A collection of the New Yorkercritic’s finest essays, which examine the books that reveal and record our world.Joan Acocella was “one of our finest cultural critics” (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investiga...

Born into a family of successful playwrights and producers, Agnes de Mille was determined to be an actress. Then one day she witnessed the Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, and her life was altered forever. Hypnotized by Pavlova’s beauty, in that moment de Mille dedicated herself to dance. Her memoir records with lighthearted humor and wisdom not only the difficulties she faced—the resistance of her parents, the sacrifices of her training—but also the frontier atmosphere of early Hollywo...

A remarkable account of a wildly artistic life, finally restored to its unexpurgated form, with a revealing new introduction by Joan Acocella.The visionary choreographer and dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) not only revolutionized dance in the twentieth century but blazed a path for other visionaries who would follow in her wake. While many biographies have explored Duncan’s crucial role as one of the founders of modern dance, no other book has proved as critical—as both historica...

Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf;...

A prodigy from his youth in Russia, Vaslav Nijinsky came to international fame as a principal dancer in Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In December 1917, Nijinsky—by then the most famous male dancer in the Western world—moved into a Swiss villa with his wife and three-year-old daughter and began to go mad. When psychosis struck, he imagined himself as married to God. Although he lived another 30 years, he never regained his sanity. This diary, which he kept in four notebooks over six wee...

This book was designed for use in a one-semester dance appreciation survey class. As such, I have attempted to limit the information provided to that which can be covered comfortably. This means that many noteworthy choreographers and dancers do not appear in this text. Teachers may wish to add other important contributors to the art of dance, particularly in Chapters five, six, and seven.Tami M. White is an adjunct faculty member with the Dance Department at Old Dominion Universit...

In this third self-contained volume of her autobiography, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou moves into the adult world, and the white world as well, as she marries, enters show business, and tours Europe and Africa in Porgy and Bess.As the book opens, Maya, in order to support herself and her young son, gets a job in a record shop run by a white woman. Suspicious of almost any kindness shown her, she is particularly confused by...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLYFor more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of bal...

A far-ranging, invigorating and irrepressible collection of essays on literature, cinema, art - and everything in between - from the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Feel Free and Swing Time'Alarmingly good' Metro'Striding with open hearted zest and eloquence between fiction (from EM Forster to David Foster Wallace) and travel, movies and comedy, family and community in a self-portrait that charts the evol...

A collection of delicious anecdotes of a life spent on stages and film sets across the world—from Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre to The Sound of Music—from one of our greatest actors.Christopher Plummer’s magnificent book recounts the wild adventure that was his life, stretching from a privileged childhood in Canada to the glorious, star-studded New York of the fifties to a sensational career in film appearing in some of our most beloved classics. ...

A collection of reflections on writing and the nature of the writer from one the greatest American writers of the 20th century.Throughout Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.”Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels...

In 1957, when a young Midwestern woman landed a job at The New Yorker, she didn’t expect to stay long at the reception desk. But stay she did, and for twenty-one years she had the best seat in the house. In addition to taking messages, she ran interference for jealous wives checking on adulterous husbands, drank with famous writers at famous watering holes throughout bohemian Greenwich Village, and was seduced, two-timed, and proposed to by a few of the magazine’s eccentric luminaries. Thi...