Category Archives: Books

New Travel Books: “Capri – Dolce Vita” (Assouline)

June 12, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Capri, a resort island dating back to the height of the Roman Empire, has long been an extraordinary destination full of ancient charm. Cherished by everyone from physician Axel Munthe, who recommended its clean air to his patients as a cure for bronchitis; to film director Jean-Luc Godard as the setting for his 1963 film Contempt; to literary icons, celebrities, poets, and the jet set, Capri boasts a rich Mediterranean spirit and style that encompasses a wealth of beauty, from gardens to villas to caves to the people walking in the lively Piazzetta, where cars are prohibited and the island’s playful attitude runs rampant. Capri Dolce Vita is a look at this fabled corner of the world through the ages and a celebration of paradise on earth.

Cesare Cunaccia is a writer, lecturer, curator, and journalist. He was editor at large for Vogue Italia and L’Uomo Vogue and the antiques consultant for Architectural Digest Italy. He has also contributed to the divisions of Architectural Digest in Germany, China, and Russia, as well as Connaissance des Arts, Opera magazine, and L’Oeil. Cunaccia has published a variety of books, particularly on the Italian artistic heritage, which have been translated into twelve languages.

Top New Digital Catalogs: “Artbook – D.A.P Fall 2020”

June 11, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

“We are proud to announce the Fall 2020 Artbook | D.A.P. Catalog of new books on art and culture.”

Against the odds, our publishers have produced a collection of gorgeous, generous and enlightening new books on some of the world’s most important and relevant artists—whether they be contemporary–like Kara Walker, Gerhard Richter, William Eggleston or Taryn Simon–or historic–like Hilma af Klint, Claude Monet or Rembrandt. Re-discoveries abound this season in the work of west coast sculptor and ceramicist JB Blunk, a facsimile 1982 dymaxion cookbook for Buckminster Fuller’s eighty-sixth birthday and the ultimate new edition of Helen Levitt’s classic A Way of Seeing, to name just a few.

READ DIGITAL CATALOG

And yes, Reel Art Press really is publishing a collection of Neal Preston’s photographs of the rock band Queen, with texts from the band.

Arts & Literature, Books, Classics, Literature, Profiles

Literary Profiles: The “Sparkling, Perfect” Prose Of P.G. Wodehouse (BBC)

June 11, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

From BBC Culture (June 2, 2020):

With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a flutter on the choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk us far away from our worries.

If we’re talking about culture that makes people happy, we have to start with the works of PG Wodehouse. There are two reasons why. One reason is that making people happy was Wodehouse’s overriding ambition. The other reason is that he was better at it than any other writer in history.

P. G. Wodehouse: A Brief History

The author of almost a hundred books and the creator of Jeeves, Blandings Castle, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Fred and Mr Mulliner, P. G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 and educated at Dulwich College. After two years with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank he became a full-time writer, contributing to a variety of periodicals including Punch and the Globe. He married in 1914.

As well as his novels and short stories, he wrote lyrics for musical comedies with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and at one time had five musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. His time in Hollywood also provided much source material for fiction.

At the age of ninty-three, in the New Year’s Honours List of 1975, he received a long-overdue knighthood, only to die on St Valentine’s Day some forty-five days later.

Official Website

Art, Arts & Literature, Books, History

New Art Books: “Bosch – The Complete Works”

June 10, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

A bird-monster devouring sinners, naked bodies in tantric contortions, a pair of ears brandishing a sharpened blade: with just 20 paintings and nine drawings to his name, Netherlandish visionary Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) secured his place as a pillar of art history. To this day, the painter par excellence of hell and its demons continues to puzzle and enthrall scholars, artists, designers, and musicians alike.

Based on the best-selling XXL edition, which saw TASCHEN commission new and exclusive photography of details and recently restored works, this large-scale monograph presents Bosch’s complete oeuvre. Texts from art historian and Bosch expert Stefan Fischer dissect the many compelling elements that populate each scene, from hybrid creatures of man and beast to Bosch’s pictorial use of proverbs and idioms. By tying together the elusive threads of his oeuvre into one exhaustive overview, this book reveals just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential.

Bosch - The Complete Works

Features:

Impeccable full-page reproductions celebrating the artist’s staggering compositional scope
Enlarged details unveiling the most intricate and bizarre scenes as much as the unsuspected technical minutiae, from subtle brush-strokes to the grain of the canvas
A fold-out spread drawn from the legendary Last Judgement
A special chapter focusing on Bosch’s most famous work, the mesmerizing and terrifying triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights

The author

Stefan Fischer studied art history, history, and classical archaeology in Münster, Amsterdam, and Bonn. In 2009 he completed his doctoral thesis “Hieronymus Bosch: Malerei als Vision, Lehrbild und Kunstwerk.” His specialist fields are Netherlandish painting of the 15th to the 17th centuries and museology.

Website

Books, Interviews, Literature, Videos

Interviews: Author Peter Boxall On His Book “The Prosthetic Imagination”

Video June 9, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

In this interview, Peter Boxall answers questions about his new title, The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. If the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination.

These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Discover more about this title at: https://www.cambridge.org/academic/su…

Books, Films, Interviews, Podcasts

Podcast Interviews: Filmmaker Jon Wilkman On “Screening Reality”

Audio June 8, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

New Books in History talks to Professional filmmaker Jon Wilkman, who draws on his own experience, as well as the stories of inventors, adventurers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists who framed and filtered the world to inform, persuade, awe, and entertain.

Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a widescreen view of how American “truth” has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed during more than one hundred years of dramatic change, through World Wars I and II, the dawn of mass media, the social and political turmoil of the sixties and seventies, and the communications revolution that led to a twenty-first century of empowered yet divided Americans.

Arts & Literature, Books, Performing Arts, Videos

New Photography Books: “Ballet – Arthur Elgort”

Video June 8, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Following his career-spanning monograph The Big Picture, Arthur Elgort pays homage to his first love and eternal muse in this new collection of photographs. While glimpsing ballet through Elgort’s lens we are taken not to the front of the stage but behind the scenes, where the hard work is done.

On this journey through the hallways and rehearsal spaces of some of the world’s most distinguished ballet schools, including the New York City Ballet and the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, we see previously unpublished images of legends such as Balanchine, Baryshnikov and Lopatkina. The perfection of the prima ballerina disappears in these quiet photographs where the viewer is able to witness the individual dancers’ natural glamor as they work to perfect their craft.

Elgort’s snapshot style allows the pain and pleasure of one of the world’s most beloved forms of expressive dance to be seen with beauty.

Fiction: “Hercule Poirot” Created 100 Years Ago In 1920 By Agatha Christie

June 6, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

From Open Magazine (May 29, 2020):

And with The Mysterious Affair at Styles (published a 100 years ago, in 1920) Christie would introduce readers to Monsieur Hercule Poirot, an old Belgian detective who resembled Holmes superficially (‘eccentric detective, stooge assistant’, as the author would admit in her autobiography later) but whose psychological insights and near-mystical idiosyncrasies would make him arguably the most successful and beloved literary sleuth of all time.

IN 1916, THE 26-year-old Agatha Christie finished writing her first detective novel at Dartmoor, a quiet upland in Devon, UK, known for its beautiful granite hilltops. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had published The Hound of the Baskervilles, in 1902, which would become one of the most widely read Sherlock Holmes adventures—and the story was set in this same corner of the world, Dartmoor.

Books like Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Death on the Nile (1937) remain some of the bestselling murder mysteries in the world today, over eight decades after their original publication (Christie’s net sales for all of her books combined are over two billion now).

Read full article

Arts & Literature, Books, Media, Podcasts

Podcast Essays: American Western Writer Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) By NY Times Critic A.O. Scott

Audio June 5, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Scott discusses his first in a series of essays about American writers, Wallace Stegner, and David Kamp talks about “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America.”

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called “The Dean of Western Writers”. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

Books, Interviews, Podcasts

Podcast Interviews: 56-Year Old British Writer Julia Hobsbawm – “The Simplicity Principle”

Audio June 4, 2020 She Seeks Serene Leave a comment

Julia Hobsbawm is a writer, speaker, social entrepreneur and strategist whose work focuses on finding solutions for humans in an ever-changing world. She speaks to Georgina Godwin about her latest book, ‘The Simplicity Principle: Six Steps Towards Clarity in a Complex World’.