album art including iconic early Yes covers such as the award-winning Tales From Topographic Oceans. The new edition streamlines the original square format and retains the combination of concept sketches and brilliantly displayed finished work. Featuring a new foreword, revised typography, and graphic openers and identifying icons, Views showcases and celebrates the art that defined an era.

Anarchism and Other Essays


Emma Goldman - 1910
    A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor and friend of the oppressed. This book is a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded.In the first of these essays, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, she says, "Direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual." In Minorities Versus Majorities she holds that social and economic well-being will result only through "the non-compromising determination of intelligent minorities, and not through the mass." Other pieces deal with The Hypocrisy of Puritanism; Prisons: A Social Crim and Failure; The Psychology of Political Violence—note the relevence of these themes to our own time; The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought; Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty; and The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation. A biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel precedes the essays.Anarchism and Other Essays provides a fascinating look into revolutionary issues at the turn of the century, a prophetic view of the social and economic future, much of which we have seen take place, and above all, a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary woman: brilliant, provocative, dedicated, passionate, and what used to be called "high-minded."Unabridged republication of the 3rd (1917) edition, with a new Introduction by Richard Drinnon. Frontispiece. xv + 271 pp. 5-3/8 x 8-1/2. Paperbound.

Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography


T.J. Demos - 2006
    Over the past ten years it has experienced radical changes, in part due to the rise of digital technologies. Photography is now often engaged in by artists who are not just printing in a darkroom, but using the medium as a single aspect of a larger ouvre, as one of several media under exploration. Vitamin Ph focuses on diverse global developments in 'art' photography through the work of 121 contemporary artists, who were nominated by 78 international critics, curators and artists. These selections will be accompanied by a 5000 word introductory text by TJ Demos, aiming to explore ideas relevant to contemporary photography with reference to the works included in the book. In addition, the work of each photographer/artist will be introduced by a short commissioned text of approximately 500 words. Similar in concept, scope and structure to Vitamin P and Vitamin D, Vitamin Ph presents, in A to Z order, artists who have emerged, or in some instances re-emerged, in the last five years using the medium of photography.

Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around the World


Pete Tombs - 1998
    Fully illustrated, this book includes an Indian song-and-dance version of Dracula; Turkish version of Star Trek and Superman; China's "hopping vampire" films, and much more.

The Americans


Robert Frank - 1958
    There is no question that Robert Frank's The Americans is the most famous and influential photography book ever published. It was 1959 when the book first came out: a series of deceptively simple photographs that Frank took on a trip through America in '55 and '56, pictures of normal people, everyday scenes: lunch counters, bus depots, cars, and the stangely familiar faces of people we don't quite know but have seen somewhere. They are pictures that saw the "American way of life" as we hadn't yet quite been able to see it ourselves, photographs that condensed the entire life of a nation in classic images that still speak to us today, forty years and several generations later.

Francesca Woodman


Francesca Woodman - 1991
    David Levi Strauss writes in his essay: "The constitutive facts of Francesca Woodman's life are by now well known. We know that she was born in 1958, that she began taking photographs seriously at age thirteen or fourteen and continued this involvement into her twenty-second year, building up, in this brief time, a remarkably coherent and affecting body of work. And we know that on January 19, 1981, just two and a half months before her twenty-third birthday, she took her own life, leaping from a window on the Lower East Side in Manhattan to her death". This volume, containing many unpublished images, finally allows us to discover the full body of work of this artist, created in Rhode Island, Rome, New York, MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire: self-portraits, mise-en-scenes, nudes, and deeply emotional collage-like images. They all show her intense relation with the camera and her own self, long before this kind of picture-making became fashionable.

The Dresden Dolls Companion


Amanda Palmer - 2006
    This Boston-based alternative pop/German-like cabaret duo hand-designed this book which includes art, photos, commentary and 11 songs from their 2004 release. Songs included are: Bad Habit * Coin Operated Boy * Girl Anachronism * Good Day * Gravity * Half Jack * The Jeep Song * Missed Me *Perfect Fit * Slide * Truce.

Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order)


Bridget Quinn - 2017
    Aligned with the resurgence of feminism in pop culture, Broad Strokes offers an entertaining corrective to that omission. Art historian Bridget Quinn delves into the lives and careers of 15 brilliant female artists in text that's smart, feisty, educational, and an enjoyable read. Replete with beautiful reproductions of the artists' works and contemporary portraits of each artist by renowned illustrator Lisa Congdon, this is art history from 1600 to the present day for the modern art lover, reader, and feminist.

Interaction of Color


Josef Albers - 1971
    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.


Lili Anolik - 2019
    Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.