Art Essays

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music.

This is the remarkable and tragic story of Oscar Wilde, legendary wit and conversationalist, author of perhaps the most perfect comedy in the English language, yet seemingly doomed by his own flawed temperament to suffer at the hands of a censorious and hypocritical society...

An essay from Things I've Learned From the Women Who've Dumped Me.

How do you become a television writer? What does it take to create your own show? Did the writers of Lost really have a plan, or were they making it all up as they went? In a career spanning far longer than he cares to admit, Javier Grillo-Marxuach has not only written for some of your favorite (and not-so-favorite) shows.

Are you sick of writing factual reports that put you and your audience asleep? Do you wish there were a way to write research that both informed and entertained like your favorite non-fiction books do? Do you need a laugh? Do you want to make your teacher laugh? Congratulations! You hold in your hands the key to facing the facts with fun. 51 Wacky We-search Reports will teach you how to hunt for the best facts and turn them into cartoons, parody performances, jokes, wacky poetry and much, much more. For students or teachers, this latest book from author and teacher Barry Lane will add ...

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person - and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss - from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde - Larissa Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.

This work is a collection of humorous insights into important topics ranging from annoying pet people ("I’m Not Talking About You, of Course"), to analyzing your inner child ("Irrational Fears"), to living like the Amish in the aftermath of a hurricane ("A Jolt of Electricity").

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.

An essay by James J. Caterino, the author of Romance Stories, Reviews and Essays, To Meghan, True Stories, Time Travel Stories, Ghost Stories, and so much more,

Davy Rothbart is looking for love in all the wrong places. Constantly. He falls helplessly in love with pretty much every girl he meets - and rarely is the feeling reciprocated. Time after time, he hops in a car and tears across half of America with his heart on his sleeve. He’s continually coming up with outrageous schemes, which he always manages to pull off. Well, almost always. But even when things don’t work out, Rothbart finds meaning and humor in every moment.

Youth and frailty, ambition and anxiety, the limitations of the body and the challenges of personal transformation: these are the undercurrents that animate acclaimed poet Ashleigh Young's first collection of essays. In Can You Tolerate This? - the title comes from the question chiropractors ask to test a patient's pain threshold - Young ushers us into her early years in the faraway yet familiar landscape of New Zealand: fantasizing about Paul McCartney, cheering on her older brother's fledging music career, and yearning for a larger and more creative life.

From bestselling and Booker-nominated author Colm Tóibín comes a beautiful collection of essays ranging from personal memoir to brilliantly acute writing on religion, literature and politics.

Because sometimes, we just need to cry. Make Me Cry, Please is an essay by James J. Caterino, the author of Reviews and Essays, 50 Films, My Encounter with the Partridge Family, sort of, The Girl Out of Time, What If, The Address Book, and much more.

Am essay on legendary Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino by James J. Caterino, the author of True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, The Anti-Matter Girl, On Writing, Girl Pop, and What If.

My Year as a Rookie: How I almost became a cop, is the entertaining, insightful, true, real-life story of how writer James J. Caterino, well, almost became a cop. James J. Caterino is the author of True Stories, My Encounter with The Partridge Family, Cool Stuff, Laura and Laurie, and much more.

Mit ihren Romanen ist Herta Müller berühmt geworden – in ihren Essays gibt sie Auskunft über sich und ihre Zeit. Wohl nirgends ist ihr bizarrer Weg aus einem Dorf in Rumänien in die Welt der Literatur so gut nachvollziehbar. In den ausgewählten Texten erzählt sie von Kindheit und Jugend, berichtet von den Verfolgungen durch die Geheimpolizei, aber sie widmet sich auch Fragen ihres eigenen Schreibens, seinen literarischen und politischen Seiten. Mit der Stockholmer Rede zur Nobelpreisverleihung und der Tischrede im Originalton.

This is the first of a series of essays to explore the age-old art of BS. What is BS? How can one master the art of BS? When, where, and how is BS appropriate? A tongue-in-cheek cultural and literary analysis of the history and nature of BS as an art form. Author and narrator Dan Sullivan tackles the subject in his customarily zany way, mixing anecdote, history, science, and of course, biology.

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts.