Here are 100 books that Exquisite Corpse fans have personally recommended if you like
Exquisite Corpse.
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Visits to galleries, museums, and castles were an integral part of my childhood. These filled me with an enduring love for art, architecture, and archaeology. My initial studies covered all areas of art history, but I became drawn to the visual cultures of the Islamic world. I have been lucky enough to live and work in different parts of the Middle East. I am committed to sharing knowledge about the arts and archaeology of the Islamic world through books, exhibitions, and websites. I have always enjoyed fiction that involves art as part of a story, and the selections in this list are my current favorites. I hope you enjoy them!
It was only on a second attempt at reading it that I really appreciated this complex and wonderful book. Opening with the description of the murder of a manuscript gilder in sixteenth-century Istanbul, this book functions at one level as a captivating mystery. It is, of course, much more than that.
Made up of first-person narratives, I loved how animals and even inanimate objects are given their own voices. In one chapter, a counterfeit gold coin reflects on the intimate (and stomach-churning) ways such precious items interact with the human body. In what other novel can you find the drawing of a tree offering reflections about whether art should represent the outer forms or inner meanings of the natural world?
The bestselling murder mystery from Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
** PRE-ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK **
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Award
'Wonderful' The Spectator 'Magnificent' Observer 'Unforgettable' Guardian
My Name is Red is an unforgettable murder mystery, set amid the splendour of sixteenth century Istanbul, from the Nobel prizewinning author
In the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in…
Visits to galleries, museums, and castles were an integral part of my childhood. These filled me with an enduring love for art, architecture, and archaeology. My initial studies covered all areas of art history, but I became drawn to the visual cultures of the Islamic world. I have been lucky enough to live and work in different parts of the Middle East. I am committed to sharing knowledge about the arts and archaeology of the Islamic world through books, exhibitions, and websites. I have always enjoyed fiction that involves art as part of a story, and the selections in this list are my current favorites. I hope you enjoy them!
This book is one of my favorite novels, featuring unforgettable descriptive passages. Its plot is simple, focused on the experiences of an art conservator traumatized by his experiences in World War I. During his brief stay in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby, an ancient church is both his workplace and home.
The building becomes a potent, if mute, character in the story. The evocations of rural life are beautiful, though I was captivated by the gradual uncovering of the medieval fresco depicting the Last Judgement. These slow revelations seem to mirror the central character’s search for meaning as he rebuilds his own life. I have returned to this moving, poetic work again and again.
Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling.
J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country was first published in 1980. Tom Birkin, a damaged survivor of World War One, is spending the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting in the village church of Oxgodby. Joined by another veteran, employed to look for a grave outside the churchyard, he uncovers old secrets…
Visits to galleries, museums, and castles were an integral part of my childhood. These filled me with an enduring love for art, architecture, and archaeology. My initial studies covered all areas of art history, but I became drawn to the visual cultures of the Islamic world. I have been lucky enough to live and work in different parts of the Middle East. I am committed to sharing knowledge about the arts and archaeology of the Islamic world through books, exhibitions, and websites. I have always enjoyed fiction that involves art as part of a story, and the selections in this list are my current favorites. I hope you enjoy them!
Packed with funny, unexpected, and disturbing imagery, I read this book in one sitting. Art historians have discussed the agency possessed by material things, arguing that art and other manufactured objects can shape the actions and attitudes of individuals and groups. This has led to the creation of biographies of ancient objects, tracking their movements and transformations over time.
Fischer takes this one step further in his picaresque novel, told from the perspective of an ancient Sumerian bowl. As the title suggests, the bowl surreptitiously observes and records the lives of the collectors who have owned it over the course of millennia. I haven’t looked at old pots in my house in the same way again!
To a small flat in South London comes a Sumerian bowl: but the bowl is the Collector Collector, clay with something to say, an object d'art who will offer Rosa, its owner, vast swathes of unrecorded history from the last 5, 000 years. Meanwhile, Rosa tries to centre her life and settle the disturbances caused by an uninvited guest, Nikki.
1001 Nights meets the inner city, The Collector Collector is a comic masterpiece and unquestionably the finest novel ever narrated by a bowl.
Visits to galleries, museums, and castles were an integral part of my childhood. These filled me with an enduring love for art, architecture, and archaeology. My initial studies covered all areas of art history, but I became drawn to the visual cultures of the Islamic world. I have been lucky enough to live and work in different parts of the Middle East. I am committed to sharing knowledge about the arts and archaeology of the Islamic world through books, exhibitions, and websites. I have always enjoyed fiction that involves art as part of a story, and the selections in this list are my current favorites. I hope you enjoy them!
I keep returning to this collection of essays because of the elegantly stark prose style and Berger’s willingness to go against popular opinion. Who else would choose to place modernist titans like Jackson Pollock, Naum Gabo, and Paul Klee in a chapter entitled “Artists defeated by the difficulties”?
My reason for including Permanent Red here is the first chapter, “To Be an Artist,” in which Berger asks the reader to imagine lying beneath a tree on a summer day. Describing the geometry of the leaves and branches and the play of form and space, he reflects on what it means to see the world as an artist. For me, it’s the most lyrical evocation of looking as a creative act.
Hello. My name is Mike Russell. I write books (novels, short story collections, and novellas) and make visual art (mostly paintings, occasionally sculptures). I love art and books that are surreal and magical because that is the way life seems to me, and I love art and books that are mind-expanding because we need to expand our minds to perceive just how surreal and magical life is. My books have been described as strange fiction, weird fiction, surrealism, magic realism, fantasy fiction… but I just like to call them Strange Books.
Some of the stories in this collection, like my own stories, use surreal metaphor, expressing poetic imagery in prose form; others are more about the thrill of absurdity. Though surrealism existed before the term or movement existed (in visual art and literature e.g. Lewis Carroll, Hieronymus Bosch, etc.), Andre Breton and his mates really went for it. Here you can read works by Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and more. What I love about all of these artists is their obvious joy in discovering the surreal or poetic image, a joy I know well, and their absolute passion for the importance and potency of expressing such imagery.
Comprised of works by authors from 17 countries, these volumes provide the most extensive assemblage of surrealist writing, much of which is here translated into English for the first time. "The Identity of Things" introduces surrealism's reworking of the fairy tale and the Gothic novel, its essays in the myths, desires and mysteries underlying modern reality.
"I went to fetch my car, but my chauffeur, who has no sense at all, had just buried it', writes Leonora Carrington in this captivating collection of tales from 17 languages." The Observer
I first started art when I was nine years old, but my art journey really started after seeing the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s work at age 14. This experience changed my life and from there, I continued on with fourteen years of formal art education. The book details my experience and journey as a student, instructor, and professional artist over a thirty-year time period across three continents. I wroteAn Artist’s Odyssey to help young artists or artists transitioning into art as a profession to help them avoid the pitfalls of the art world and supplement the necessary business acumen required to make a sustainable career in the art world.
Dalí. The Paintingsis one of the most complete compilations of works I’ve seen, and it includes the examination of one of the most prolific and controversial figures in art. Salvador Dali is a genius. He took his artistic skill and vision across so many different genres of the arts. The book is a fascinating journey into his mind and work. I learned a tremendous amount regarding composition, palette and tone decisions, and of course realism. I loved the idea that you can inspire the mind, leading it into new thought patterns by presenting something that is different or strange.
Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics-and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination.
This publication presents the artist's painted oeuvre. After many years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret finally located the paintings of this highly prolific artist. Many of the works had been inaccessible for years-in fact so many that almost half the illustrations in this book had…
Fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is the author of Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History, and The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion. She is working on a biography of designer Chester Weinberg.
Like any art form, fashion has its share of tortured geniuses. Perhaps none combined genius and torture with as much panache as Charles James, who dressed celebrities and socialites only to die in poverty. Vogue editor Bettina Ballard remembered that “he was constantly cutting and perfecting” his toiles, “which he turned, very occasionally, into actual dresses.” A personality as complex and demanding as his sculptural evening gowns, James knew everybody and got along with nobody—and you’ll understand why after reading Klein’s biography, which draws on recently discovered, unfiltered tapes James made for a planned autobiography that, like so many of his creations, he never he finished.
Christian Dior described him as the inspiration for the New Look. Salvador Dali called his work soft sculpture, and Virginia Woolf exclaimed, He is a genius. As George Bernard Shaw tells us, only unreasonable men change the world. This portrait of the life and times of Charles James winner of two Coty awards, and the subject of a 2014 Metropolitan Museum of Art show draws on the glamour of Europe in the 1930s, and the dazzle of New York City from the 40s through the 70s as it travels with James from his birth to privilege in England in 1906…
I’m a bestselling author of historical fiction—some readers might recognize my pen name, Olivia Hawker, under which I wrote One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow, along with several other novels. My greatest passion is literary fiction, especially when it intersects with historical fiction. Along with my books, I continue to explore new modes of storytelling and new uses for story in my podcast,Future Saint of a New Era.
I was first intrigued by Jodorowsky’s bizarre, unforgettable films. I only discovered his fiction later, but I’m glad I did. Where the Bird Sings Best is a semi-fictional account of the author’s family history, incorporating the magical-realism tradition of Latin American literature with factual details of one family’s immigration and resettlement half a world away from their original homeland.As in Jodorowsky’s filmmaking, the images within his novel are haunting, weird, and leave the reader with the impression that she has only grasped one-tenth of the real meaning.
The magnum opus from Alejandro Jodorowsky—director of The Holy Mountain, star of Jodorowsky’s Dune, spiritual guru behind Psychomagic and The Way of Tarot, innovator behind classic comics The Incal and Metabarons, and legend of Latin American literature.
There has never been an artist like the polymathic Chilean director, author, and mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky. For eight decades, he has blazed new trails across a dazzling variety of creative fields. While his psychedelic, visionary films have been celebrated by the likes of John Lennon, Marina Abramovic, and Kanye West, his novels—praised throughout Latin America in the same breath as those of Gabriel…
A cult author who has survived by the skin of her wits. Nina has spent her adult years in London though many believe she is from New York, which sounds like a lot of travelling for someone who has spent the majority of her life in the dream land of writing. What does being a cult author entail? It is to be a literary Will o’ the Wisp, possessing a gem like glimmering in a mist of obscurity, loved by the rarified few. After writing many critically acclaimed books on various nefarious rock n’ rollers, her ardor dimmed with the passing years as those she had loved were no more and so she returned to her first love, which is the strange and supernatural.
Rather than saying that he edited Come Hither, the poet, and author, Walter De La Mare
(1873-1956) describes himself as having ‘made’ the anthology. Given the enticing notes to the poems and the selection of verses more than validates De La Mare’s assertion. Indeed the anthology of poetry is like a house designed to the finest detail by Mr. De La Mare, who might be considered the Poe of Poetry, as his verses tended towards the odd, ghostly and ineffable.
He was one of the last of the romantic school and Come Hither reflects his taste, Walter De La Mare is long out of fashion like many of the verses on offer, but that is what makes it all the sweeter, from the speech of The Wandering Spectre by unknown to my very favorite poem Tom O’ Bedlam (another marvel by ‘anon’) to more recognized names, such as William…
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
I have written nine crime novels, mostly psychological thrillers, but some blend procedural and PI elements and two are gangland stories. I went to the BRIT school in the 90’s and studied Drama and English Literature at University. I always think that my Performing Arts background gave me a great tool kit for ‘getting into character’ which is useful for writing. I also have an MA in journalism but I definitely prefer fiction to fact. I love the immediacy of first person prose and I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator.
Kit Quinn is a psychologist who is brutally attacked by a prisoner while working. The same prisoner is under suspicion of murder and Kit is called in.
She, however doesn’t think they have the culprit. So ensues a fast-paced race to solve the case. This was one of the first psychological thrillers I ever read and served as a fantastic intro to the genre. It probably pushes the boundaries of believability but it remains one of my favourite books
At the request of London police, psychologist Kit Quinn agrees to evaluate Michael Doll, a sexual predator who slashes her face. As she recovers, Kit has horrible dreams of a red room. Months later, Doll is arrested for murder. As Doll's obsession with Kit escalates, Kit is gripped with a paralyzing fear that the killer isn't Doll--but someone close to her heart.
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