A "compelling" biography of the brilliant abstract expressionist painter who was far more than just Mrs. Jackson Pollock ( Los Angeles Times).Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in this riveting biography, the first full-length account of her colorful life, Krasner emerges as a significant artist who deserves her place in the twentieth century's cultural lexicon.In this cap...

From one of the most acclaimed art biographers writing today comes the surprising life of Alice Baber, who produced exquisite abstract paintings of vibrantly colored shapes that created an illusion of floating light. Heralded as an "artist of lyrical abstractions," Baber's paintings had already entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney at the time of her premature death at just fifty-four. How could such an accomplished...

The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel, a breathtaking feat of storytelling where everything is connected, but nothing is as it seems ...**"A true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly." —**New York Times Book ReviewIt is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. O...

More than 150 inspired—and inspiring—novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians on how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do.Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, ...

All actors and acting teachers need The Ultimate Scene and Monologue Sourcebook, the invaluable guide to finding just the right piece for every audition. The unique format of the book is ideal for acting teachers who want their students to understand each monologue in context. This remarkable book describes the characters, action, and mood for more than 1,000 scenes in over 300 plays. Using these guidelines, the actor can quickly pinpoint the perfect monologue, then find the text ...

Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told.When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kauf...

**Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland PrizeA critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture**Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in i...

A never-before-published collection of letters - an intimate self-portrait as well as the portrait of a century. Saul Bellow was a dedicated correspondent until a couple of years before his death, and his letters, spanning eight decades, show us a twentieth-century life in all its richness and complexity. Friends, lovers, wives, colleagues, and fans all cross these pages. Some of the finest letters are to Bellow's fellow writers-William Faulkner, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ral...

In this landmark work, Jed Perl captures the excitement of a generation of legendary artists–Jackson Pollack, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ellsworth Kelly among them–who came to New York, mingled in its lofts and bars, and revolutionized American art. In a continuously arresting narrative, Perl also portrays such less well known figures as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, and the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, as well the writer...

The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock. In true Oedipal fashion, Pollock even fell in love with Benton's wife.Pollock later broke a...

A lively portrait of mid-twentieth-century American book publishing—"A wonderful book, filled with anecdotal treasures" ( The New York Times).According to Al Silverman, former publisher of Viking Press and president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the golden age of book publishing began after World War II and lasted into the early 1980s.In this entertaining and affectionate industry biography, Silverman captures the passionate spirit of legendary hou...

The life and architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) have been much-studied, yet there is a consistent division between analyses of his architecture, which exclude any discussion of his daily life, and books that tell the often sensational tale of his life, with barely a passing reference to the buildings themselves. The result is that, despite the large number of volumes on Wright, the most essential part of his life – his life as an architect, working, as he said, ‘in the cause of...