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From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject. For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists. He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.” He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic). Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded. His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture. There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate. And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s. A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.
The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984. As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him and some of his most incisive writing lay ahead. All Art Is Propaganda follows Orwell as he demonstrates in piece after piece how intent analysis of a work or body of work gives rise to trenchant aesthetic and philosophical commentary. With masterpieces such as "Politics and the English Language" and "Rudyard Kipling" and gems such as "Good Bad Books," here is an unrivaled education in, as George Packer puts it, "how to be interesting, line after line." With an Introduction from Keith Gessen.
An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.
New collection of literary-critical essays and reviews of C. S. Lewis, including previously unpublished and long-unavailable works.
From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending and one of Britain’s greatest writers: a brilliant collection of essays on the books and authors that have meant the most to him throughout his illustrious career. • "[A] blissfully intelligent gathering of literary essays." —Financial Times In these seventeen essays (plus a short story and a special preface, “A Life with Books”), Julian Barnes examines the British, French and American writers who have shaped his writing, as well as the cross-currents and overlappings of their different cultures. From the deceptiveness of Penelope Fitzgerald to the directness of Hemingway, from Kipling’s view of France to the French view of Kipling, from the many translations of Madame Bovary to the fabulations of Ford Madox Ford, from the National Treasure status of George Orwell to the despair of Michel Houellebecq, Julian Barnes considers what fiction is, and what it can do. As he writes, “Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”
Presents a chronological survey of this genre from the beginnings of modern science and technology to the present.
Donald Francis Tovey Born in 1 875, Donald Francis Tovey was a British musicologist and composer. He took classical honors with his B. A. at Ox ford in 1898, and became a pianist of the first rank, though he never sought a virtuoso career. From 1914 to 1940 he was Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He died in 1 940. His other books include Normality and Freedom in Music, The Main Stream of Music, A Musician Talks, Essays in Musical Analysis, and Beethoven. ivx Meridian Books edition first published October 1956 First printing September 1956 Second printing June 1957 Third printing July 1958 Fourth printing April 1959 Fifth printing December 1959 Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press Originally published 1944 as Musical Articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica Library of Congress catalog card number 56-10015 Manufactured in the United States of America EDITORIAL PREFACE THE desire to set down upon paper a comprehensive system of musical education was present in the mind of Donald Tovey for the greater part of his life. In 1896, when he was 21, he wrote in a letter to a friend that he had begun a great work quot on the means of Expression in Music quot If ever I finish the thing, into print it shall go. Thirty years later, he was talking about a series of four text-books on music. But into print neither the one scheme nor the other went the final expression of his ideas on music was never written. It never could be written, because it was never final in the mind of that incessant discoverer in music. Nor was his method of writing that of finality. The nearest point to finality which Tovey ever reached in his expression of a formal philosophy in music is tobe found in the articles on technique and aesthetics of music as he called them himself in the list of his writings supplied to Who s Who which he contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Those articles, written from 1906 onwards for the eleventh edition of the Ency clopaedia, and revised again, almost rewritten, for the fourteenth edition in 1929, were necessarily cast in the imposed form of treatises under word-headings. Yet they coalesce very firmly into a clear and coherent testament, almost into a text-book of the art of music in its widest meaning. Like the Glossary to the Essays in Musical Analysis, the entries are unconnected, the whole comprehensive, and while not attempting completeness, afford the reader a wider range of musical thought and a fuller discussion of technical problems than most of the exhaustive and laborious theses now available. Tovey himself set great store by these articles. They formed for him the basis of his teaching at the University of Edinburgh. They are the background to those fuller considerations of musical compositions which are his Essays in Musical Analysis. It was his own proposal that these articles should be gathered together into one volume, an idea expressed to me as long ago as 1926. Means were then taken towards the end of publishing, and it was agreed that Tovey should in his own time make any alterations or correc tions necessary for the new method of presentation. But many other fresh and no doubt more important ideas and schemes came bubbling up into that wonderfully fertile brain, and nothing was done about the book of musical articles. I say more important because, though he was in life so fully occupied, it has now been foundpossible to publish these articles after the author s death. This book contains all the articles which Tovey wrote for the VI EDITORIAL PREFACE Encyclopaedia Britannica, as they now appear there, with the exception of one on Modern Music and the biographies. The book was set up from printed slips, and thus follows the text finally approved and corrected by the author. The very long musical examples are printed in full...
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.
Widely regarded as the one essential book for every science fiction fan, The Year's Best Science Fiction (Winner of the 2002 Locus Award for Best Anthology) continues to uphold its standard of excellence with more than two dozen stories representing the previous year's best SF writing. This year's volume includes Ian R. MacLeod, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, Maureen F. McHugh, Robert Reed, Paul McAuley, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Charles Stross, John Kessel, Gregory Benford and many other talented authors of SF, as well as thorough summations of the year and a recommended reading list.