Traces the story of Picasso's rise from an obscure young painter in Barcelona to one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, documenting the events of his first visit to Paris, his emergence as a leader of a group of bohemian artists, his gradual recognition by collectors and the 1906 creation of the disturbing masterpiece, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." "When Picasso became Picasso: the story of how an obscure young painter came...

Critical and historical notes accompany Shakespeare's comic play about the separation an eventual reuniting of twin brothers.

"In this passionate, deeply personal book, Adam Nicolson explains why Homer matters--to him, to you, to the world--in a text full of twists, turns and surprises. In a spectacular journey through mythical and modern landscapes, Adam Nicholson explores the places forever haunted by their Homeric heroes. From Sicily, awash with wildflowers shadowed by Italy's largest oil refinery, to Ithaca, southern Spain, and the mountains on the edges of Andalusia...

"A writer studies a famous work of art and finds herself and her own cultural moment revealed at its heart. Jeannie Marshall lived in Rome for ten years without visiting the Sistine Chapel: she didn't want to have a superficial experience of the frescos, but she wasn't sure how, amidst the crowds of tour groups and the noise of pop culture allusions, she could have anything but. What's more, she wondered what this very old, very Catholic art, created...

Samuel L. Jackson's embodiment of cool isn't just inspirational--it's important. Bad Motherfucker lays out how his attitude intersects with his identity as a Black man, why being cool matters in the modern world, and how Jackson can guide us through the current cultural moment in which everyone is losing their cool. Edwards details Jackson's fascinating personal history, from stuttering bookworm to gunrunning revolutionary to freebasing addict to...

A collection of essays follows the author as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor; her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her; and the responsibility she has inherited from the great thinkers and writers of the past. "'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what...

"How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, one of America's most preeminent literary critics. Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi,...