Woodstock: Peace, Music & Memories

By Brad Littleproud and Joanne Hague

1969, when the Woodstock Music & Art Festival began. An event that brought more than half a million people to Max Yasgur’s farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York for three days of music and celebration, Woodstock signaled the popularity and potency of modern rock ’n’ roll in American society, and ultimately led to the creation of today’s popular music empire and celebrity culture. Three books, two new volumes and an updated reissue, provide exhaustive and often spirited accounts from insiders, historians and participants in the epic festival that paved the way for the convergence of commerce and culture that constitutes such contemporary spectacles as Bonnaroo.

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Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting

Transforming words into icons and images into wide-screen epics, Ed Ruscha has wholly reconceived the terms of painting for our era. Tagged variously as a Conceptualist, Pop artist or latter-day Surrealist, Ruscha flouts category, or rather incorporates all categories, always surprising and experimenting with both subject and method. His paintings are steeped in our times: cinema, advertising, logos, late capitalism and the twists and turns of postwar art have all informed his iconography since the early 1960s, arriving on the cool surfaces of his canvases with magnetic detachment.

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Photography: The 50 Most Influential Photographers of All Time

Icons of Culture : Photography presents the spellbinding ideas and images of 50 of the most influential photographers in history and chronicles 10 of the most significant trends and developments in the field.
Following the personal histories and photography of such luminaries from around the world as Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Annie Leibovitz, and Cecil Beaton, this intriguing book sheds light on the inspirational forces that have shaped the way in which the world views itself.
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Tim Burton

Over the past three decades, Tim Burton has reinvented genre filmmaking, melding the fantastic, the horrific, and the comic. Accompanying Burton's first major museum retrospective, this book considers his career as an artist and filmmaker. It narrates the evolution of his creative practices, following the current of his visual imagination from his early childhood drawings through his mature work, and revealing how popular culture and Pop Surrealism have infused his distinctive vision. Reproducing now only film stills but drawings, paintings, photographs, and maquettes from both film and nonfilm projects, the book presents previously unseen works from Burton's personal archive and sheds new light on his singular aesthetic.
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Grey Gardens

This eclectic volume offers a myriad of collaged illustrations, photographs, film stills, production notes and other archival materials alongside transcripts of the Beales' own stories and conversations edited from unreleased Grey Gardens sound recordings. Structured to mirror the Maysles' own approach to the world of the Beales, it closely resembles the enchanting clutter of the mansion, a self-contained world littered with mementos and telling ephemera. It also reproduces unpublished photographs by both Albert and David Maysles. With an introduction by Albert Maysles, drawings and illustrations by Albert's daughter, Rebekah Maysles and an appendix with the full transcript of Grey Gardens, as well as an audio CD of sound recordings capturing the Beales at their best, this book is the essential companion to the film and a beautiful testimony to its legacy. The 60-minute CD that comes with the book contains conversations with the Beales and their friends, songs and poetry recited by the two Edies and audio of the Beales during and after watching the film for the first time.
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Hunt & Gather: Discovering New Art

Hunt & Gather showcases contemporary international art featured in galleries and media across the globe. Its striking collection of surrealism, pop art, illustration, collage, graphic design and mixed media represents many of the poses struck by today's most boundary-pushing artists. Aspects of the collection are dark, at times macabre, but have their compliment of arrestingly playful pieces.

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Atget: Photographe De Paris

Originally published in 1930, Atget : Photographe de Paris has been reproduced by Books on Books, an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to photobook enthusiasts.
This edition reproduces all 96 collotype plates and an English translation of the Pierre Mac Orlan text on Eugene Atget's remarkable documentation of Paris at the turn of the 19th century. 
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Art + Travel Europe: Step into the Lives of Five Famous Painters

Art and Travel Europe profiles Van Gogh in Arles, Vermeer in The Netherlands, Goya and Madrid, Caravaggio and Rome, and Munch and Oslo. Each section includes a timeline for the artist's career, calendar of yearly events for the geographic area , walking tour, where to eat and sleep, and the opportunity to experience the locale through the eyes of the artist.

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Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman

By Matt Stone and Preston Lerner

When Paul Newman was filming Winning (1969), he and costar Robert Wagner took professional driving lessons. According to Stone (executive editor, Motor Trend magazine), Newman already had a fascination with automobiles, but it was the drivers and consultants associated with the film who fueled his passion for speed. Among Newman's accomplishments listed here are his four Sports Car Club of America titles and his being the oldest driver to post a class win at the 24 hours of Daytona. As an owner, he posted eight Champion Auto Racing Team (CART) titles. Stone includes excellent color photos of cars, crews, and drivers, and heartfelt tributes from Newman's associates in motor sports over the years. The big names include Bobby Rahal, Christian Fittipaldi, and Mario Andretti, who wrote the book's foreword. There's just enough text to tell the story but not get in the way of the photos. A complete list of Newman's races is appended.  This is an essential read for Newman fans and auto-racing enthusiasts.

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The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays

By Durs Grunbein

Edited by Michael Eskin

Arguably the best-known and best contemporary poet and author to have emerged from the former East Germany, Grünbein received many major awards, including the 1995 Georg Büchner Preis, the most prestigious honor for a German-language author. Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Grünbein, through his various writings, has been an active participant in the debates that aim at facilitating Germany's attempts at reshaping and redefining itself in the post-Cold War era. The essays collected here, covering two decades, represent a wide-ranging and representative cross section of the work of this poet, essayist, and great thinker. They are grouped into six sections that intersect thematically, with each of the sections in turn clustered around major recurring topics: autobiographical pieces; exploration of the author's major interests in art, literature, aesthetics and science; exploration of literary and philosophical tradition; and the living presence of classical antiquity. (The latter is echoed in the title of the book, referring to the sandbars of the Mediterranean and the extinct city of Atlantis.) This first book-length collection of Grünbein's essays is available in English for the first time (Ashes for Breakfast was his first poetry volume in translation).

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The Andy Goldsworthy Project

In January 2003 British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy was invited to create a work of art for the National Gallery of Art. The project began with a series of ephemeral works on Government Island in Stafford County, Virginia. From this phase a series of photographic suites and a diary remain. The second phase of the project resulted in Roof, a site-specific sculpture comprising nine stacked-slate domes installed in the East Building of the Gallery by Goldsworthy, his assistant, and a group of British drystone wallers in the winter of 2004/2005. This is the most substantial scholarly volume devoted to Andy Goldsworthy's work in twenty years and the first to underscore the permanent oeuvre of the artist.
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Landscapes in Living Color,Stephen Quiller Paints in Watercolor

Stephen Quiller invites you into his studio and shares his theories for color essentials - how to set up a palette based on a color wheel, how to mix versatile neutrals and how to use complements and near complements. You'll learn how to put these principles to work while painting a vibrant mountain scene from start to finish.
Stephen Quiller has been a professional painter for more than 35 years and is a member of Watercolor West, American Watercolor Society, and National Watercolor Society.
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Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness the Whole Story, 1958 - 2009

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By Randy Taraborrelli

A biography of Michael Jackson paints a portrait of the talented performer, discussing his rise to stardom, his changing personal appearance, his legal battles, his marriages, and his children.

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The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

By Robert Hass

Long, laddering lines impel you down the page as Hass contemplates the living and the dead, the human and the wild with yearning and philosophic poise. This lustrous retrospective collection, drawn from five previous books, beginning with Field Guide (1973), opens with a generous selection of new poems redolent of Whitman and the blues. Narrative poems are droll and astringent in their musings over love's paradoxes and history's shifting claims, children's pleasures, poverty, and danger. A National Book Award winner and former poet laureate prized for his insights into human nature and our place in the web of life, Californian Hass distills experiences down to their essence as he limns landscapes, portrays friends and loved ones, and imagines the struggles of strangers. The ordinary is cracked open to reveal metaphysical riddles in poems that feel so natural, their formal complexities nearly elude our detection. Legacies and ruptures, sex and food, the journaling impulse to stop time, the "strangeness of living," all become catalysts for the tonic perceptions shared by this compassionate master poet who declares, "Joy seized me."

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Poetry in Person: Twenty-Five Years of Conversation with America's Poets

Edited by Alexander Neubauer

From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, including Amy Clampitt, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, and Charles Simic, "Poetry in Person" follows an extraordinary range of poets as they create their poems and offers numerous illustrations of the original drafts, which bring their processes to light.

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The American Theatre Wing Presents The Play That Changed My Life: America's Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them

Edited by Ben Hodges

What was the play that changed your life? What was the play that inspired you; that showed you something entirely new; that was so thrilling or surprising, breathtaking or poignant, that you were never the same? Nineteen of today's most gifted playwrights respond in this most revealing and personal book, published by Applause Books and presented by the American Theatre Wing, founder of The Tony Awards. From Edward Albee's 1935 visit to New York's Hippodrome Theatre to see Jimmy Durante (and an elephant) in Rodgers and Hart's Jumbo, to Diana Son's twelfth-grade field trip in 1983 to see Diane Venora play Hamlet at The Public Theater, from David Henry Hwang's seminal San Francisco encounter with Equus to a young Beth Henley's epiphany after seeing her mother in a "Green Bean Man costume," The Play That Changed My Life offers readers a unique peek into the theatrical influences of some of the nation's most important dramatists. The book is filled with tributes, memories, anecdotes and other insights that connect past to present and make this volume an instant "must have" for anyone who adores the theatre. Also in the book are pieces by David Auburn, Jon Robin Baitz, Nilo Cruz, Christopher Durang, Charles Fuller, A. R. Gurney, Tina Howe, David Ives, Donald Margulies, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, John Patrick Shanley, Regina Taylor, and Doug Wright, as well as an introduction by Paula Vogel. All together, the playwrights featured here have won more than 40 Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, Obies, and MacArthur genius grants.

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The Americans

Robert Frank’s The Americans was first published on May 15, 1958 by Robert Delpire in Paris. It featured 83 of Frank’s photographs taken in America in 1955 and 1956, accompanied by writings in French about American political and social history selected by Alain Bosquet. Delpire’s Les Américains formed part of the Encyclopédie essentielle series, which presented foreign countries to a French audience. Each of Frank’s photographs in this edition is placed on a right-hand page, with the texts on the left-hand pages. (Publisher notes) The Steidl (2008) edition features an introduction by Jack Kerouac.
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Robert Altman: The Oral Biography

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By Mitchell Zuckoff

Robert Altman - visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend - comes roaring to life in this rollicking cinematic biography, told in a chorus of voices that can only be called Altmanesque.
His outsized life and unique career are revealed as never before: here are the words of his family and friends, and a few enemies, as well as the agents, writers, crew members, producers, and stars who worked with him, including Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Paul Newman, Julie Christie, Elliott Gould, Martin Scorsese, Robin Williams, Cher, and many others. There is even Altman himself, in the form of his exclusive last interviews.
After an all-American boyhood in Kansas City, a stint flying bombers through enemy fire in World War II, and jobs ranging from dog-tattoo entrepreneur to television director, Robert Altman burst onto the scene in 1970 with the movie M*A*S*H. He revolutionized American filmmaking, and, in a decade, produced masterpieces at an astonishing pace: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women, and, of course, Nashville. Then, after a period of disillusionment with Hollywood - as well as Hollywood's disillusionment with him - he reinvented himself with a bold new set of masterworks: The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. Finally, just before the release of the last of his nearly forty movies, A Prairie Home Companion, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement from the Academy, which had snubbed him for so many years.
Mitchell Zuckoff - who was working with Altman on his memoirs before he died - weaves Altman's final interviews, an incredible cast of voices, and contemporary reviews and news accounts into a riveting tale of an extraordinary life. Here are page after page of revelations that force us to reevaluate Altman as a man and an artist, and to view his sprawling narratives with large casts, multiple story lines, and overlapping dialogue as unquestionably the work of a modern genius.

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Words Without Pictures

"Words Without Pictures was conceived as a year-long project with monthly themes that were formulated by an editorial team in tandem with contributors to the wordswithoutpictures.org website.
The aim was to create spaces where thoughtful and urgent discourse around very current issues for photography could happen. Each month an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator wrote a short, un-illustrated and opinionated essay about an aspect of photography that, in his or her view, was either emerging or in the process of being rephrased.
The book includes 12 essays, a selection of responses in the discussion forums, excerpts from a series of related panel discussions, two conversations between artists, and selections from the responses to the questionnaires." (Excerpts from the introduction to Words Without Pictures)
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Bette Davis: Larger Than Life

By Richard Schickel and George Perry

Bette Davis remains one of the most acclaimed and well-known stars in the history of film. Breaking new ground for women, she was a fighter who took on the Hollywood establishment at the drop of a dime. She reveled in lifelong feuds (such as with arch nemesis and co-star Joan Crawford). She was a mother, wife, and friend. She was also a no-nonsense New Englander who happened to have more talent than the movies seemed able to contain. Her personality leapt off the screen and earned her an unprecedented number of high-profile nominations and awards for her work in films like Jezebel, Dark Victory, All About Eve, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? As the epitaph on Davis’s tombstone reads, “She did it the hard way.” Through a biography, comprehensive filmography, and hundreds of rare photos, readers will find out why.

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Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962

By Theodor W. Adorno

Wonderfully displaying the verve and richness of Adorno's provocative ideas on the composition and development of classical and modern music and their necessary relationship to historical and material contexts, this volume brings together two significant collections of essays, Moments Musicaux and Theory of New Music, from the German collected works of one of the 20th century's most dazzling yet perplexing philosophers. The fidelity to the ordering of the original German editions allows some of the less well-known essays (such as those on Ravel and Offenbach) to thematically and stylistically resonate in the company of the famous (and infamous) works on Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg and jazz. With only a short introduction and occasional footnotes, the collection would perhaps have benefited from a preliminary consideration of the author's complex notions of subjectivity, objectivity and historical materialism that underpin his understanding of the development of music from Beethoven to the new music of 12-tone composition and beyond. Nonetheless, despite their undeniable and frequent difficulty, the blend of precise music analysis, sociohistorical awareness and stylized writing in the individual texts is always engrossing reading.

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The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for A Baroque Masterpiece

By Eric Siblin

A former pop-music critic, Siblin was transported to the eighteenth century when his imagination was captured by a performance of Bach's Six Suites for Solo Cello. He embarked on a journey part historical, part personal, to discover for himself the music that has remained a pillar of the cello repertoire since Pablo Casals recorded the suites in 1936. Siblin traveled to Leipzig looking for traces of the German composer, and to the Catalonian coast of Spain to trace the steps of the suites' first modern master. Included in his thorough research are interviews with cellists such as Mischa Maisky and Anner Bylsma, who describe the complexities of the music and the challenges it presents to the soloist. In Siblin's history of the composer, Bach is far from the stuffy image often applied to classical music; he appears restless, brash, and proud, occasionally landing in jail for upsetting a patron. Siblin's writing is most inspired when describing the life of Casals, showing a genuine affection for the cellist, who, caught in the throes of the Spanish civil war and World War II, used his instrument and the suites as weapons of protest and pleas for peace.

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The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Edited by Laurence Senelick

Editor Senelick (recipient of the George Jean Nathan Prize for dramatic criticism) has done an excellent job of selecting a wide-ranging, historically significant selection of theater reviews, essays, memoirs, diary entries, and criticism. Extending through time with pieces by such recognizable writers as Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain, as well as Henry Louis Gates, Susan Sontag, and Tony Kushner, this collection also includes lesser-known writers such as Olive Logan, who wrote "About Nudity in the Theatre" in 1866, and Congregational minister Rollin Lynde Hartt, who discusses melodrama as a positive benefit to the working class and its new found leisure. Many of the writings included here can be found only in volumes that are not indexed and are housed in archives and rare-book collections. This is not a documentary history or a survey of American theater and therefore stands somewhat alone on the theater studies shelf. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy here, and readers who love theater as well as history will be entertained for many hours.

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Soul of the age : a biography of the mind of William Shakespeare

 by Jonathan Bate / Both an editor and a scholar of Shakespeare, Bate (Univ. of Warwick, UK) has written a brilliant biography of Shakespeare, a treatment that stands out among lives of the Bard. That Shakepeare's life continues to inspire myriad biographies, despite the few known facts about it, remains a paradox. Bate succeeds not only by writing lucidly about these facts but also by depicting Shakespeare from the outside in. In sum, he has written a book that alters understanding of how to write biography. Carefully sifting and analyzing facts about Shakespeare's society and information from Shakespeare's work, Bates is able to approach something like the man himself. The author devotes a section to each of the seven ages of man, as named in As You Like It, and in so doing shadows Shakespeare from infancy to oblivion. So, for example, in the first chapter, "Stratford 1564," Bate contextualizes what little is known of Shakespeare's infancy (from textual allusions) with what was going on in early modern England at the time of Shakespeare's birth. One wishes only that Bate had supplemented his precise, useful notes with a bibliography. --Choice. (Check Catalog)