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A lovable oddball cast of characters is at the heart of this treasure-hunt through the last days of one of the greatest flea markets on earth. "[Rips] has humanity, humor and the gift of a limpid, agile, unpretentious prose style.… A captivating portrait.”—Ben Downing, Wall Street Journal Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more. In The Golden Flea, the acclaimed writer Michael Rips takes readers on a trip through this charmed world. With a beguiling style that has won praise from Joan Didion and Susan Orlean, Rips recounts his obsession with the flea and its treasures and provides a fascinating account of the business of buying and selling antiques. Along the way, he introduces us to the flea’s lovable oddball cast of vendors, pickers, and collectors, including a haberdasher who only sells to those he deems worthy; an art dealer whose obscure paintings often go for enormous sums; a troubadour who sings to attract customers; and the Prophet, who finds wisdom among all the treasures and trash. As Rips’s passion for collecting grows and the flea’s last days loom, he undertakes a quest to prove the provenance of a mysterious painting that just might be the one.
The captivating story of Manhattan's legendary Chelsea Flea Market.
A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.
Hailed for its quirkiness and charm, this book tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and baby and discovers a community of eccentrics who make them feel right at home.
One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?
A guidebook for beating the monotony of the everyday by purposefully cultivating the surprising joys that come from living an off-kilter life It's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day--moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, surprising us by breaking up our routines and reminding us that there's more to life than the everyday. In How to Be Weird, Eric G. Wilson offers 99 fun and philosophically rich exercises for embracing all the weird in the world around us--taking aimless walks, creating a reverie nook, exploring the underside of bridges, making tombstone rubbings, finding your own Narnia, and more. With brief digestible entries on how to make sense of the random, guidelines on how to defamiliarize familiar objects through meditation, and exercises for locating weird states and phenomena for ourselves, How to Be Weird is an invitation to lean into the weird and to live a fuller life.
A son uncovers the remarkable secret life of his midwestern father—and his Nebraska city—in this “beguiling [and] deeply unusual” memoir (The Boston Sunday Globe). Nick Rips’s son had always known him as a conservative midwesterner, dedicated, affable, bland to the point of invisibility. Upon his father’s death, however, Michael Rips returned to his Omaha family home to discover a hidden portfolio of paintings—all done by his father, all of a naked black woman. His solid Republican father, Michael would eventually discover, had an interesting past and another side to his personality. Raised in one of Omaha’s most famous brothels, Nick had insisted on hiring a collection of social misfits to work in his eyeglass factory—and had once showed up in his son’s high school principal’s office in pajamas. As Michael searches for the woman in the paintings, he meets, among others, an African American detective who swears by the clairvoyant powers of a Mind Machine, a homeless man with five million dollars in the bank, an underwear auctioneer, and a flying trapeze artist on her last sublime ride. Ultimately, in his investigations through his Nebraska hometown, he will discover the mysterious woman—as well as a father he never knew, and a profound sense that all around us the miraculous permeates the everyday. “Writing with similar pain and urgency as Nick Flynn in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and August Kleinzahler in Cutty, One Rock, Rips’ terse, flinty syntax perfectly embodies the hard-boiled nature of this nearly surreal true-life tale.” —Booklist “An amazing, beautiful book—a study of a certain family in a certain place at a certain time that gives us, in stunning shorthand, the reality of America.” —Joan Didion, author of The White Album “At once a lyrical family portrait, a philosophical inquiry, a bittersweet evocation of a lost time and place, and an enthralling domestic mystery.” —Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief “Quirky, funny, moving, and immensely readable . . . a brilliantly observed story about place, family, and race in America.” —Randall Kennedy
For fans of The Maze Runner and The Fifth Wave, this debut YA novel from Hugo Award winner Will McIntosh pits four underprivileged teens against an evil billionaire in the race of a lifetime. No one knows where the brilliant-colored spheres came from. One day they were just there, hidden all over the earth like huge gemstones. Burn a pair and they make you a little better: an inch taller, skilled at math, better-looking. The rarer the sphere, the greater the improvement—and the more expensive the sphere. Sully is a sphere dealer at a flea market. It doesn’t pay much—Alex Holliday’s stores have muscled out most of the independent sellers—but it helps him and his mom make the rent. When Sully meets Hunter, a girl with a natural talent for finding spheres, the two start searching together. One day they find a Gold—a color no one has ever seen. There’s no question the Gold is priceless, but what does it actually do? None of them is aware of it yet, but the fate of the world rests on this little golden orb. Because all the world fights over the spheres, but no one knows where they come from, what their powers are, or why they’re here. PRAISE: “Burning Midnight is for (1) adrenaline junkies and gamers, (2) obsessive collectors, and (3) people who can’t get enough of crazy endings. I’m all of these things, and I loved it.” —Margaret Stohl, New York Times bestselling author of Black Widow: Forever Red and coauthor of the internationally bestselling Beautiful Creatures series
EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL “Startlingly inventive.” —The New York Times Book Review “A sheer delight to read . . . I had no idea what was going to happen from one page to the next.” —Kate Atkinson On the grubby outskirts of Paris, Grace restores bric-a-brac, mends teapots, re-sets gems. She calls herself Julie, says she’s from California, and slips back to a rented room at night. Regularly, furtively, she checks the hometown paper on the Internet. Home is Garland, Tennessee, and there, two young men have just been paroled. One, she married; the other, she’s in love with. Both were jailed for a crime that Grace herself planned in exacting detail. The heist went bad—but not before she was on a plane to Prague with a stolen canvas rolled in her bag. And so, in Paris, begins a cat-and-mouse waiting game as Grace’s web of deception and lies unravels—and she becomes another young woman entirely. Unbecoming is an intricately plotted and psychologically nuanced heist novel that turns on suspense and slippery identity. With echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, Rebecca Scherm’s mesmerizing debut is sure to entrance fans of Gillian Flynn, Marisha Pessl, and Donna Tartt.
A one-of-a-kind collection of movie posters spanning fifty years, from silent films to Cinemascope For four decades film historian Ira M. Resnick has been amassing a superb collection of 2,000 vintage movie posters and 1,500 stills, which has never before been published. Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood features the best of Resnick’s collection, with vivid reproductions of 250 posters and forty stills from the golden age of Hollywood, 1912 to 1962. In a moving introduction, Resnick relates how his love of vintage movie art translated into a career as a collector and the founder of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery, the first gallery devoted exclusively to the art of the movies. Resnick’s firsthand account offers entertaining anecdotes about how he managed to acquire such stellar film artwork, as well as historical information about the stars and films shown on the pieces he collected. Guiding the reader through the best posters and stills of his collection, Resnick provides a tour of cinematic history, starting in the silent film era and continuing up to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). By showcasing several posters for each performer—such as Lillian Gish, the Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe, John Barrymore, and Audrey Hepburn—Resnick offers a unique method of charting the evolution of each movie star’s career. Organizing his account both chronologically and thematically, in later chapters Resnick discusses some of Hollywood’s legendary directors and films, and critiques fantastic graphic art from little-known films. Bonus material includes a list of Resnick’s fifty favorite one-sheets, helpful tips for the collector, and a glossary of terms and poster sizes. A must-have book for every collector and film buff, Starstruck offers a beautifully illustrated, personal tour of a bygone age of the motion picture advertising industry.