Art Essays

The story of dealers of Old Masters, champions of modern art, and victims of Nazi plunder. Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to...

Why some of the most interesting artists of our time committed themselves to some of the most devastating conflicts on Earth Why are some of the most interesting artists of our time committed to engaging with conflict and exploitation around the world? Beautiful, Gruesome, and True tells the...

Scratching River braids the voices of mother, brother, sister, ancestor, and river to create a story about environmental, personal, and collective healing. This memoir revolves around a search for home for the author’s older brother, who is both autistic and schizophrenic, and an unexpected...

In Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter embarks on a quest to find her great-grandfather, the Métis fiddler and performer Léon Robert Goulet. Through musicology, jigs and reels, poetry, photographs, and the ecology of fire, Porter invests biography with the power of reflective ingenuity, creating...

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances...

“Chasing Bright Medusas should appeal to anyone — novice or expert — ready to explore Cather’s life and work in the company of a critic so alert to the shimmering subtlety of her style and the hard years of effort that went into crystallizing it.” —The Washington Post A tender...

A cinephile's dream: the chance to follow legendary director Woody Allen throughout the creation of a film--from inception to premiere--and to enjoy his reflections on some of the finest artists in the history of cinema. Eric Lax has been with Woody Allen almost every step of the way. He...

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person - and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss - from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde - Larissa Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

The definitive new book from India’s no. 1 business writer Chanakya was one of the best strategic thinkers of the world. In the fourth century BC, he wrote the Arthashastra, an unrivalled political treatise that has since been used by leaders across the globe. In Inside Chanakya’s Mind, for...

Ghosting the News tells the most troubling media story of our time: How democracy suffers when local news dies. Reporting on news-impoverished areas in the U.S. and around the world, America's premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage but also surveys some new...

Attention would-be paesans: Can’t distinguish “gabagool” from “pasta fazool”? Not sure how to properly accessorize your track suit with gold chains? Does the phrase “go to the mattresses” make you sleepy? Now Steven R. Schirripa, The Sopranos’ own Bobby Bacala, exposes the inner...

A deeply humane new collection by a luminary of Bengali literature A radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen's rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay...

Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN: The fragments of which this lecture is composed are taken entirely from the original manuscripts which have but recently been discovered. It is not certain that they all belong to the same lecture, nor that all were written at the same period. Some portions were written in Philadelphia in 1882.

Parkour, the art of displacement, or freerunning—whatever the name, this new discipline born in the Paris suburbs is rapidly being adopted by people throughout the world. Not satisfied to suffer through urban life, these athletic artists or artistic athletes want to thrive in it, all the while earning dignity by daringly reappropriating three motor skills: running, jumping, and climbing. Vincent Thibault explores the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the art of movement and offers ideas on health, sports, urban living, and the relationship between the body and the environment.

El audiolibro de Eduardo Calla y escucha habla de Bach y Beethoven: de los pleitos laborales del primero y de la vez que la policía confundió al segundo con un indigente. Indaga la relación entre música y política: de la presentación de los Rolling Stones en La Habana a una fuga de presas políticas en Uruguay que fingieron que eran un coro de iglesia. Revela a Cri-Cri como el autor de algunos de los cuentos más kafkianos de la lengua española y le sigue la pista al discreto obrero que ayudó a demoler la industria discográfica a principio de los dosmiles.

Wie ein Sturm ist das Werk Emily Brontës in das Leben von Mithu Sanyal hineingefegt. Die erste Lektüre des Romans "Sturmhöhe: Wuthering Heights" hatte für die Autorin von "Identitti" lebensprägende, lebensverändernde Kraft. Mithu Sanyal hat ein mitreißendes Buch über das Leben und Schreiben der weltberühmten englischen Autorin geschrieben, der man zu Lebzeiten mangelnde Weiblichkeit vorwarf und deren Buch als gefährlich galt.

Bei Gottfried Benn kann es nie um reine Liebe gehen. Wer sich seit über zwei Jahrzehnten so intensiv mit Benn beschäftigt wie Florian Illies, der erlebt zahlreiche Enttäuschungen angesichts der politischen Verirrungen und der menschlichen Kälte des Autors – und doch wird er immer wieder gefangen genommen vom einzigartigen Klang der Benn'schen Verse. Von dieser so leidenschaftlichen wie wechselhaften Beziehungsgeschichte erzählt Florian Illies in diesem Hörbuch.

満月の夜だけ開店するレストランで、焚き火を囲んでお月見をしたり、急遽思い立って、三崎港へのひとり大人遠足を計画したり。ベルリンでは、語学学校に通って予習と宿題に追われ、束の間の休みは、ご近所

鎌倉に小さな古い家を借りて、久し振りの一人暮らし。朝は早起きしてお寺の座禅会に参加し、夜は屋上でビール片手に満天の星を観る。ペンギンと恋人のように待ち合わせして夕食を楽しんだり、近くの小川を

苦節10年の末に、小説『食堂かたつむり』でデビューを果たした著者。執筆、サイン会、取材と怒涛の日々を送る彼女に代わって、ペンギンが台所デビュー。まぐろ丼、おでん、かやくご飯…。