Showing titles in Art & Literature

Drawing on previously hidden historical documents and interviews with the long-silent "illegitimate" branch of the family, William J. Mann paints an elegant, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking group portrait of this legendary family. Mann argues that the Roosevelts' rise to power and prestige was actually driven by a series of intense personal contests that at times devolved into blood sport. His compelling and eye-opening masterwork is the story of a family at war with itself, of social Darwinism at its most ruthless.

Atop a hill in the rainforest of Belize, next to the ruins of a fallen civilization, a butterfly farm raises the brilliant blue morpho. What starts out as the worst vacation ever turns into a quest to learn more about the first-of-its-kind farm when journalist Diana Marcum inadvertently discovers this wildlife sanctuary, which is supported by an international live-butterfly trade.

Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love - remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences.

Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist. The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution.

Throughout Maya Angelou’s life, from her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, to her world travels as a bestselling writer, good food has played a central role. Preparing and enjoying homemade meals provides a sense of purpose and calm, accomplishment and connection. Now in Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, Angelou shares memories pithy and poignant—and the recipes that helped to make them both indelible and irreplaceable.

In the long out-of-print sequel to Life Among the Savages, Jackson’s four children have grown from savages into full-fledged demons. After bursting the seams of their first house, Jackson’s clan moves into a larger home. Of course, the chaos simply moves with them. A confrontation with the IRS, Little League, trumpet lessons, and enough clutter to bury her alive - Jackson spins them all into an indelible reminder that every bit as thrilling as a murderous family in a haunted house is a happy family in a new home.

On March 17, 2009, Laura Ling and her colleague Euna Lee were working on a documentary about North Korean defectors who were fleeing the desperate conditions in their homeland. While filming on the Chinese/North Korean border, they were chased down by North Korean soldiers who violently apprehended them. Laura and Euna were charged with trespassing and "hostile acts," and imprisoned by Kim Jong Il's notoriously secretive Communist state.

In the summer of 1964 Jacksonville, Florida teenager Ronnie Van Zant and some of his friends hatched the idea of forming a band to play covers of the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Yardbirds, and the country and blues-rock music they had grown to love. Naming their band after Leonard Skinner, the gym teacher at Robert E. Lee Senior High School who constantly badgered the long-haired aspiring musicians to get haircuts, they were soon playing gigs at parties, and bars throughout the South.

Internationally best-selling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long-awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become over the course of half a century a poet-interruptus, an air force weatherman, a radio DJ, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist, and a counter-culture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical, and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters.

When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007.

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O'Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work - equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky - has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

Before Picasso became Picasso—the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures—he was constantly surveilled by the police. Amidst political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services. Though he soon became the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades.

Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. He published in 1872 as a prequel to his first book, The Innocents Abroad. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything--and usually failed. Twain's encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes and volcanoes, even Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, come to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales

For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For 45 years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Set deep in the rugged Appalachian Mountains, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, mountain music, and her daddy's dimestore. It was in that dimestore - listening to customers and inventing life histories for the store's dolls - that she began to learn the craft of storytelling.

A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.

Louis Vuitton was just thirteen years old, when, he left the family mill to escape his stepmother. In Paris, he found work with Maréchal, the most prestigious box-maker and packer in Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Caroline Bongrand's vivid account relates the rise of this daring young man, a virtuoso, visionary craftsman in a capital city transformed by Haussmann. When Eugénie de Montijo became Empress of France, she continued to enlist the services of her favorite packer, with whom she developed a sincere, lasting friendship.

An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life.

Racial identity, pop culture, and delusions of perfection collide in an eye-opening and refreshingly frank memoir by fashion and beauty insider Danielle Prescod.

In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kind of novelistic memoir”, Jay Parini takes us back 50 years, when he fled the United States for Scotland - in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges.

The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life. What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds.