Art Biography

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.” On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever...

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story—a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the...

The author of the New York Times bestseller Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep returns with a lively history of the Academy Awards, focusing on the brutal battles, the starry rivalries, and the colorful behind-the-scenes drama. America does not have royalty. It has the Academy Awards. For nine...

Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to listeners. Like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination to be both wife and mother, on the one hand, and teacher and writer on the other, Plath tried simultaneously to fulfill and to fight the conventions that bound women in the 1950s. In this biography, the first to draw on unpublished journals and letters recently made available, Wagner-Martin examines the ironies, contradictions, and achievements of Plath's life.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NATIONAL BESTSELLER A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and...

A fascinating, cinematic, multigenerational history of the Cuban mob in the US from ""America’s top chronicler of organized crime""* and New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne. By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of...

In 2001, Ian McKellen put on the robe and pointed hat of a wizard named Gandalf and won a place in the hearts of Tolkien fans worldwide. Though his role in the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings introduced him to a new audience, McKellen had a thriving career a lifetime before his visit to Middle Earth. He made his West End acting debut in 1964 in James Saunders's A Scent of Flowers, but it was in 1980 that he took Broadway by storm when he played Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Tony Award-winning play Amadeus....

In this completely updated edition of her bestselling book, renowned acting coach Ivana Chubbuck shares her cutting-edge technique that has launched some of the most successful and lauded acting careers in Hollywood Let the instructor who taught Halle Berry, Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Jim...

"Changer : méthode" est le récit d'une vie, le parcours douloureux et difficile d'un transfuge de classe pour s'extraire de son milieu culturel et social. La profondeur des changements intimes, la douleur des liens qui se rompent et la volonté inouïe qu'il faut mettre en œuvre pour se réinventer sont au cœur de ce livre audio magnifique.

The single glass of wine with dinner... the cold beer on a hot day... the champagne flute raised in a toast... what I'd drink if Hunter S. Thompson wanted to get wasted with me... these are my fantasies lately. Too bad I've gone sober. When Sacha Z. Scoblic was drinking, she was a rock star; the days were rough and the nights filled with laughter and blackouts. Then she gave it up. She had to. Here are her adventures in an utterly and maddeningly sober world... and how she discovered that nothing is as odd and fantastic as life without a drink in hand.

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Beloved actress, Food Network personality, and New York Times bestselling author Valerie Bertinelli reflects on life at sixty and beyond. Behind the curtain of her happy on-screen persona, Valerie Bertinelli’s life has been no easy ride, especially when it...

Regarded as a masterpiece today, 2001: A Space Odyssey received mixed reviews. Despite the success of Dr. Strangelove, director Stanley Kubrick wasn't yet recognized as a great filmmaker, and 2001 was radically innovative, with little dialogue and no strong central character. Author Michael Benson explains how 2001 was made, telling the story primarily through the two people most responsible for the film, Kubrick and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke. Benson interviewed Clarke many times, and has also spoken at length with Kubrick's widow, Christiane.

READ BY THE AUTHOR AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Imagine if all the worn-out, untrue, painful chapters of our lives started to quiet, and the beautiful, unique pieces of who we are were to rise. Imagine if the stories we tell brought us back to our true selves, back to one another...

John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents’ house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer's greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime's immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it.

An intimate portrait of Handel’s life and inner circle, modeled after one of the composer’s favorite forms: the fugue. During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel’s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns, but the man himself - known to most as the composer of Messiah - is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and even provided for their preservation on his death, very little of an intimate nature survives.

In 1969, Illeana Douglas' parents saw the film Easy Rider and were transformed. Taking Dennis Hopper's words - "That's what it's all about, man" - to heart, they abandoned their comfortable upper-middle-class life and gave Illeana a childhood filled with hippies, goats, free spirits, and free love. Illeana writes, "Since it was all out of my control, I began to think of my life as a movie, with a Dennis Hopper-like father at the center of it." I Blame Dennis Hopper is a rollicking, funny, at times tender exploration of the way movies can change our lives.

From global art superstar Kent Monkman and his long-time collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers’ understanding of the land called North America. For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent...

"Surely make you lose your mind . . ." So the Eagles warn us about the outrageous and ruthless lifestyle of the ambitious rock-n-roller. In fact, Don Henley could barely listen to the track "Life in the Fast Lane" when they were recording it. He was so high that it made him sick. The band that embodied the American dream with globe-straddling success, impossibly luxurious lives, and almost supernatural talent also descended into nightmare with betrayal, hate-filled hubris, the skeletons of perceived enemies, brutally discarded lovers and former band mates left unburied in the road behind them.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin is the published version of Anaïs Nin's own private manuscript diary, which she began at age 11 in 1914 during a trip from Europe to New York with her mother and two brothers. Nin would later say she had begun the diary as a letter to her father, Cuban composer Joaquín Nin, who had abandoned the family a few years earlier.