High Art

Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.

When a nameless, struggling actor in 1970s New York gets the call that an enigmatic director wants him for an art film set in the Amazon, he doesn't hesitate: He flies to South America, no questions asked. He quickly realizes he's made a mistake. He's replacing another actor who quit after seeing the script - a script the director now claims doesn't exist. The movie is over budget. The production team seems headed for a breakdown. The air is so wet that the celluloid film disintegrates.

In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.

In an evolving networked era, social-issue documentaries like Blackfish are art for civic imagination and social critique. In Story Movements, producer and scholar Caty Borum Chattoo explores how documentaries disrupt dominant cultural narratives through complex, creative, often investigative storytelling.

Danny Plotnick showcases the history of Super 8 filmmaking in this must-listen audiobook. Super 8 offers a detailed look at the beloved medium - one not only embraced by suburban dads, the target audience of the format, but by the art world, punk rockers, and ultimately popular culture. Filmmakers who got their start in Super 8 include Robert Zemeckis, Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes, Sam Raimi, Wes Anderson, and Alex Gibney.

Written in Tyrrell's trademark satirical style, How Do We Get Out of Here? is an invaluable and intimate recount of the political and cultural battles that shaped our contemporary politics.

The idea of American musical theater often conjures up images of bright lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in amateur productions at high schools, community theaters, after-school programs, summer camps, and dinner theaters. In Beyond Broadway, author Stacy Wolf looks at the widespread presence and persistence of musical theater in US culture and examines it as a social practice - a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts.

Margarett Sargent was an icon of avant-garde art in the 1920s. In an evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of a spirited and gifted woman committed at all costs to self-expression.

In the fall of 1948 Hemingway and his fourth wife traveled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called "a goddam wonderful city." He was a year shy of his 50th birthday and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. At a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Di Robilant - whose great-uncle moved in Hemingway's revolving circle of bon vivants, aristocrats, and artists - re-creates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship.

In the mid-1950s, Kurt Vonnegut takes a job in the PR department at General Electric in Schenectady, where his older brother, Bernard, is a leading scientist in its research lab - or "House of Magic". Kurt has ambitions as a novelist, and Bernard is working on a series of cutting-edge weather-control experiments meant to make deserts bloom and farmers flourish.

With only a guitar, a tatty copy of the Melody Maker, and his template for the perfect band, Andrew Matheson set out in 1971 to make musical history. His band, the Hollywood Brats, were prepunk prophets - uncompromising, ultrathin, wild, untamable, and outrageous. But thrown into the crazy world of the 1970s London music scene, the Brats ultimately fell afoul of the crooks and heavies that ran it and an industry that just wasn't ready for them.

In 100 brief chapters, John M. Borack discusses and ranks the greatest moments in Beatles history. An avid Fab Four fan since childhood and a music journalist for more than 35 years, Borack has created a book to agree with and disagree with, and one that is sure to spark conversations. A love letter to the greatest rock band of all time, The Beatles 100 is a book for Beatles buffs and casual fans alike.

Along Comes the Association is the story of how Russ Giguere and his fellow band members in the legendary and influential pop group The Association came together to create unparalleled music, unique to the time and place, and never again to be repeated.

Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep.

An oral-history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight.

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

He was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century political history. Yet today, Elias Demetracopoulos is strangely overlooked - even though his life reads like an epic adventure story....

Matt Pinfield is the ultimate music fan. He's the guy who knows every song, artist, and musical riff ever recorded, down to the most obscure band's B-side single on its vinyl-only EP import. As a child, music helped Pinfield make sense of the world. Later he would approach his music idols after concerts and explain why he loved their music. As an adult, rock music inspired his career, fueled relationships, and, at times, became a life raft.

Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr., were towering figures who argued publicly about every major issue of the 1960s: the counterculture, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, the Cold War. Behind the scenes, the two were close friends and trusted confidantes who lived surprisingly parallel lives. In Buckley and Mailer, historian Kevin M. Schultz delves into their personal archives to tell the rich story of their friendship, arguments, and the tumultuous decade they did so much to shape.