This easy, breezy handbook is full of insight that will help regular people begin a more inspiring and less stressful relationship with art. With tips on how to visit museums, how to talk about art at cocktail parties, and how to let art wake you up to the world around you, this little guide makes it possible for anyone to fall in love with art, whether for the first time or all over again.

    This full-length, exhaustively researched account of the thrash kings' career recaps and reevaluates the years guitar hero Jeff Hanneman and drum legend Dave Lombardo were in the group. Over the course of 59 chapters, 400 footnotes and three appendices, it profiles the members and presents dramatic scenes from 32 years in the Abyss: A fresh look at the group's early days. Reign in Blood tours. A European invasion. The Palladium riot. The seat cushion chaos concert. Newly unearthed details from Lombardo's turbulent history with the band. Historical artwork and photos never seen in public before. The entire diabolical discography. Hanneman’s hard times. The Big Four’s big year. Lombardo’s final exit. The top 11 Hanneman tributes. The mosh memorial service. Untold stories. Updates. And relevant digressions, including a contrasting look at other contemporaries and cutting-edge extreme bands. Over decades, Slayer experience triumph and loss, but never defeat, whether it's at the hands of rivals, peers, America's most infamous church, or the United States government itself. In addition to extensive archival material, this book features original content from the band, key affiliates, and firsthand witnesses, including Metal Blade CEO Brian Slagel, former tour manager Doug Goodman, engineer Bill Metoyer, former Metal Blade exec William "DJ Will" Howell, and cover artist Albert Cuellar (who went on to work with Tim Burton, Sublime, and Sir Mix-A-Lot). It also includes Jeff Hanneman's original diagram for the Live Undead picture disc (spoiler: it's a stick-figure sketch). Slayer fans will never see — or hear — the thrash metal champions the same way. 33 photos and 11 illustrations include lost artwork by Hell Awaits artist Albert Cuellar and stunning exclusive pictures by Harald Oimoen (of Murder in the Front Row renown). Written by D.X. Ferris, an Ohio Society of Professional Journalists Reporter of the Year and author of "Slayer's Reign in Blood," which is book no. 57 in Bloomsbury Academic's prestigious 33 1/3 series. The bargain-priced e-book edition features extensive interactive content, and can be read on any smart phone, tablet, computer, or portable communications device (with free Kindle software).

    With stitch motifs that are contemporary and modern, with a graphic aesthetic-not retro, kitschy, sentimental, or old-fashioned, the book is accessible to the total beginner plus contains ideas to keep more advanced stitchers interested.

    Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

    Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

    Find your "authentic" design voice and get carving today!

    Topics range from expressive hand gestures to patron saints, pasta, parmesan, shoes, opera, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, gelato, gondolas, and more. History, folklore, superstitions, traditions, and customs are tossed in a delicious sauce that also includes a wealth of factual information for the sophisticated traveler:• why lines, as we know them, are nonexistent in Italy• why a string of coral beads is often seen around a baby’s wrist• what the unlucky number of Italy is (it’s not thirteen, unless seating guests at a table, when it IS thirteen–taking into account the outcome of the Last Supper)• why red underwear begins to appear in shops as the New Year approaches In addition to the lyrical and poetic, Italianissimo provides useful and indispensable information for the traveler: deciphering the quirks of the language (while English has only one word for “you,†in Italy there are three), the best place to find balsamic vinegar (in Modena, of course), the best gelato (in Sicily, where they first invented it using the snow from Mount Etna). There are also recommendations for little-known museums and destinations (the Bodoni museum, the Pinocchio park, legendary coffee bars).This is a new kind of guidebook overflowing with enlightening and hilarious miscellaneous information, filled with luscious graphics and unforgettable photographs that will decode and enrich all trips to Italy–both real and imaginary.

    But Witold Rybczynski disagrees, and in The Look of Architecture, he makes a compelling case for the importance of style to the mother of the arts. This is a book brimming with sharp observations--that form does not follow function; that the best architecture is not timeless but precisely of its time; that details do not merely complement the architecture--details are the architecture. But the heart of the book illuminates the connection between architecture, interior decoration, and fashion. Style is the language of architecture, Rybczynski writes, and fashion represents the wide and swirling cultural currents that shape and direct that language. The two--style and fashion--are intimately linked; indeed, architecture cannot escape fashion. To set these ideas in sharp relief, he shows us how style and fashion have been expressed in the work of major architects including Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, Charles McKim, Allan Greenberg, Robert Venturi, Enrique Norten, and many others. He helps us see their works anew and ultimately to look afresh at our surroundings. Style is one of the enduring--and endearing--aspects of architecture, Rybczynski concludes. Furthermore, an architecture that recognizes the importance of style would not be as introspective and self-referential as are so many contemporary buildings. It would be part of the world: Not architecture for architects, but for the rest of us.

    Here nearly 200 illustrations--over 100 in color--make a fascinating collection.

    This is not a step-by-step technique book--rather, the stylized animals are simplified, modernized, and reduced to the most basic elements, showing you how simple abstract shapes and forms meld to create the building blocks of any item that you want to draw. Each of the 20 interpretations provides a different, interesting approach to drawing a single item, providing loads of inspiration for your own drawing. Presented in the author’s uniquely creative style, this engaging and motivational practice book provides a new take on the world of sketching, doodling, and designing.

    A handbook for the happy, and a bible for the broken-hearted, The Alphabet of the Human Heart is an enchanting and enriching journey through the upside and the downside of what it means to be human – our hopes and our fears, our strengths and our weaknesses, our highs and our lows.

    Learn about depth, scale, contrast, composition, and more.

    If you are looking for new ways of employing type in your works of art and design (or new twists to apply to your current typographic techniques), check out Type Idea Index. You'll find yourself face-to-face with 650+ custom-created, idea-sparking examples of typography and type-intensive design. For maximum user-friendliness, these samples are organized according to the theme they express (Energy, Elegance, Order, Rebellion) and the sort of real-world application they relate to (initials, monograms, logos, headlines, paragraphs).Expand your knowledge of type and brainstorm for ideas every time you design with letters and words.Type Idea Index "is the sixth installment in the best-selling, globally popular Index series by Jim Krause."

    The one-size-fits-all approach to your best life is outdated - you can do better.You don't have to be exceptional (or even the exception) to be successful. You just need to learn the algorithm. Through her own success experiment, Lillian transformed herself from a two-time uni drop-out stuck in a career that paid in burnout, into a highly sought-after media personality FlexMami. And here she shows that her experience hasn't been a fluke. Instead of focusing on what you can't change, spend your time hacking what you can - yourself. This formula combines what you know about yourself with what you know about society. The result? Getting what you really want. (Via Bloomsbury)

    Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.