Picasso was arguably the most important artist, in any medium, of the 20th century.
A prodigy and polymath, a genius who could seemingly do anything, he changed painting forever. He was also a monster, abusing and manipulating everyone around him, not least a rotating cast of beautiful young women, most of them amazing artists in their own right.
But his first and worst victim was himself – he went through life tormented and haunted and wildly immature and unfulfilled, and even as death approached, having pushed away everyone who loved him, he sat hidden in his atelier filling canvas after canvas, trying to beat death with art, not able to put it down even at the very end.
I’m a great student of artistic lives gone wrong (there are so many ways), and this is one of the great cautionary tales. It is also thrilling and fascinating and inspiring and unputdownable, with beautiful writing and storytelling by the author. A triumph.
Through numerous interviews with Picasso's intimates, the author penetrates the barriers of the Picasso myth to reveal the struggle between his power to create and his passion to destroy
I’ll say it plainly: I think Helprin is our greatest living English language novelist. I have no idea how it took me so long to discover him, but once I did, I quickly and greedily read everything he wrote.
This is perhaps the best of the lot, in a crowded and competitive field – rich and warm and engrossing, and filled with moments of perfect beauty and wonder and awe inscribed in glorious prose that genuinely makes you catch your breath to be in the presence of such literary superpowers.
An old man's magnificent tale of love and war-a recapitulation of a life and a reckoning with mortality told by one of America's most acclaimed novelists.
I’ve got like a dozen runners-up for third place, but I guess I have to choose! And I have to choose the great Steven Pressfield.
Regular readers will have heard me rave about The War of Art, which is the holy text for writers, creatives, and anyone trying to do anything hard and creative in the world. His novels, particularly The Profession and Killing Rommel, are absolute masterclasses in (literary) military fiction. But this is his epic story, finally told in full, and will be of interest not just to Pressfield die-hards, as well as students of the artist’s journey, but to anyone interested in humanity.
This is a gripping and wonderful and wise and deeply human story, by one of our great storytellers (and story gurus) – and what it really, finally is is: great literature.
A battle-worn woman who became the perfect machine for survival and the deadliest special operator on Earth.
Now with the entire world collapsing around her and safety – and Alpha Team – 10,000 miles away… Strap in for the opening salvo of the ARISEN : Operators epic – the biggest and most explosive ARISEN adventure yet, and the untold story of the pipe-hitting operators of the Unified Special Operations Command during the first two years of the Zulu Alpha.
