Showing titles in Art & Literature

You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know many of the images he shaped, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?

Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms’ ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses.

Perhaps the most unconventional and literally breathtaking father-son story you'll ever read, My Friend Leonard pulls you immediately and deeply into a relationship as unusual as it is inspiring. The father figure is Leonard, the high-living, recovering coke addict, "West Coast Director of a large Italian-American finance firm" (read: mobster) who helped to keep James Frey clean in A Million Little Pieces.

This telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms, but a life that was often a painful struggle. Jane famously lived a 'life without incident', but with new research and insights Lucy Worsley reveals a passionate woman who fought for her freedom. A woman who far from being a lonely spinster in fact had at least five marriage prospects, but who in the end refused to settle for anything less than Mr Darcy.

In February 2011 John Galliano, the lauded head of Christian Dior, imploded with a drunken, anti-Semitic public tirade. Exactly a year earlier, celebrated designer Alexander McQueen took his own life three weeks before his women's wear show. Both were casualties of the war between art and commerce that has raged within fashion for the last two decades.

New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers—the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his "swans."

The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated 18th-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of "retirement" in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind.

John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists.

This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag’s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.

Margery Allingham, already a successful crime writer, was living quietly in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy ("Auburn") when the Second World War broke out. Her house became an Air Raid Wardens’ post and a First Aid centre, and Allingham herself became responsible for 275 East London evacuees in a rural community of just over 600.

What can we learn about life, love, and artillery from an 82-year-old man whose favorite hobby is firing his homemade cannons? Visit by visit - often with his young daughters in tow - author Michael Perry is about to find out. Toiling in a shop Perry describes as "an antique store stocked by Rube Goldberg, curated by Hunter Thompson, and rearranged by a small earthquake," Tom Hartwig makes gag shovel handles, parts for quarter-million-dollar farm equipment, and - now and then - batches of potentially "extralegal" explosives.

يعدُّ هذا الكتاب أول وأوسع كشف بالعربية عن الحياة الشخصية لأحد أعظم وأعمق من كتب الرواية (فيودور دوستويفسكي).

عندما يقع بين يديك كتاب ل" سيجموند فرويد" فإنَّك على الأغلب لن تتركه أبدًا وسيحدث في عقلك وروحك الكثير من التغييرات، إذن تخيل أن يكون هذا الكتاب عن الفنان العبقري "ليوناردو دافنشي" !!

دائمًا ما نسمع عن موسوعة الدكتور عبد الوهاب المسيري حول اليهودية والصهيونية فقد اعتادت الصحف اليومية نشر ما يكتب من مقالات وتحليلات يوميًا وأصبحت كتبه في علم السياسة وعلم الاجتماع والأدب تدرَّس كمنهجٍ في الجامعات ولم يكن مفاجئًا أن يحصل المسيري على جائزة الدولة التقديرية في الآداب فقد سبق وحصل على جائزةٍ عالمية عن مجمل أعماله وكان المسيري قد كتب سيرته الذاتية قبل موته في كتابه الأشهر: "رحلتي الفكرية في البذور والجذور والثمر" ليأتي هذا الكتاب ويربط هذه السيرة والرحلة الذاتية بفكره ومفاهيمه حول أمور الحياة المختلفة.

John Cooper Clarke is a phenomenon: Poet Laureate of Punk, rock star, fashion icon, TV and radio presenter, social and cultural commentator, reluctant national treasure. At 5 feet 11 inches (116lb, 32in chest, 27in waist), in trademark suit jacket, skin-tight drainpipes and dark glasses, with jet-black back-combed hair and mouth full of gold teeth, he is instantly recognisable. As a writer his voice is equally unmistakable and his inimitable dry Salford drawl shines through the prose.

In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within this audiobook, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance.

بعد حياة حافلة بالعطاء استمرت ما يقارب تسعة عقود، اختار الراحل الكبير الأستاذ أنيس منصور صديقه وتلميذه، الدكتور مجدى العفيفي، ليأتمنه على ذلك التاريخ الحافل وذلك التراث الثري، فكان الرجل على قدر المسؤولية وأصدر مؤخراً كتابه المتميز"آخر 200 يوم مع أنيس منصور" فى 550 صفحة، تحمل كل منها ما يستحق أن يكون كتاباً فى حد ذاته، حيث غزارة المعلومات وانسيابها، والبلاغة فى التعبير وإبداعاتها، إضافة إلى تعدد جوانب الغوص فى الشخصية وحكاياها، من السياسة إلى العاطفة إلى الصحافة.

لا يُقدّم العقّاد في هذا الكتاب سردًا لسيرة حياة عمر بن الخطاب، وإنّما يُقدّم وصفًا لأطواره، ودلالةً على خصائص عظمته، واستفادةً من هذه الخصائص في علم النفس، وعلم الأخلاق وحقائق الحياة، كما يقول في مقدّمة الكتاب، ولم يمنعه صغر الحادث من أن يقدّمه بالاهتمام والتّنويه على أكبر الحوادث، إن كان أوفى تعريفًا بعمر، وأصدق دلالة عليه.

في هذه السيرة المُلهمة ، لم يكن الروائي الكبير "بهاء طاهر" يتوانى عن سرد حكاياته الخاصة بين أبيه و أمّه ، بين "ستيفكا" زوجته و بينه ، أسراره التي عاشها في الماضي ، أسرار الغربة ، التي أطلق عليها منفى ، الكتاب مليء بالحكايات الغنية المُضحكة المُبكية في آن ، في هذا الكتاب ، سيرة إنسانية كُبرى ، جوانب لا يعرفها أحد عن "بهاء طاهر" ، لقطات لم تُكتب في رواياته ، ولم تسجّلها سوى ذاكرته ، في هذا الكتاب سنرتحل مع "بهاء طاهر" الإنسان أكثر منه ككاتب ، ولعلّنا في نهاية الرّحلة سنكتشف و نستخلص الجوهر الأصيل الحقيقي الذي انطلقت منه كتابات "بهاء طاهر" ، و طافت العالم.

El descalzo es el escritor en su tinta. Pero la tinta de un escritor no es sólo la tinta de su tintero, de su teclado. Es, además, todo eso que lo envuelve como una red y lo apresa y/o contiene y está más allá y más acá de su biblioteca, de sus apuntes, de sus tortuosos borradores, de los laberintos de gestación, de sus hábitos y manías y mañas a la hora de afrontar el desafío de la página en blanco o de la página que rebasa.