Showing titles in Art & Literature

In his debut collection of personal essays, Emmy-nominated screenwriter Michael Jamin (King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, Beavis and Butt-Head, Wilfred, Maron, Rules of Engagement, Tacoma FD) recounts the true stories of a sensitive, anxious man searching for the things that are most important: identity, love, forgiveness, and redemption.

From an early age, Grace Dent was hungry. As a little girl growing up in Currock, Carlisle, she yearned to be something bigger, to go somewhere better. Hungry traces Grace’s story from growing up eating beige food to becoming one of the much-loved voices on the British food scene. It’s also everyone’s story—from treats with your nan, to cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, to the exquisite joy of cheaply made apple crumble with custard.

Getting a head of state in the dock was once unthinkable but as journalist and human rights advocate Steve Crawshaw uncovers in PROSECUTING THE POWERFUL - a blend of on-the-ground reportage and intellectual history - it is a real possibility. PROSECUTING THE POWERFUL tells a hopeful story of the long march towards justice for victims of state warfare.

Introduced at a workshop in Boston University led by the acclaimed and famous poet Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, colored by jealousy and respect in equal terms.

Rutger Bregman joins Gabriel Fleming in the Audible Studios to discuss his latest best-selling publication, Utopia for Realists. Rutger Bregman is one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. At 29, he is a historian and an author with four books already under his belt, not to mention a regular spot on the revered online journalism platform The Correspondent and publications in The Washington Post and The Guardian.

Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath has also been fueled in part by the tragic nature of her death. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath have appeared over the last fifty-five years that mainly focus on her death or contain projections of an array of points of view about the writer.

Maya Angelou, one of the best-loved authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this best-selling spiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power of spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou’s latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth in every minute.

Hannah Kent joins Elise Italiaander in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest book, Burial Rites.

In Clothes...And Other Things that Matter, Alexandra Shulman delves into her own life to look at the emotions, ambitions, expectations and meanings behind the way we dress. From the bra to the bikini, the trench coat to trainers, the slip dress to the suit, she explores their meaning in women's lives and how our wardrobes intersect with the larger world - the career ladder, motherhood, romance, sexual identity, ambition, failure, body image and celebrity.

A famous autobiographical account of life as a young soldier in the first World War trenches. Robert Graves, who went on to write I, Claudius, has given to posterity here one of the all-time great insights into the experience of war.

Everyone knows Steve Madden's name and his shoes, but few are familiar with his story. Over the past 30 years, Steve Madden has taken his eponymous shoe company from the fledgling start-up he founded with a mere $1,100 to a global, multibillion-dollar brand. But Madden's mistakes, from his battle with addiction to the financial shortcuts that landed him in prison, are as important to his story as his most iconic shoes. In this raw, intimate, and ultimately inspiring book, Madden holds nothing back as he shares what it took to get here and the lessons he's learned along the way.

Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France.

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies he encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the world of the Henrician court, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius.

Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, On the Road, Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey, to name just some of his cohorts on the beatnik path, Cassady lived life to the fullest, ready for inspiration at any turn. Here are his autobiographical writings, the rambling American saga of a free man.

Picoult, born in New York, has published more than 26 novels and short stories, not including the several issues of Wonder Woman she wrote for DC Comics. Picoult has 40 million copies of her books in print, and they have been translated into 34 languages - to say she is a prolific writer would be an understatement, and she was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003.

Picasso has often been called the greatest artist of this century. This biography defines his greatness: his accomplishment and versatility as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and designer. Most of the innovations in 20th century art are associated not only with his work but with the legend he built of himself as the quintessential modern artist.

Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering.

In his own time (701-762), Li Bai's poems - shaped by Daoist thought and characterized by their passion, romance, and lust for life - were never given their proper due by the official literary gatekeepers. Nonetheless, his lines rang out on the lips of court entertainers, tavern singers, soldiers, and writers throughout the Tang dynasty. The Banished Immortal is an extraordinary portrait of a poet who both transcended his time and was shaped by it and whose ability to live, love, and mourn without reservation produced some of the most enduring verses.

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school - in her 60s - to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful, demands of a life fully lived.

Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.