Iāve always been sensitive to my material environment, discerning the spiritual and emotional effects of light, color, and sound in everyday life, like our clothes and homes and also in nature. However, for years, I lived in my head. Iād relegated my body and intuition to the sidelines. For two decades, I built a career in visual art, but it took the mid-life collapse of everything Iād wanted to find my way back to the authenticity of those early sensibilities, charting an artistās way home. The creative life is not just for artists. It sustains our humanity in times of darkness and is the source of our brightest future.
This book's investment in objects of art and the everyday deepened my relationship with the most mundane aspects of my daily life. I began to see the world around me as a lens for self-knowledge.
The book's intimate reflections ignited in me a day-to-day creativity that has transformed the would-be-ordinary into the beautiful. Here the material world is a gateway to our humanity. I read this book for the first time over twenty years ago and it has stayed present and relevant for me ever since.
Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.
This story of individuation shines as a beacon. The juxtaposition of identity, ancestral stories, and creativity told distinctly in an artistās voice cracked open for me a world that is at once relatable and completely, necessarily idiosyncratic.
I felt the world of the book color my everyday experiences as this story weaves together life and art, as well as extends the honest relationship an artist must have with the material world into the most intimate of material relationships: the one we have with our own body. These most mundane relationships are shown as inseparable from our humanity as creative beings. This book inspired me to look at my relationships as a mirror for self-discovery.
FEATURED ON THE COVER OF TIME MAGAZINE AS A 2021 NEXT GENERATION LEADER
āA once-in-a-generation voice.ā ā Vulture
āOne of our greatest living writers.ā ā Shondaland
A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times bestselling author, āa dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual selfā (Esquire)
In three critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, Igbo belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Ojiā¦
Artist Nilda Ricci could use a stroke of luck. She seems to get it when she inherits a shadowy Victorian, built by an architect whose houses were said to influence the mindāsupposedly, in beneficial ways. At first, Nildaās new home delivers, with the help of its longtime housekeeper. And Nildaā¦
I got lost in the detailed universe of young people growing by a bread-crumb trail, one small creative act at a time, into the famous artists they are known as today. Whether itās hopping on a bus to New York City, setting up a studio practice in a shabby apartment, to honing a voice in particular media, be it photography or music, this chronicles idiosyncratic choices, creative exploration, and the coalescing of kindred communities.
In a unique time and place, a certain status quo was traded for a microcosm that allowed kids who trusted each other and their own curiosities to pave the way forward. It is a portrait of artists being born, teased out, from the fabric of everyday life.
āReading rocker Smithās account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, itās hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.ā -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocenceā¦
Despite the protagonist in this book embarking on one compulsive and distinctive adventure after another, I couldnāt help but see my journey in her steps, even as they unfolded to destroy the life she worked for and believed she wanted. In a novel that reads like a memoir, I followed a womanās path from a conventional life to one of authenticity.
Her new world opens up, perilous, quirky, and deeply libidinal, giving me access to a story that could only be singular and unique. I was emboldened to see allegiance to personal truth, a kind of curiosity, as a radical path to freedom, the kind of freedom that makes way for others.
The New York Times bestselling author returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious and surprising novel about a woman upending her life
āA frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expectā¦.the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.āāVogue
āA novel that presses into that tender bruise about the anxiety of aging, of what it means to have a female body that is aging, and wanting the freedom to live a fuller lifeā¦Deeply funny and achingly true.ā āLA Times
Jera Fowler is hardly excited about having to keep a journal for ninth-grade English class. āWhat can happen in a day?ā she grumps as she chronicles the 1984-85 school year. She doesnāt realize that a single day can be the dividing line between life and death. Forty years later, whileā¦
I grew up in the suburbs of a big city in an Italian American family that valued the āAmerican Dream.ā The path to success was marked by academic achievement and financial gain. These were among many tacit beliefs and stories, right alongside what it means to be in a marriage and to have children, that led me on a decades-long journey straight into the mid-life collapse of all Iād worked towards.
Frangelloās account of conditions, events, and an underlying, perilous terrain of female identity and romantic ideology treads so close to my own experience of catastrophic relational collapse and betrayal. As in my own life, the crisis extends backward and forwards in time, unearthing the buried ground on which I inadvertently founded my dreams and built my life. This book is a lens that reframed my history and refocused my future.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice ā¢ A Good Morning America Recommended Book ā¢ A LitReactor Best Book of the Year ā¢ A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year ā¢ A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year ā¢ A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year ā¢ A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month
"A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced,ā¦
My book is an evocative memoir exploring the complexities of love, betrayal, and the healing power of art. When Rob confesses his affair with Gabriellaās young friend, it shatters their decades-long bond built on radical honesty and unravels the unconventional life they had carefully constructed. Robās betrayal rips apart not only their marriage but the foundation of their shared lifeās creative work.
Through the lens of devastation, this raw memoir journeys through the aftermath, reflecting on the meaning of art, trust, and identity. With poetic insight, it contemplates what remains when the story you believed in most collapsesāand how, for an artist, the material world reveals a hopeful image of the way forward.
Resting Places follows one womanās journey after the devastating news of her sonās death. Elizabeth ekes out a lonely and strained relationship with her husband while trying to lose her grief in alcohol. A chance meeting with a man on the side of the road spurs her to travel cross-countryā¦
A memoir of homecoming by bicycle and how opening our hearts to others enables us to open our hearts to ourselves.
When the 2008 recession hit, 33-year-old Heidi Beierle was single, underemployed, and looking for a way out of her darkness. She returned to school, but her gloom deepened. Allā¦