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› Find signed collectible books: 'Art and Life of G. O'Keefe'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of Bev Doolittle'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of Michael Whelan'
Award-winning artist Whelan has illustrated the work of almost every major author in speculative fiction. Here are featured all the artist's major recent paintings, as well as a series of 25 never-before-seen works produced especially for this book. Over 100 full-color reproductions. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Art of Richard Diebenkorn'
On the process of painting, American painter Richard Diebenkorn once wrote, "I want painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems ... the better." In part, he meant that the freest artistic expression was often the result of some sort of restraint. Much like Shakespeare writing within the rigorous poetic form of the sonnet, Diebenkorn found his format in the vertical, rectangular, human-size canvases that he used to paint his famed Ocean Park series, which occupied a large portion of his magnificent career and included many figurative works. This sequence consists of more than 100 paintings created primarily over the course of the 1970s. There is a tranquil, mystical quality to his works: geometric lines define fields of color evoking the tones, landscape, atmosphere, and quality of light in Ocean Park. His paintings thus hover on the boundary between abstraction and landscape.
This paperback exhibition catalog of the retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City contains a beautifully produced plate section, arranged chronologically, that spans nearly the entire second half of the 20th century. A special highlight are Diebenkorn's notes to himself on beginning a painting. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Art/Women/California 1950-2000: Parallels and Intersections'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Artist of the Floating World'
In An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro offers readers of the English language an authentic look at postwar Japan, "a floating world" of changing cultural behaviors, shifting societal patterns and troubling questions. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but moved to England in 1960, writes the story of Masuji Ono, a bohemian artist and purveyor of the night life who became a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the war. But the war is over. Japan lost, Ono's wife and son have been killed, and many young people blame the imperialists for leading the country to disaster. What's left for Ono? Ishiguro's treatment of this story earned a 1986 Whitbread Prize. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl: Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy And Goth Girl'
Hardcover [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aubrey Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Berthe Morisot'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Black Rubber Dress: A Sam Jones Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blue Dog'
The inspirational story of Tiffany, the beloved terrier-spaniel who became Blue Dog, the top-selling art phenomenon that has captured America with her mesmerizing eyes and her message of true love conquering all--includes eight new Blue Dog paintings. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of Kells'
An unusual and original work of fantasy from the acclaimed author of .A contemporary man, John Thornburn (a meek, non-violent and unpredictable artist) and woman, Derval (his tough, confrontational, strong and warrior-like lover) time travel to ancient Ireland to avenge a Viking attack. Packed with fascinating details of historical time and place in Irish history and delicately balanced on the border between realism and fantasy, the story centers around one of the most famous and beautiful illuminat [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cinderella Deal'
In a warm, funny tale of opposites attracting, a man persuades a sharp-tongued woman to pose as his fiance+a7e in order to win his dream job, but his partner in pretense plans to make her role a reality. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The City, Not Long After'
Set in a city devastated by plague, this book tells of a young woman who arrives in the city to join a charismatic group of artists, journalists and writers. The group must join together to defeat the invading forces of megalomaniac General Fourstar. From the author of "The Shadow Hunter". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Cry in the Night'
Talented Erich Krueger seemed like the answer to Jenny's prayers, but after their marriage, she began to notice his obsession with his dead mother, and his possessiveness. Stumbling across old family secrets about a string of deaths, Jenny fears for herself and her children. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dc Comics Guide to Writing Comics'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dinner Party'
When Judy Chicago's multimedia exhibit "The Dinner Party" opened in the 1970s, it was hailed "an icon of feminist art" (ARTnews) and was seen by nearly one million people. Now, in a book celebrating the re-opening of the exhibit in Los Angeles later this year, Chicago updates the themes, interpretation, and history of her landmark exhibit. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eric Gill'
Eric Gill was a typographer and lettercutter whose typefaces still feature in our lives, especially his Perpetua and Gill Sans. He was also a sculptor and wood-engraver. He was a key personality in three Catholic art and craft communities at Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin and Pigotts. He was a devoted family man but, at the same time, he was fickle and quarrelsome and a believer in complete sexual freedom. He had a succession of mistresses and affairs. In this biography the author analyzes these apparent contradictions. Fiona MacCarthy directed the Omega Workshops Exhibition at the Crafts Council in 1984, and in 1987 "Eye for Industry" at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She wrote "A History of British Design", "British Design Since 1880" and "Simple Life". She was awarded the Royal Society of Arts Bicentenary Medal for 1987. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eric Gill: A Lover's Quest for Art and God'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fool's Puzzle'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fortress of Solitude'
From the funked-up, messed up Brooklyn of the 1970s to the present day, this novel spans 30 years in the life of two best friends, Dylan and Mingus, their families and an entire neighbourhood. From their stories comes the history of soul music, graffiti art, comic books and experimental film. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Found Meals of the Lost Generation: Recipes and Ancedotes from 1920s Paris'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Freeze My Margarita'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Frida'
Beset by one shattering ordeal after another, world-renowned painter Frida Kahlo always managed to channel her anguish into creativity. Frida, by Jonah Winter and illustrator Ana Juan, is an exquisite and playful glimpse into the artist's life and work. Filled with the folk art icons of Frida's Mexican culture--monkeys, devils, smiling skeletons, and sympathetic jaguars depicted with acrylics and wax on paper--the book describes, in short streams of text, the feisty, irreverent, fierce nature of the artist. One especially memorable illustration, based on one of Frida Kahlo's own paintings, shows Frida herself caught in a tangle of thorns against a mournful blue night sky. The text reads, "After the accident ... her body will hurt, always." Author and illustrator's notes add background information, but this stunning book from the author of Diego, about famed Mexican muralist (and husband of Frida) Diego Rivera, is a spectacular, lush introduction to an inspiring woman and her art. (Ages 5 to 8) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gabriel's Gift'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Georgia O'Keeffe'
The definitive book on Georgia O'Keeffe's work--selected, designed, and supervised by the artist herself, with her own text. Includes 108 magnificent full-color plates, some never reproduced elsewhere or publicly shown. Covers the entire range of O'Keeffe's career, from her intense, personal abstractions to her unique depictions of nature--flowers, bones, rocks, and landscapes. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Georgia Okeeffe a Portrait'
The artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) first met in 1916, when she heard that he was giving her drawings their first public showing - without her consent. The following year Stieglitz began his portrait of his future wife, according to his idea that a portrait was not just one photograph, but a series that would portray the many aspects of a person. Expanded from the original edition, which was prepared with O'Keeffe's assistance in 1978, this book includes a representative selection of 79 of the hundreds of photographs which were taken over a period of 30 years. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita-The Artist Caught Between East & West'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Masters: Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Guermantes Way'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gugu's House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hattie and the Wild Waves: A Story from Brooklyn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Henri Matisse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hogarth: A Life and a World'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Howards End'
Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.
Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'I Capture the Castle'
Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain wants to become a writer. Trouble is, she's the daughter of a once-famous author with a severe case of writer's block. Her family--beautiful sister Rose, brooding father James, ethereal stepmother Topaz--is barely scraping by in a crumbling English castle they leased when times were good. Now there's very little furniture, hardly any food, and just a few pages of notebook paper left to write on. Bravely making the best of things, Cassandra gets hold of a journal and begins her literary apprenticeship by refusing to face the facts. She writes, "I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud."
Rose longs for suitors and new tea dresses while Cassandra scorns romance: "I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them." But romantic isolation comes to an end both for the family and for Cassandra's heart when the wealthy, adventurous Cotton family takes over the nearby estate. Cassandra is a witty, pensive, observant heroine, just the right voice for chronicling the perilous cusp of adulthood. Some people have compared I Capture the Castle to the novels of Jane Austen, and it's just as well-plotted and witty. But the Mortmains are more bohemian--as much like the Addams Family as like any of Austen's characters. Dodie Smith, author of 101 Dalmations, wrote this novel in 1948. And though the story is set in the 1930s, it still feels fresh, and well deserves its reputation as a modern classic. --Maria Dolan [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Summer Light'

› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Night Cafe'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leonardo Da Vinci'
A distinguished chronicler of the human body and spirit interprets a Renaissance genius
The enigma of the Mona Lisa's smile is not less than the enigma of her creator's life force."In Leonardo da Vinci, Sherwin Nuland (whose own work Time has called "awe-inspiring") completes his twenty-year quest to understand an unlettered man who was painter, architect, engineer, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. What was it that propelled Leonardo's insatiable curiosity? How could he be, in the same moment, as naive as a child and as profound as a sage?
Nuland finds clues in his subject's art, relationships, and scientific studies--as well as in the manuscripts spotlighted by their sale at auction to Bill Gates. Nuland detects the siren voice that lured the great artist so often into the arms of science--his fascination with anatomy, first as the basis for his paintings and then as the crucial component in his aim to systematize all knowledge of nature. Scholarly and passionate, Nuland's Leonardo da Vinci takes us deep into the first truly modern, empirical mind, one that was centuries ahead of its time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leonardo da Vinci: Flights Of The Mind'
For five centuries, Leonardo da Vinci has stood alone as the quintessential Renaissance manthe incomparable artist, writer, thinker, and inventor who most powerfully transformed his world. In this dazzling new intimate biography, award-winning author Charles Nicholl creates a portrait of the artist for our timea biography that brings Leonardo to life as a complex man living in a fascinating, dangerous, quickly changing world.
Drawing freely on his own original translations of Leonardos notebooks as well as newly discovered contemporary accounts, Nicholl captures the very texture of Leonardos mind and the pungent visceral impressions he transmuted into art. Detail by brilliant detail, Nicholl reconstructs the life and times of the artist, from his troubled childhood as the illegitimate son of an established Tuscan family to his years of apprenticeship in the burgeoning art world of Medici Florence to his unrivaled achievements in a breathtaking array of disciplines and media. Here, too, are compelling new answers to the enduring mysteries of Leonardos sexual orientation, the true identity of the Mona Lisa, and the early experiences that inspired his lifelong obsession with human flight.
A writer of irresistible charm and quicksilver imagination, Nicholl takes us from the backstreet artists studios of Florence to the glittering palazzi of the Medici, Sforza, and Borgia families as he pursues the most extravagantly talented and maddeningly elusive artist of all time. The result is a biography of rare grace and penetration. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Leonardo da Vinci : The Artist, Inventor, Scientist in Three-Dimensional Movable Pictures'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life and Death of Andy Warhol'
From the time of his first exhibition in the 1960s to his early death in 1987, Andy Warhol - "Pied Piper of New York's underground" - was rarely out of the news. This biography, written by an associate of the artist, is based on interviews with family, friends, lovers and hangers-on. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Matisse on Art'

› Find signed collectible books: 'May and Amy: A True Story of Family, Forbidden Love, and the Secret Lives of May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy, and Sir Edward Burne-Jones'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mermaid Chair'
Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair is the soulful tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island, where she is caring for her troubled mother, Nelle. Like Kidd's stunning debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, her highly anticipated follow up evokes the same magical sense of whimsy and poignancy.
While Kidd places an obvious importance on the role of mysticism and legend in this tale, including the mysterious mermaid's chair at the center of the island's history, the relationships between characters is what gives this novel its true weight. Once she returns to her childhood home, Jessie is forced to confront not only her relationship with her estranged mother, but her other emotional ties as well. After decades of marriage to Hugh, her practical yet conventional husband, Jessie starts to question whether she is craving an independence she never had the chance to experience. After she meets Brother Thomas, a handsome monk who has yet to take his final vows, Jessie is forced to decide whether passion can coexist with comfort, or if the two are mutually exclusive. As her soul begins to reawaken, Jessie must also confront the circumstances of her father's death, a tragedy that continues to haunt Jessie and Nelle over thirty years later.
By boldly tackling such major themes as love, betrayal, grief, and forgiveness, The Mermaid Chair forces readers to question whether moral issues can always be interpreted in black or white. It is this ability to so gracefully present multiple sides of a story that reinforces Kidd's reputation as a well-respected modern literary voice. --Gisele Toueg [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Michelangelo'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Middlemarch'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Moments of Being'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mondrian'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Monument'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mozart'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'My Dog Rosie'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Narcissus and Goldmund'
Hesse's novel of two medieval men, one quietly content with his religion and monastic life, the other in fervent search of more worldly salvation. This conflict between flesh and spirit, between emotional and contemplative man, was a life study for Hesse. It is a theme that transcends all time. The Hesse Phenomenon "has turned into a vogue, the vogue into a torrent. . .He has appealed both to. . . an underground and to an establishment. . .and to the disenchanted young sharing his contempt for our industrial civilization."-- The New York Times Book Review [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nathan Oliveira'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Oh Rats! the Story of Rats And People'
Authors: Arnold B. Glimcher Publisher: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc. Keywords: nevelson, louise Pages: 197 Published: 1976-08-17 Language: English ISBN-10: 0525474390 ISBN-13: 9780525474395 Binding: Paperback (Enlarged 2nd) List Price: 16.99 USD [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Road'
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Paul Klee on Modern Art'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pedagogical Sketchbook'
"One of the most famous of modern art documents - a poetic primer, prepared by the artist for his Bauhaus pupils, which has deeply affected modern thinking about art...This little handbook leads us into the mysterious world where science and imagination fuse." ~~"The Observer" [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."
As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'
A novel that has fascinated readers for over a century, The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who attains eternal youth while only his portrait grows old, hidden away in a locked room. Despite the young man's disintegration into a life of crime, his face never reflects the moral decay. Instead, the portrait records every deed by turning his once handsome features into a hideous mask.
With Tony Ross's splendid illustrations and extended captions unique to the Whole Story, The Picture of Dorian Gray provides background information that modern readers could otherwise access only through a broad range of supplemental research -- from biographical profiles of Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries to depictions of London's art world in the late nineteenth century. This distinctive approach places The Picture of Dorian Gray, first published in 1891, within the context of its era, bringing it vividly to life. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings by Oscar Wilde'
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."
As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Piero Della Francesca: The Flagellation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece Modernism, Money, Politics, Collectors, Dealers, Taste, Greed, and Loss'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Uncovering the Forgotten Secrets and Hidden Life Histories of Iconic Masterpieces'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters'
The author writes: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker ? RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR ? An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Raise High the Roof beam, Carpenters And Seymour: An Introduction'
The author writes: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker ? RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR ? An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rembrandt's Hat'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Roger Fry: A Biography'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Room of Ones' Own'
Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye'
"Pather Panchali", the first film in Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy brought world attention to the work of this director. Andrew Robinson views Ray's prodigious achievements from both an Indian and a Western perspective. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Saul Steinberg Masquerade'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Guineas'
This prestigious new edition of the most controversial of Woolf's works includes an illuminating introduction and full annotations by the editor. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Through the Flower: My Struggle As a Woman Artist'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'To the Lighthouse'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Turn: The Journal of an Artist'
The second journal of an artist by "an extraordinary woman: sensitive, intelligent, perceptive"--Doris Grumbach. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vermeer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'What Makes a Degas a Degas?'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The World According to Garp'
"Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."
Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.
In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?
Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."
All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values'
In his now classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig brings us a literary chautauqua, a novel that is meant to both entertain and edify. It scores high on both counts.
Phaedrus, our narrator, takes a present-tense cross-country motorcycle trip with his son during which the maintenance of the motorcycle becomes an illustration of how we can unify the cold, rational realm of technology with the warm, imaginative realm of artistry. As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details--be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.
In his autobiographical first novel, Pirsig wrestles both with the ghost of his past and with the most important philosophical questions of the 20th century--why has technology alienated us from our world? what are the limits of rational analysis? if we can't define the good, how can we live it? Unfortunately, while exploring the defects of our philosophical heritage from Socrates and the Sophists to Hume and Kant, Pirsig inexplicably stops at the middle of the 19th century. With the exception of Poincaré, he ignores the more recent philosophers who have tackled his most urgent questions, thinkers such as Peirce, Nietzsche (to whom Phaedrus bears a passing resemblance), Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. In the end, the narrator's claims to originality turn out to be overstated, his reasoning questionable, and his understanding of the history of Western thought sketchy. His solution to a synthesis of the rational and creative by elevating Quality to a metaphysical level simply repeats the mistakes of the premodern philosophers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, Pirsig writes a compelling story. And he is a true innovator in his attempt to popularize a reconciliation of Eastern mindfulness and nonrationalism with Western subject/object dualism. The magic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to lie not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises and the way it raises them. Like a cross between The Razor's Edge and Sophie's World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes us into "the high country of the mind" and opens our eyes to vistas of possibility. --Brian Bruya [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Zen Art of Motorcycle'
In his now classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig brings us a literary chautauqua, a novel that is meant to both entertain and edify. It scores high on both counts.
Phaedrus, our narrator, takes a present-tense cross-country motorcycle trip with his son during which the maintenance of the motorcycle becomes an illustration of how we can unify the cold, rational realm of technology with the warm, imaginative realm of artistry. As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details--be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.
In his autobiographical first novel, Pirsig wrestles both with the ghost of his past and with the most important philosophical questions of the 20th century--why has technology alienated us from our world? what are the limits of rational analysis? if we can't define the good, how can we live it? Unfortunately, while exploring the defects of our philosophical heritage from Socrates and the Sophists to Hume and Kant, Pirsig inexplicably stops at the middle of the 19th century. With the exception of Poincaré, he ignores the more recent philosophers who have tackled his most urgent questions, thinkers such as Peirce, Nietzsche (to whom Phaedrus bears a passing resemblance), Heidegger, Whitehead, Dewey, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn. In the end, the narrator's claims to originality turn out to be overstated, his reasoning questionable, and his understanding of the history of Western thought sketchy. His solution to a synthesis of the rational and creative by elevating Quality to a metaphysical level simply repeats the mistakes of the premodern philosophers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, Pirsig writes a compelling story. And he is a true innovator in his attempt to popularize a reconciliation of Eastern mindfulness and nonrationalism with Western subject/object dualism. The magic of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to lie not in the answers it gives, but in the questions it raises and the way it raises them. Like a cross between The Razor's Edge and Sophie's World, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance takes us into "the high country of the mind" and opens our eyes to vistas of possibility. --Brian Bruya [via]
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