Showing titles in Art & Literature

In 1835, at the age of 13, a young boy walked nearly 300 miles to Paris; he worked odd jobs, and did whatever it took to survive. He eventually learned a craft: box making. Before long, the young boy had earned enough to open his own box-making store.

A classic work for artists of all kinds, about reconciling the call of creative work with the demands of daily life and narrated by Anne Truitt herself. Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Within its beautifully written pages, you will come to know a woman whose range of sensitivity - moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual - is remarkably broad.

“A roaring getaway car of guilty pleasures” (The New York Times Book Review), Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade is a fascinating, critically acclaimed chronicle of the rises and falls of one of the world’s most iconic superheroes and the fans who love him—now with a new afterword. Since...

G. Eric Kuskey, former colleague of Thomas Kinkade and close friend until the artist's death in 2012, tells Kinkade's story for the first time, from his art's humble beginnings on a sidewalk in Carmel, California, to his five-house compound in Monte Sereno. It's a tale of addiction and grief, of losing control, and ultimately, of the price of our dreams.

“Warm, witty, imaginative.... This is a rich and winning book.”—The New Yorker Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature’s most compelling and influential authors...

A lawyer’s fall from grace paved the way for an author’s rise to unimaginable success. In December of 2005, Scott Pratt was marched to a jail cell after being charged with suborning perjury. Within two years, he had written a legal thriller that was a finalist for the top mystery novel worldwide. Joe Dillard, Scott’s primary protagonist, served as a whiteboard for the author’s life, enabling him to reimagine and reinvent himself.

In Russian literary marriages, the wives of some of the most famous authors of all time did not resent taking a "secondary position", although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers' illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West.

‘The way Robert Peal describes Georgian England, you’d be mad not to want to live there yourself’ GUARDIAN Anne Bonny and Mary Read, pirate queens of the Caribbean Tipu Sultan, the Indian ruler who kept the British at bay Olaudah Equiano, the former slave whose story shocked the world Mary...

Danielle Bernstein spent her youth shopping at discount department stores, getting boozy in suburban backyards, and proposing marriage to every boy she dated. By age 19, she was a college dropout living in a West Village shoebox with three roommates and only six months to prove that her blog, @WeWoreWhat, could become a full blown career...or else board the train back to her mom's house. This Is Not a Fashion Story is the down and dirty tale of how a Long Island-born teenager became one of the most recognizable names in fashion.

Hunter S. Thompson, "smart hillbilly"; boy of the South; born and bred in Louisville, Kentucky; son of an insurance salesman and a stay-at-home mom; public school-educated; jailed at 17 on a bogus petty robbery charge; member of the US Air Force (airman second class); copy boy for Time; writer for The National Observer; et cetera.

Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde is a timeless collection of the sharpest observations, paradoxes, and epigrams from one of literature’s most brilliant minds. Oscar Wilde’s wit is elegant, mischievous, and relentlessly insightful. With effortless precision, he skewers social conventions, exposes hypocrisy, and reveals enduring truths about love, ambition, beauty, morality, and human folly. Each quotation stands alone yet contributes to a larger portrait of Wilde’s worldview—one that prizes individuality, intellectual courage, and the art of living well.

In this incredible second book in a series of autobiographies, the poet, still in her teens, gives birth to a son, tries to keep a job, falls in love, dances, falls out of love, chases after her kidnapped baby, and goes to work in a house of prostitution thinking she is helping the man she loves...

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him.

Vincent van Gogh is one of the world’s most famous artists, and his paintings are among the world’s most valuable. The archetypal starving artist, Vincent died aged just 37 years by his own hand, poor, isolated, and, in his eyes, a failure. Yet, in Vincent’s life story we can see the evolution of a boy becoming a man becoming a great artist, whether his contemporaries could see it at the time or not.

Herodotus, the fifth-century chronicler, scarcely figured in the curriculum when famed Polish writer and traveler Ryszard Kapuscinski attended university in the 1950s. Ryszard became a foreign correspondent who hoped to go abroad, perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was sent to India—the first stop on a decades-long tour of the world. His only companion on his travels was a volume of Herodotus. In his journey across continents, Kapuscinski discovers his life's work: to understand and describe the non-Western world, in all its variety, through his still-virginal Western eyes.

Hace unos años me rompí por completo. Tanto como para que tuvieran que atarme a la cama de un hospital psiquiátrico para evitar que pudiera hacerme daño. No tengo ni idea de cuándo empezó a formarse mi locura. A lo mejor nací genéticamente predispuesto. A lo mejor fui macerando una depresión al callarme ciertas cosas por no preocupar a los demás. O a lo mejor simplemente hay cerebros que de la noche a la mañana hacen crec y se acabó.

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.

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.

Tracey Emin is an internationally renowned artist. Here she discusses her life and achievements in a series of interviews from the BBC radio and TV archives.

A playful and moving book of essays by a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times) who invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of the everyday When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who...