You will not open this book and read of frilly dresses, although they do hang in my closet, somewhere behind all of the shoes. While you peruse the pages you may cross the occasional rose petal, but I assure you, they have been strategically placed as distraction, laughing off the intensity. The first poem was birthed at the age of twelve, so please, be gentle and read with kin...(展开全部)

In 18 remarkable essays, John Updike has collected together his thoughts and observations on American art. Beginning with early American portraits and landscapes, he goes on to extol two late-nineteenth-century masters, Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, considers the eccentric pre-modern James McNeill Whistler, discusses the competing American Impressionists and Realists of the ...(展开全部)

When, in 1989, a collection of John Updike’s writings on art appeared under the title Just Looking , a reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, “He refreshes for us the sense of prose opportunity that makes art a sustaining subject to people who write about it.” In the sixteen years since Just Looking was published, he has continued to serve as an art critic, mos...(展开全部)

In this, the only up-to-date critical work on still life painting in any language, Norman Bryson analyses the origins, history and logic of 'still life', one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painti...(展开全部)

One of Andrew Wyeth's most important paintings, "Wind from the Sea" (1947), is also the artist's first full realization of the window as a recurring subject in his art. Wyeth returned to windows during the course of the next 60 years, producing more than 300 remarkable works that explore both the formal and conceptual richness of the subject. Absent from these spare, elegant, a...(展开全部)

From the author of The New York Times bestseller Possession, comes a highly acclaimed novel which captures in brilliant detail the life of one extended English family--and illuminates the choices they must make between domesticity and ambition, life and art. Toni Morrison, author of Beloved, writes of Byatt: "When it comes to probing characters her scalpel is sure but gentle. S...(展开全部)

Frederica Potter, "doomed to be intelligent'' plunges into Cambridge Universty life greedy for knowledge, sex and love. In Yorkshire her sister Stephanie has abandoned academe for the cosy frustration of the family. Alexander Wedderburn, now in London, struggles to write a play about Van Gogh, whose art and tragic life give the novel its central Leitmotiv. In this sequel to Th...(展开全部)

Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova's—she's an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter's m...(展开全部)