Gente di Dublino di James Joyce

 

 

Considerati tra i capolavori della letteratura del Novecento, questi quindici racconti - terminati nel 1906 ma pubblicati soltanto nel 1914 perché per la loro audacia e realismo gli editori li rifiutarono - compongono un mosaico unitario che rappresenta le tappe fondamentali della vita umana: l'infanzia, l'adolescenza, la maturità, la vecchiaia, la morte. Fa da cornice a queste vicende la magica capitale d'Irlanda, Dublino, con la sua aria vecchiotta, le birrerie fumose, il vento freddo che spazza le strade, i suoi bizzarri abitanti. Una città che, agli occhi e al cuore di Joyce, è in po' il precipitato di tutte le città occidentali del nostro secolo.

Dublino. Con carta estraibile di Fionn Davenport

 

 

Foto suggestive, i consigli degli autori e la vera essenza dei luoghi. Gli strumenti e gli itinerari per pianificare il viaggio che preferisci. I luoghi più famosi e quelli meno noti per rendere unico il tuo viaggio.

 

The Wreckage of My Presence: Essays by Casey Wilson

 

 

Laugh-out-loud, deeply insightful, and emotion-filled essays from multi-talented actress, comedian, podcaster, and writer Casey Wilson.

Casey Wilson has a lot on her mind and she isn’t afraid to share. In this dazzling collection, each essay skillfully constructed and brimming with emotion, she shares her thoughts on the joys and vagaries of modern-day womanhood and motherhood, introduces the not-quite-typical family that made her who she is, and persuasively argues that lowbrow pop culture is the perfect lens through which to examine human nature.

Whether she’s extolling the virtues of eating in bed, processing the humiliation over her father’s late in life perm, mourning her mother's passing, or revealing her patented method for keeping the mystery alive in a marriage, Casey is witty, candid, and full of poignant and funny surprises. Humorous dives into her obsessions and areas of personal expertise - self-help, nice guys, cool girls (not her), and how to receive visitors in the bath - are matched by touching meditations on female friendship, anger, grief, motherhood, and identity. 

Listening to The Wreckage of My Presence is like spending time with a close friend - a deeply passionate, full-tilt, joyous, excessive, compulsive, shameless, hungry-for-it-all, loyal, cheerleading friend. A friend who is ready for any big feelings that come her way - and isn’t afraid to embrace them.

 

The Beauty of Living Twice by Sharon Stone

 

 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Not your typical Hollywood autobiography. Brutally honest, restless and questing.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
Sharon Stone tells her own story: a journey of healing, love, and purpose.

Sharon Stone, one of the most renowned actresses in the world, suffered a massive stroke that cost her not only her health, but her career, family, fortune, and global fame. In The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone chronicles her efforts to rebuild her life and writes about her slow road back to wholeness and health. In a business that doesn’t accept failure, in a world where too many voices are silenced, Stone found the power to return, the courage to speak up, and the will to make a difference in the lives of men, women, and children around the globe.

Over the course of these intimate pages, as candid as a personal conversation, Stone talks about her pivotal roles, her life-changing friendships, her worst disappointments, and her greatest accomplishments. She reveals how she went from a childhood of trauma and violence to a career in an industry that in many ways echoed those same assaults, under cover of money and glamour. She describes the strength and meaning she found in her children, and in her humanitarian efforts. And ultimately, she shares how she fought her way back to find not only her truth, but her family’s reconciliation and love.

Stone made headlines not just for her beauty and her talent, but for her candor and her refusal to “play nice,” and it’s those same qualities that make this memoir so powerful. The Beauty of Living Twice is a book for the wounded and a book for the survivors; it’s a celebration of women’s strength and resilience, a reckoning, and a call to activism. It is proof that it’s never too late to raise your voice and speak out.

Love Life Rob Lowe

 

 

On the heels of his New York Times bestselling Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe is back with an entertaining collection that “invites readers into his world with easy charm and disarming frankness” (Kirkus Reviews).

After the incredible response to his acclaimed bestseller, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe was convinced to mine his experiences for even more stories. The result is Love Life, a memoir about men and women, actors and producers, art and commerce, fathers and sons, movies and TV, addiction and recovery, sex and love. Among the adventures he describes in these pages are:

· His visit, as a young man, to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, where the naïve actor made a surprising discovery in the hot tub.
· The time, as a boy growing up in Malibu, he discovered a vibrator belonging to his best friend’s mother.
· What it’s like to be the star and producer of a flop TV show.
· How an actor prepares, for Californification, Parks and Recreation, and numerous other roles.
· His hilarious account of coaching a kid’s basketball team dominated by helicopter parents.
· How his great, great, great, great, great grandfather may have inspired everything from his love of The West Wing to his taste in classic American architecture.
· His first visit to college, with his son, who is going to receive the education his father never got.
· The time a major movie star stole his girlfriend.

Linked by common themes and his philosophical perspective on love—and life—Lowe’s writing “is loaded with showbiz anecdotes, self-deprecating tales, and has a general sweetness” (New York Post).

My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir by Katherine Johnson

 

 

 

Yearbook by Seth Rogen

 

A collection of funny personal essays from one of the writers of Superbad and Pineapple Express and one of the producers of The Disaster Artist, Neighbors, and The Boys. (All of these words have been added to help this book show up in people’s searches using the wonders of algorithmic technology. Thanks for bearing with us!)
 
Hi! I’m Seth! I was asked to describe my book, Yearbook, for the inside flap (which is a gross phrase) and for websites and shit like that, so… here it goes!!!
 
Yearbook is a collection of true stories that I desperately hope are just funny at worst, and life-changingly amazing at best. (I understand that it’s likely the former, which is a fancy “book” way of saying “the first one.”) 
 
I talk about my grandparents, doing stand-up comedy as a teenager, bar mitzvahs, and Jewish summer camp, and tell way more stories about doing drugs than my mother would like. I also talk about some of my adventures in Los Angeles, and surely say things about other famous people that will create a wildly awkward conversation for me at a party one day.
 
I hope you enjoy the book should you buy it, and if you don’t enjoy it, I’m sorry. If you ever see me on the street and explain the situation, I’ll do my best to make it up to you.

You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation by Susannah Gora

 

 

You can quote lines from Sixteen Candles (“Last night at the dancemy little brother paid a buck to see your underwear”), your iPod playlist includes more than one song by the Psychedelic Furs and Simple Minds, you watch The Breakfast Club every time it comes on cable, and you still wish that Andie had ended up with Duckie in Pretty in Pink. You’re a bonafide Brat Pack devotee—and you’re not alone.

The films of the Brat Pack—from Sixteen Candles to Say Anything—are some of the most watched, bestselling DVDs of all time. The landscape that the Brat Packmemorialized—where outcasts and prom queens fall in love, preppies and burn-outs become buds, and frosted lip gloss, skinny ties, and exuberant optimism made us feel invincible—is rich with cultural themes and significance, and has influenced an entire generation who still believe that life always turns out the way it is supposed to.

You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried takes us back to that era, interviewing key players, such as Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, and John Cusack, and mines all the material from the movies to the music to the way the films were made to show how they helped shape our visions for romance, friendship, society, and success.

Just Fly Away by Andrew McCarthy

 

 

The debut novel from Andrew McCarthy—actor, director, and bestselling author of Brat: An 80s Story—is a powerful story about family secrets, first love, the limits of forgiveness, and finding your way in the world.

When fifteen-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a secret child from a brief affair, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her family. How could her father have betrayed them like this? How could her mother forgive him? And why isn’t her sister rocked by the news the way Lucy is? Lucy can’t bring herself to tell her friends, and when she tries to confide in her boyfriend, he doesn’t understand. Fed up with everyone around her and desperate for answers, Lucy runs away to Maine—the home of her mysteriously estranged grandfather—to get to the bottom of her family’s secrets and lies.

The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down by Andrew McCarthy

 

 

“A soulful and searching book. Vibrant and elegant…McCarthy’s prose shines with intelligence and intimacy. One feels pulled along…the book gaining momentum and meaning page by page” (Cheryl Strayed, The New York Times Book Review).

With absorbing honesty and an irrepressible taste for adventure, award-winning travel writer and actor Andrew McCarthy takes us on a deeply personal journey played out amid some of the world’s most evocative locales. Unable to commit to his fiancée of nearly four years—and with no clear understanding of what’s holding him back—McCarthy finds himself at a crossroads, plagued by doubts that have clung to him for a lifetime. Though he ventures from the treacherous slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro to an Amazonian riverboat and the dense Costa Rican rain forests, McCarthy’s real journey is one of the spirit. Disarmingly likable, McCarthy isn’t afraid to bare his soul on the page, and what emerges is an intimate memoir of self-discovery and an unforgettable love song to the woman who would be his wife.

Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life by Julianna Margulies

 

 

Known for her outstanding performances on the groundbreaking television series The Good Wife and ER, Julianna Margulies deftly chronicles her life and her work in this deeply powerful memoir.
 
“At once a tender coming-of-age story and a deeply personal look at a young woman making sense of the world against a chaotic and peripatetic childhood.”—Katie Couric

As an apple-cheeked bubbly child, Julianna was bestowed with the family nickname “Sunshine Girl.” Shuttled back and forth between her divorced parents, often on different continents, she quickly learned how to be of value to her eccentric mother and her absent father. Raised in fairly unconventional ways in various homes in Paris, England, New York, and New Hampshire, Julianna found that her role among the surrounding turmoil and uncertainty was to comfort those around her, seeking organization among the disorder, making her way in the world as a young adult and eventually an award-winning actress.
 
Throughout, there were complicated relationships, difficult choices, and overwhelming rejections. But there were also the moments where fate, faith, and talent aligned, leading to the unforgettable roles of a lifetime, both professionally and personally—moments when chaos had finally turned to calm.
 
Filled with intimate stories and revelatory moments, Sunshine Girl is at once unflinchingly honest and perceptive. It is a riveting self-portrait of a woman whose resilience in the face of turmoil will leave readers intrigued and inspired.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography by Rob Lowe

 

 

A wryly funny and surprisingly moving account of an extraordinary life lived almost entirely in the public eye

A teen idol at fifteen, an international icon and founder of the Brat Pack at twenty, and one of Hollywood's top stars to this day, Rob Lowe chronicles his experiences as a painfully misunderstood child actor in Ohio uprooted to the wild counterculture of mid-seventies Malibu, where he embarked on his unrelenting pursuit of a career in Hollywood.

The Outsiders placed Lowe at the birth of the modern youth movement in the entertainment industry. During his time on The West Wing, he witnessed the surreal nexus of show business and politics both on the set and in the actual White House. And in between are deft and humorous stories of the wild excesses that marked the eighties, leading to his quest for family and sobriety.

Never mean-spirited or salacious, Lowe delivers unexpected glimpses into his successes, disappointments, relationships, and one-of-a-kind encounters with people who shaped our world over the last twenty-five years. These stories are as entertaining as they are unforgettable.

Brat: An '80s Story by Andrew McCarthy

 

 

Fans of Patti Smith's Just Kids and Rob Lowe's StoriesI Only Tell My Friends will love this beautifully written, entertaining, and emotionally honest memoir by an actor, director, and author who found his start as an 80s Brat pack member.
 

Most people know Andrew McCarthy from his movie roles in Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Weekend at Bernie's, and Less than Zero, and as a charter member of Hollywood's Brat Pack. That iconic group of ingenues and heartthrobs included Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, and Demi Moore, and has come to represent both a genre of film and an era of pop culture.

 

In his memoir Brat: An '80s Story, McCarthy focuses his gaze on that singular moment in time. The result is a revealing look at coming of age in a maelstrom, reckoning with conflicted ambition, innocence, addiction, and masculinity. New York City of the 1980s is brought to vivid life in these pages, from scoring loose joints in Washington Square Park to skipping school in favor of the dark revival houses of the Village where he fell in love with the movies that would change his life.

 

Filled with personal revelations of innocence lost to heady days in Hollywood with John Hughes and an iconic cast of characters, Brat is a surprising and intimate story of an outsider caught up in a most unwitting success.

 

Atelier d’artista: Poesie + Album fotografico (2015 – 2019) di Donato Di Poce (I Quaderni d’Arte del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno)

Ogni uomo, è attratto consapevolmente o no dal bisogno di un'esperienza estetica della vita e del mondo. E più che dalla bellezza di un'opera o dalla personalità' di un artista, ama scoprire le poetiche, i processi creativi, la sequenza realizzativa di un'idea, le impronte e le tracce, i tentativi, gli abbozzi e le cancellazioni di una comunicazione iconica e segnica che e' anche e sempre una comunicazione psicologica. Da qui, l'interesse per i segni preistorici sulle grotte, i disegni preparatori degli artisti, i diari, i dessins e i collages, le sinopie, gli "sketchbook", i progetti, i "carnets" gli scarabocchi, la "mail-art" e i "libri monotipi", in una parola "I percorsi nascosti della creativita'", che ci permettono di entrare nelle "stanze segrete" e negli "atelier" degli artisti, di sbirciare dal loro buco della serratura (Donato Di Poce)

La narrazione per versi ed immagini si concentra sui percorsi estetico/creativi di

AVALLE FILIPPO - IL CANTO DELLA POLVERE

BALENA VINCENZO - CI SONO PERSONE

BENCINI ENNIO – NEL PAESE DELL’ANIMA

BIANCATELLI FULVIO - QUEL CHE RESTA

BLAIOTTA GAETANO – ALBERI

BOERETTO ANNALU' - I SETTE SOGNI PROIBITI

BOSCHI ANNA - NEL DOLORE TI SCRIVO

BRIGANTI CATIA - PARTICELLE DUBITATIVE

CALATRAVA SANTIAGO – ACROSTICO

CHEN LI - LE PAROLE

COLANTONI DOMENICO - LA DONNA IN ROSSO

CORSITTO CARMELA - LIBRO BIANCO

CRISANTI GIULIO - UN GIRASOLE PALLIDO

DALI’ SALVADOR – VENERE DEI CASSETTI

D’AMBROSIO GIUSEPPE – IL COMPIMENTO DEL BENE

DANELLI MARIA ELENA – CRISALIDE

DANGELO SERGIO – MERIDIANE DI LUCE

DE SANCTIS NICO – VIRGOLE DI SENSO

DESSI' MONICA - EQUILIBRI

FADINI LUCIANO - PICCOLE VENERI

FARINA CINZIA - RICUCIRE IL MONDO

FORSTER REBECCA - I SOGNI IN UN CAPPELLO

FRANCO MANUELA – ANIMA BIANCA /ANIMA NERA

FREDDI BRUNO – L’OPERA INCOMPIUTA

GALLINGANI ALBERTO - IL MIDOLLO DEL LEONE

GREGOLIN EMANUELE - LA TELA BIANCA

GUZZI CARLO - ALTRO DA ME

IZUMI OKI - RIFLESSIONI

LOME (LORENZO MENGUZZATO)- FOGLIE DI POESIA

MALETIK AURORA - VISIONE

MARIANI LUIGI - LA SCATOLA DELLE SIRENE

MARRA MAX - OSAON

MARTIN MONICA - IL TRAMONTO

MICOZZI MARIA - LA DONNA SENZA VOLTO

MIGLIETTA ENZA – SIAMO SANGUE D’AMORE FUTURO

ORAZIO GAETANO - A GRANDI BRACCIATE NEL BUIO

PACE ACHILLE - SEGNO/SCRITTURA

REA MAURO - ICONE POP

RONCORONI FANNA MARIA PIA - PERCHE’?

RONZONI GIOVANNI – ACROSTICO

SARTI MASSIMILIANO - IL CAMMINO DELL’ARTE

SCACCABAROZZI SONIA – AMORE SILENZIOSO

SERGI STEFANIA - INCANTOS

SPAGNULO VALDI - SGUARDI SOSPESI

SQUATRITI FAUSTA - SE IL MONDO AVESSE GLI OCCHI

TALO' RAFFAELLO - LA VALIGIA DELLA PACE

VALDES MANOLO - VIRGOLE DANZANTI

VERDI ALESSANDRO - REVERIE

ZOLA BETTY – PAGINE D’ACQUA

Info link

https://www.amazon.it/Atelier-dartista-Poesie-Album-fotografico/dp/1661134750/ref=sr_1_120?__mk_it_IT=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=stefano+donno&qid=1579339638&s=books&sr=1-120

Who is Donato Di Poce? Search on Google

http://www.creactivitybranding.it/

http://www.taccuinidartista.it/

http://www.donatodipoce.net/

 

 

ANATOMIA DEGLI STATI UNITI. DIARIO DI UN AMORE DIFFICILE di Alessandro C...

Il pianista. Varsavia 1939-1945. La straordinaria storia di un sopravvissuto di Wladyslaw Szpilman e Lidia Lax

 

 

Il 23 settembre 1939 Wladyslaw Szpilman, un giovane pianista di Varsavia, suonò il "Notturno" in C diesis minore di Chopin per la radio locale, mentre le bombe tedesche cadevano sulla città. Più tardi, un ordigno tedesco distrusse la centrale elettrica e la stazione radio polacca fu ridotta al silenzio. La guerra precipitò Varsavia nell'orrore dell'occupazione nazista. Rinchiusi nel ghetto, gli ebrei furono a poco a poco decimati. Agghiacciato testimone degli eventi che porteranno alla rivolta e all'evacuazione della città, Szpilman vide morire molti dei suoi amici e la sua intera famiglia, riuscendo miracolosamente a sopravvivere tra le rovine della sua amata Varsavia. "Il pianista" è allo stesso tempo la storia straordinaria della tenacia di un uomo di fronte alla morte e un documento della misteriosa, possibile umanità degli esseri umani: la vita di Szpilman fu salvata da un ufficiale tedesco che lo udì suonare quello stesso "Notturno" di Chopin su un pianoforte trovato fra le macerie.

Il piccolo burattinaio di Varsavia di Eva Weaver e M. Gozzi

 

 

Questa è la storia di un coccodrillo, un giullare, una scimmia, una principessa e un principe: i burattini che Mika, un giovane ebreo confinato nel ghetto di Varsavia, trova nel cappotto ereditato dal nonno, un cappotto che si rivela magico, pieno di tasche e nascondigli, in cui potranno essere celati molti altri segreti. Questa è anche la storia di Max, un soldato tedesco in servizio in Polonia, e del suo incontro con un ragazzo con un cappotto troppo grande e misterioso, incontro destinato a cambiare le loro vite per sempre. Nei momenti più estremi la speranza può celarsi ovunque, anche in un piccolo battaglione di burattini colorati. Un romanzo che ci parla di coraggio e redenzione, oblio e memoria, una storia capace di toccare nel profondo come "Il bambino con il pigiama a righe" e "La vita è bella".

 

Il dottore di Varsavia di Elisabeth Gifford e Roberto Serrai

 

 

Varsavia, 1937. Quando Misha, giovane studente ebreo, assiste per la prima volta a una lezione del brillante dottor Korczac, capisce subito che il suo destino è diventare un insegnante. Celebre in tutto il Paese per i suoi rivoluzionari metodi educativi, Korczac - che non si è mai sposato e non ha avuto figli - fa da padre ai 200 bambini che vivono nel suo orfanotrofio, crescendoli all'insegna della comprensione e della libertà di pensiero. Contro il parere della famiglia, Misha si offre come volontario nell'istituto e intanto, proprio sui banchi della facoltà di pedagogia, incrocia lo sguardo limpido di Sophia, una bellissima studentessa che condivide i suoi sogni. Finché un giorno uno striscione minaccioso compare sull'ingresso: “Via gli ebrei dall'università”. Le lezioni del dottore si interrompono bruscamente, e mentre un muro di mattoni separa il ghetto dal resto della città invasa dai nazisti, Misha e Korczac rischiano ogni giorno la vita per procurarsi scorte di cibo e garantire la sopravvivenza ai bambini. Quando i venti di guerra travolgono Varsavia, Sophia, che con i suoi capelli biondi può spacciarsi per ariana, è l’unica ad avere una possibilità di fuga. Ma che ne sarà di Misha, Korczac e dei loro bambini? Nel ghetto di Varsavia vivevano 400.000 ebrei. Solo uno su cento riuscì a sopravvivere. Questo romanzo si basa sulla storia vera di Misha e Sophia, e sul diario di uno dei più grandi uomini dell'epoca: il dottor Janusz Korczac.

La signora dello zoo di Varsavia di Diane Ackerman e Mara Dompè

 

 

Varsavia, 1939. Antonina Żabińska e suo marito, il dottor Jan Żabiński, gestiscono lo storico zoo della città con cura e dedizione. Quando la Polonia viene invasa dai nazisti, però, oltre ai bombardamenti e all'occupazione la coppia è costretta a sottostare anche al nuovo capo zoologo nominato dal Reich, Lutz Heck, che prevede un programma di allevamento selettivo per la struttura. Reagendo allo sgomento, i due coniugi si impegnano prima a salvare gli animali superstiti e poi, quando la violenza nazista si accanisce contro gli ebrei, non esitano a trasformare lo zoo e i suoi sotterranei in un rifugio per i perseguitati. All'odio per chi è diverso e alla follia di voler imporre alla natura un disegno mitomane, Antonina e Jan oppongono l'amore e il rispetto per la vita e per gli esseri umani, a costo di mettere in pericolo la propria famiglia. Grazie a loro, più di trecento ebrei e militanti della Resistenza polacca riusciranno a sfuggire alla furia nazista e a mettersi in salvo.

Il re di Varsavia di Szczepan Twardoch e Francesco Annicchiarico

 

 

C’era una volta a Varsavia. 1937. A pochi mesi dall’invasione nazista e in un clima politico di crescente dittatura e inconsapevolezza del futuro, si svolge l’ascesa di Jakub Shapiro, ebreo, gran pugile ma anche un assassino al servizio del capomafia della comunità israelitica. La racconta, cinquanta anni dopo, da Tel Aviv dove si era rifugiato in tempo, Moises Inbar, all’epoca diciassettenne, che di Jakub era diventato l’ombra. Da quando Jakub ha ucciso con sanguinaria crudeltà il mite padre di Moises, il ragazzo è una specie di specchio del travolgente criminale, in un rapporto odio-identificazione difficile da decifrare. Del boss avventuroso, il fragile ragazzino ebreo testimonia, ammirato e schifato, gli atti e le passioni di una vita avida, in un continuo di episodi e figure travagliate, ebrei e non ebrei, nessuna delle quali solo comprimaria ma sempre caratterizzata da una propria storia (il capomafia, la tenutaria del bordello, la moglie ebrea borghese, l’amante polacca aristocratica, il fratello sionista idealista, il killer mostruoso con il suo demone, e i molti minori che compongono lo sfondo sociale). Soprattutto Moises avverte del «re di Varsavia» quel «nucleo oscuro» che rende in fondo contraddittorio ogni suo successo. E che preannuncia qualcosa di terribilmente triste e sorprendente. Il re di Varsavia è un romanzo criminale; è un romanzo storico sulla Varsavia antisemita e capitale dell’ebraismo, divisa tra l’aspirazione a metropoli europea e un autoritarismo provinciale, mentre scivola verso la tragedia; è un romanzo morale, sull’assuefazione alla violenza e su quanta e quale ne è giustificata dalla voglia di rivalsa di chi è oppresso; ed è un romanzo politico, sulle radici della nazione di Israele. Da questo libro è stata prodotta una serie televisiva.

Il bambino di Varsavia. Storia di una fotografia di Frédéric Rousseau e F. Grillenzoni

 

 

"La fotografia del bambino di Varsavia è vittima della sua grande efficacia. Nell'era multimediale planetaria, un piccolo clic ci fa passare da una vittima all'altra: clic! Mohammed al-Durah cancella il bambino di Varsavia; clic! È il turno del piccolo Eliàn Gonzàlez... La confusione sentimentale e politica è totale. L'immagine del ghetto di Varsavia non è più un documento: ha smesso di essere uno strumento pedagogico; sfocata, travestita, abusata, stravolta, sequestrata, ha perduto la sua capacità di messa in guardia; non informa più, è erosa dagli usi distorti. L'immagine si è modificata, consumata: portatrice all'inizio di una verità fondamentale, è diventata supporto di menzogne al servizio dei peggiori deliri. All'interno di un processo accelerato di globalizzazione degli affetti, delle emozioni, delle sensibilità, si fa sempre più riferimento 'all'opinione pubblica mondiale'. E ormai l'unico dovere di questa opinione pubblica è di commuoversi, di commuoversi spesso, di commuoversi e basta. L'analisi e la comprensione dei processi storici vengono messe da parte a favore della sola dimensione emotiva delle immagini. In sostanza, in una certa misura sono delle storie senza storia - né quella degli individui né quella dei popoli - quelle che oggi offrono agli occhi e alla comprensione queste immagini. L'immagine ha cessato di essere archivio. Non sollecita più il nostro desiderio di conoscere. Dopo essere stata verità, l'immagine si è trasformata in menzogna."

Painting Time: A Novel by Maylis de Kerangal

 

 

Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by The Guardian | The Millions

An aesthetic and existential coming-of-age novel exploring the apprenticeship of a young female painter

In Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time, we are introduced to the burgeoning young artist Paula Karst, who is enrolled at the famous Institut de Peinture in Brussels. Unlike the friends she makes at school, Paula strives to understand the specifics of what she’s painting―replicating a wood’s essence or a marble’s wear requires method, technique, and talent, she finds, but also something else: craftsmanship. She resolutely chooses the painstaking demands of craft over the abstraction of high art.

With the attention of a documentary filmmaker, de Kerangal follows Paula’s apprenticeship, punctuated by brushstrokes, hard work, sleepless nights, sore muscles, and long, festive evenings. After completing her studies at the Institute, Paula continues to practice her art in Paris, in Moscow, then in Italy on the sets of great films, all as if rehearsing for a grand finale: a job working on Lascaux IV, a facsimile reproduction of the world’s most famous paleolithic cave art and the apotheosis of human cultural expression.

An enchanted, atmospheric, and highly aesthetic coming-of-age novel, Painting Time is an intimate and unsparing exploration of craft, inspiration, and the contours of the contemporary art world. As she did in her acclaimed novels The Heart and The Cook, Maylis de Kerangal unravels a tightly wound professional world to reveal the beauty within.

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

 

 

"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

"The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." ―David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice

Named a most anticipated book of April by The New York Times | The Washington Post | Oprah Daily

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

 

Everybody: A Book about Freedom by Olivia Laing

 

 

"Astute and consistently surprising critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing investigates the body and its discontents through the great freedom movements of the twentieth century.

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century―among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.

Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.

 

Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II by Daniel James Brown

 

 

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism, highlighting the contributions and sacrifices that Japanese immigrants and their American-born children made for the sake of the nation: the courageous Japanese-American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe; their families, incarcerated back home; and a young man who refused to surrender his constitutional rights, even if it meant imprisonment.

They came from across the continent and Hawaii. Their parents taught them to embrace both their Japanese heritage and the ways of America. They faced bigotry, yet they believed in their bright futures as American citizens. But within days of Pearl Harbor, the FBI was ransacking their houses and locking up their fathers. And within months many would themselves be living behind barbed wire.

Facing the Mountain is an unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe. Based on Daniel James Brown's extensive interviews with the families of the protagonists as well as deep archival research, it portrays the kaleidoscopic journey of four Japanese-American families and their sons, who volunteered for 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible.

But this is more than a war story. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to shutter the businesses, surrender their homes, and submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of a brave young man, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best--striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick

 

 

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past, and how our experience colors those meanings.

Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.

Plunder: Napoleon's Theft of Veronese's Feast by Cynthia Saltzman

 

 

"A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” ―Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal

A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice

Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings.

As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness―to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization―and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa.

Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

Second Place: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

 

 

A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy.

A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma―and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.

Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift―and to destroy.

The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That… by Ross King

 

 

 

 

The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings―the dazzling handiwork of the city’s skilled artists and architects. But equally important for the centuries to follow were geniuses of a different sort: Florence’s manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars, and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world.

At the heart of this activity, which bestselling author Ross King relates in his exhilarating new book, was a remarkable man: Vespasiano da Bisticci. Born in 1422, he became what a friend called “the king of the world’s booksellers.” At a time when all books were made by hand, over four decades Vespasiano produced and sold many hundreds of volumes from his bookshop, which also became a gathering spot for debate and discussion. Besides repositories of ancient wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists. His clients included a roll-call of popes, kings, and princes across Europe who wished to burnish their reputations by founding magnificent libraries.

Vespasiano reached the summit of his powers as Europe’s most prolific merchant of knowledge when a new invention appeared: the printed book. By 1480, the king of the world’s booksellers was swept away by this epic technological disruption, whereby cheaply produced books reached readers who never could have afforded one of Vespasiano’s elegant manuscripts.

A thrilling chronicle of intellectual ferment set against the dramatic political and religious turmoil of the era, Ross King’s brilliant The Bookseller of Florence is also an ode to books and bookmaking that charts the world-changing shift from script to print through the life of an extraordinary man long lost to history―one of the true titans of the Renaissance.

 

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal

 

 

A New York Times Bestseller
An Economist Book of the Year
Costa Book Award Winner for Biography
Galaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.