Art Biography

Mary Gauthier was 12 years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines to her, and she longed to write her own, one day. Then, for a decade, while struggling with addiction, Gauthier put her dream away and her call to songwriting faded. It wasn’t until she got sober and went to an open mic with a friend did she realize that she not only still wanted to write songs, she needed to.

Keith Brymer Jones is the star presenter and judge of Channel 4's The Great Pottery Throw Down, famous for his emotional responses to the heartfelt and personal pieces made by contestants on the show. He is also the ultimate professional craftsman who's done the hard yards to get where he is today, working his way up from being a skivvy in an industrial pottery to running his own hugely successful international ceramics business.

In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography - a masterly account of how one man's extraordinary political acumen steered the Union to victory in the Civil War, and of how his soaring rhetoric gave meaning to that agonizing struggle for nationhood and equality.

In 1992, the Screaming Trees were expected to become the next big band to come out of the Seattle music scene during the heyday of grunge. Except it never happened. It wasn't because the band didn't have great songs—indeed, the Trees were revered for their ability to write a great song that was both artistically original and commercially viable, which is no easy task. Other Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were fans of the Screaming Trees, playing shows with them and collaborating on albums, long before their own bands broke through into the mainstream.

In When Women Ran Fifth Avenue, journalist Julie Satow draws back the curtain on three visionaries who took great risks, forging new paths for the women who followed in their footsteps. This stylish account, rich with personal drama and trade secrets, captures the department store in all its glitz, decadence, and fun, and showcases the women who made that beautifully curated world go round.

A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. In The Grand Affair, scholar Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.

A famous autobiographical account of life as a young soldier in the first World War trenches. Robert Graves, who went on to write I, Claudius, has given to posterity here one of the all-time great insights into the experience of war.

A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis", the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis.

From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens is a violent and introspective memoir that reveals not only 50 Cent's story but the story of a generation of youth faced with hard choices and very little options. It is a tale of sacrifice, transformation, and redemption, but it is also one of hope, determination, and the power of self. Told in 50's own unique voice, the narrative drips with the raw insight, street wisdom, and his struggle to survive at all costs.

Art Sex Music is the autobiography of a musician who, as a founding member of the avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle and electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey, has consistently challenged the boundaries of music over the past four decades. It is the account of an artist who, as part of COUM Transmissions, represented Britain at the IXth Biennale de Paris, whose Prostitution show at the ICA in 1976 caused the Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to declare her, COUM and Throbbing Gristle "Wreckers of Civilisation".

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.

As an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, Cory Leadbeater was presented with an opportunity to work for a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. Since the tumultuous days of childhood, Cory had sought refuge from the rougher parts of life in the pages of books. Suddenly, he found himself the personal assistant to a titan of literature: Joan Didion. In the nine years that followed, Cory shared Joan’s rarefied world, transformed not only by her blazing intellect but by her generous friendship and mentorship.

"Je n'aime pas beaucoup les lettres, ni en recevoir ni en envoyer. Sauf de toi et à toi - et quelques autres. C'est ce qu'on doit appeler l'amitié." Jean d'Ormesson déploie dans l'art épistolaire autant de brio et de virtuosité que de talents de stratège et de séducteur. Il laisse libre cours, dans cette version la moins "autorisée" de son autobiographie, à son franc-parler, sa malice, son goût de l'ironie et de la facétie.

The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in 19th-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox. The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.

From former screen legends who have faded into obscurity to new revelations about the biggest movie stars, Valderrama unearths the most fascinating little-known tales from the birth of Hollywood through its Golden Age. The shocking fate of the world's first movie star. Clark Gable's secret love child. The film that nearly ended Paul Newman's career. A former child star who, at 93, reveals her #metoo story for the first time. Valderrama unfolds these stories, and many more, in a volume that is by turns riveting, maddening, hilarious, and shocking.

His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip.

In life, moments arise when you have to decide your next move. When choosing whether to accept a new job, purchase a house, attend a school, or start a relationship, how do you settle on which direction to take? Trey Gowdy has found that most consequential decisions boil down to three simple options: start, stay, or leave.

I present this book to you, raw, uncensored, and in detail—all the ups and downs of what it is really like to spend your days among the dead. You will find the hours of frustration and the moments of debilitating fear are also met with times of pure bliss when life unfolds to demonstrate the beauty of human potential.