Great Art

However, a historical transformation of similar magnitude also took place in northern Europe at the same time. This "Other Renaissance" was initially centered on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern Belgium), but its influence was soon being felt in France, the German states, London, and even in Italy itself.

John Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defenses of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost - but would first justify the killing of a king.

Are you a pub trivia enthusiast looking for some new challenges? The Great Book of Pub Trivia is the perfect companion for game nights, fun family times, fun evenings with friends, or just brushing up on your pub trivia knowledge. These trivia questions will get your brain working, and these random facts will give you bragging rights with all your friends (if you get them right).

Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts. Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a...

In the second memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, Madeleine L'Engle chronicles a season of extremes. Four generations of family have gathered at Crosswicks, her Connecticut farmhouse, to care for L'Engle's ninety-year-old mother. As summer days fade to sleepless nights, her mother's health rapidly declines and her once astute mind slips into senility. With poignant honesty, L'Engle describes the gifts and graces, as well as the painful emotional cost, of caring for the one who once cared for you.

Take a peek inside the heads of some of the world's greatest living graphic designers. How do they think, how do they connect to others, what special skills do they have? In honest and revealing interviews, 19 designers, including Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Beirut, David Carson, and Milton Glaser, share their approaches, processes, opinions, and thoughts about their work with noted brand designer Debbie Millman. The internet radio talk host of Design Matters, Millman persuades the greatest graphic designers of our time to speak frankly and openly about their work.

With clarity and insight, Richard Brestoff introduces the great acting teachers, explaining their techniques and how they are applied today. Beginning with Quintilian and Delsarte, he guides us to the present with an inside look at what is currently being taught in the major acting schools and private acting studios; The Actors Studio, Yale University, NYU, Juilliard and many more are visited. The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods will help you understand the most important ideas about acting, where they originated and how they are used in training programs today.

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

Mixed martial arts competitors wrestle, jab, and kick their ways to the top. The best fighters never pull any punches. Listen here for the biggest names in MMA.

C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the 20th century. Many know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker?

Abridged for audio. Read by the author, Clive James. With fascinating essays on towering figures from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic...

Hi, fellow music lover! Congratulations on starting your music-making journey. I won't waste your time with a long introduction, but let me say a few words just to get us off on the right foot. Ear training is one of the most rewarding skills you can develop, and it’s one that you can work on every day. Which makes total sense: Music is an aural experience, after all. Ear training helps you turn the music you hear into music you make on your guitar. This works for your own musical ideas, too.

Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth-century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What Makes It Great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the Great American Songbook, bringing many of our favorite classics to life.

Whether you're just starting out as a songwriter, you're an experienced songwriter or just looking for a new perspective on the beautiful craft of songwriting, Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics offers fresh insights to help you write your very best lyrics. In Song Maps - A New System to Write Your Best Lyrics, I deliver simple, logical, well-defined solutions to these issues and more: I give you seven well-developed professional templates for you to bring your lyrics to life.

Eric Edson has developed a new tool for bringing depth and passion to any screenplay or novel - the 23 Actions All Great Heroes Must Take. It's an easy-to-understand paradigm that provides writers and filmmakers the interconnecting, powerful storytelling elements they need. With true insight, this accomplished screenwriter and university professor pinpoints the story structure reasons most new spec scripts don't sell.

At twenty-five, activist Cristina Moon faced an impossible task: preparing for the possibility of arrest and torture inside military-ruled Myanmar. Her response? Learning Buddhist meditation. So began what would become a decades-long spiritual path—eventually leading her to a Zen temple and martial arts dojo in Hawai'i with a timeless method of warrior Zen training.

A hands-on guide to advanced spiritual transformation through the combined sacred arts of alchemy and shamanism Recasts the 7 stages of the alchemical “Great Work” as a transformative shamanic journey and initiatic experience Provides step-by-step instructions for 18 shamanic alchemy...

The Art of Writing is Yang's highly practical treatise on the four key principles of dazzling, effective writing - economy, transparency, variety, and harmony. Far from your garden-variety style guide, the principles in this audiobook apply to everyone, whether you're writing an inauguration speech or a letter home to Mom.

A New York Times investigative reporter wades into the murky, pixelated waters of the multibillion-dollar NFT market—the virtual casino that sprang up overnight in 2020 and came crashing down, with all its celebrity hucksters, just two years later. A vibrant and witty exploration of the...

The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice - paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy.