Dancing With Elephants


Kalyn Nicholson - 2019
    Covering topics from love and heartbreak to chaos and self-discovery, each poem is laced in a cozy, magical energy that is sure to hold the reader suspended in the in-between.

Versailles: A History


Robert B. Abrams - 2017
    Here is the dramatic - and tragic - story of Versailles and the men and women who made it their home.

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel


Sherill Tippins - 2013
    Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: Why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists’ community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palace is the intimate and definitive story.Today the Chelsea stands poised in limbo between two futures: Will this symbol of New York's artistic invention be converted to a profit-driven business catering to the top one percent? Or will the Chelsea be given a rebirth through painstaking effort by the community that loves it? Set against these two competing possibilities, Inside the Dream Palace could not be more fascinating or timely.

The Portable Henry Rollins


Henry Rollins - 1997
    punk rocker into a universal soldier.  His enemies: slackers and hypocrites.  His mission: to steel your soul and rock your world."Rollins was frontman for the seminal punk band Black Flag, and since 1987 has led the Rollins Band, whose ninth album, Come In and Burn, was just released by DreamWorks.As a spoken-word artist, he regularly performs at colleges and theaters worldwide and has released eight spoken-word audiotapes.  His album Get in the Van won the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for 1995.  As an actor, he has appeared in The Chase, Johnny Mnemonic, Heat, and David Lynch's forthcoming film, Lost Highway.  From his days as front man for the band Black Flag and the current Rollins Band to his books and spoken-word audiotapes, Henry Rollins is the music, the attitude, and the voice that takes no prisoners.  In his twelve books, he has led us on a hallucinatory journey through the decades--and his mind--with poems, essays, short stories, diary entries, and rants that exist at "the frayed edges where reality ends and imagination begins" (Publishers Weekly).  For the first time, the best of his legendary, no-holds-barred writings are available.  This collection includes new photos and works from such seminal Rollins books as:High Adventure in the Great OutdoorsArt to Choke HeartsBang!Black Coffee BluesGet in the VanDo I Come Here Often?SolipsistPlus never before released stories and more...

History of Modern Art: Painting Sculpture Architecture Photography


H. Harvard Arnason - 1968
    Long considered the survey of modern art, this engrossing and liberally illustrated text traces the development of trends and influences in painting, sculpture, photography and architecture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Retaining its comprehensive nature and chronological approach, it now comes thoroughly reworked by Michael Bird, an experienced art history editor and writer, with refreshing new analyses, a considerably expanded picture program, and a more absorbing and unified narrative.

Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots


Peter York - 2005
    Running with the idea that our homes are where we are truly ourselves, Peter York's wildly original and scathingly funny look at the interior decorating tastes of some of history's most alarming dictators proves that absolute power corrupts absolutely, right down to the drapes. Mining rare, jaw-dropping photographs of interiors now mostly (thankfully) destroyed, York's hilarious profiles of 16 inner sanctums of the scary leaves no endangered tiger pelt unturned, from Saddam Hussein's creepy private art collection to General Noriega's Christmas tree to the strange tube and knob contraption in the Ceausescu bathroom. All your favorite dictators are here: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mussolini, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos—each with their own uniquely frightful chic. An interior decorating book like no other, Dictator Style is a welcome tonic for a world in need of a good laugh at the expense of the all-powerful.

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.

Simple Soldering: A Beginner's Guide to Jewelry Making


Kate Ferrant Richbourg - 2012
    Fortunately, Simple Soldering proves that does not need to be the case. This handy how-to guide is complete in its exploration of the craft of creating soldered metal jewelry, including tools, techniques, and 20 beautiful projects that beginners and enthusiasts can make at home.Author and teacher Kate Richbourg demystifies basic soldering for any home crafter, showing how to create sophisticated, polished, and professional-looking jewelry pieces through simple soldering techniques. First, she instructs how to set up a jewelry workspace that fits the confines of your budget and living space. Detailed step-by-step instructions walk you through the basic tools and materials you need, plus how to use them. A sample chapter gives a host of introductory exercises that teach solid skills, allowing you to test these techniques on a small scale. Finally, you'll discover 20 finished projects that include earrings, pendants, rings, bracelets, and clasps that may also include bead or wire embellishment.Kate also demonstrates how to combine and layer techniques to gorgeous effect. She also examines common mistakes, shows how to correct or adapt them, and gives advice on when it’s time to start over. Most of all, having taught thousands of classes on soldering, Kate has a "you can do it!" attitude that shines through to help even the most reluctant jewelry maker fire up the torch with ease.Paired with an instructional DVD, Kate’s expert teaching skills will help projects come alive, right in your own studio.With Simple Soldering, the art of metal working one-of-a-kind jewelry is now at your fingertips.

I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun


Professor Happycat - 2008
    Over the past year, though, one sensation has dominated the Web: LOLcats. Here’s how it works: First you find a picture of a cat online, and then you add a caption that reflects the cat’s point of view. Just remember that although cats can speak English, their spelling and grammar is not so hot. Once you’re done, you have a LOLcat (laugh out loud cat). Since its founding in January 2007, icanhascheezburger .com (named after the most famous LOLcat of all) has been the center of the LOLcat world. I Can Has Cheezburger? collects 200 LOLcats from the enormously popular site, some classic and some new, in glorious and glossy full color. The book also highlights legendary LOLcat forms recognizable to fans everywhere (including “Do Not Want,” “Monorail Cat,” and “Oh Noes!”), and offers a guide to the finer points of LOLspeak. Packed with witty and endearing images and published into a proven cat-egory, I Can Has Cheezburger? is sure to delight feline aficionados and Internet nerds alike.

Poems 1962-2012


Louise Glück - 2012
    With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like a landscape seen from above, a novel with lacunae opening onto the unspeakable. The reiterated yet endlessly transfigured elements in this landscape—Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain—persistently emerge and reappear with the dark energy of the inevitable, while at the same time are shot through with the bright aspect of things new-made.              From the outset (“Come here / Come here, little one”), Gluck’s voice has addressed us with deceptive simplicity, the poems in lines so clear we “do not see the intervening fathoms.”  From within the earth’sbitter disgrace, coldness and barrennessmy friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?To read these books together is to understand the governing paradox of a life lived in the body and of the work wrested from it, the one fated to die and the other to endure.

City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America


Donald L. Miller - 1996
    Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900.Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its community of young writers and journalists, and its staggering engineering projects -- which included the reversal of the Chicago River and raising the entire city from prairie mud to save it from devastating cholera epidemics. The saga of Chicago's unresolved struggle between order and freedom, growth and control, capitalism and community, remains instructive for our time, as we seek ways to build and maintain cities that retain their humanity without losing their energy. City of the Century throbs with the pulse of the great city it brilliantly brings to life.

Towards a New Architecture


Le Corbusier - 1923
    The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the "mass-production spirit," and much else. A principal prophet of the "modern" movement in architecture, and a near-legendary figure of the "International School," he designed some of the twentieth century's most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cité Universitaire, Paris; Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles; and many more.Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: "American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." "Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary." "A cathedral is not very beautiful . . ." and "Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life."Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians―but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions, and innovative theories of one of this century's master builders.

Easy Rumba


Anna Edwards - 2020
    She’s a divorced actress forced out of Hollywood when she split from her more famous husband. But when she’s given the chance to resurrect her career on a famous dance show, she does so on one proviso, she’s partnered with the man who she grew up with and hasn’t seen in fourteen years.Leo Westwood is the professional dancer who’s known for his hips and the way he shakes them. He’s confident with women, but none of them hold a candle to the girl he’s dreamed of every day since he first met her all those years ago. When he’s partnered with her on a dance show, he can’t quite believe it. Could this be his second chance at happiness or is Elise too broken?When secrets from both their pasts threaten to tear them apart, Elise and Leo look certain to lose their chance of a happily ever after, or does family legend hold the key to the painful truth neither of them will want to face?

The Vermont Notebook


John Ashbery - 2001
    This is Ashbery at his wacky best, from long lists that seem to make some sense, to short lists that seem to make no sense, to made-up diary entries. Here we find Joe Brainard's version of Americana. Combined, there is a wonderful innocence to this book that is found in the work of both of these artists. Joe Brainard's popularity is soaring to new heights as the traveling retrospective of his career captivates museum-goers throughout the United States, and this publication will be a valuable addition to the available publications of his work.

The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells (and How to Do It Right)


Jeetendr Sehdev - 2017
    What can he teach us about making our own ideas, products and services break through?Jeetendr shows why successful images today - the most famous being Kim Kardashian - are not photoshopped to perfection, but flawed, vulnerable, and in-your-face. This total transparency generates a level of authenticity that traditional marketing tactics just can't touch.From YouTube sensations like Pew Die Pie to taxi-hailing app Uber, The Kim Kardashian Principle reveals the people, products and brands that do it best. After all, in a world where a big booty can break the internet, self-obsession is a must-have. No posturing, no apologies, and no shying away from the spotlight.The Kim Kardashian Principle by Jeetendr Sehdev is a fresh, provocative and eye-opening guide to understanding why only the boldest and baddest ideas will survive - and how to make sure yours is one of them.