100 books like Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush

Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen! I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.

Christie’s stories are set in downtown eastside Vancouver, a neighbourhood notorious for junkies and homelessness. Of course, the realities are much more diverse. 

These stories focus not only on the down-and-out but also on shop owners and others trying to make a go there, the traumatic things they witness and experience, and the guilt of surviving there. In prose that is sharp and witty, yet evocative and illuminating, he shows every character to be struggling, regardless of their situation. 

It is a very real look at completely believable characters. And he sees them very clearly, shows their humanity, and finds compassion for all of them.

The long titular story from Peninsula Sinking is about three phases in a young man’s life, and his maturation from a guy who does crazy stunts to get attention from the cool kids to someone who, full of regrets and hopes, grapples with highly evolved intellectual and ethical conundrums and finds safety only in love. Its final third opens with this enticement: “Imagine it’s you facing the loss of the still-ripening cherries between your legs.” Throughout the book, Huebert proves himself a wizard with figurative, sensual writing, layering bizarre images with tricky turns of phrase. We are reminded that “there were palm trees on Antarctica once.” Anything can happen.

This collection is filled with great energy, stunning images, and overall great stories—all of them prominently featuring non-human animals, and their interactions with humans, in some cases tackling complex ethical dilemmas with considerable insight.

The Loft Generation is unlike any other memoir or autobiography I’ve read. It’s written in short pieces, not exactly essays or chapters but remembrances of painter and writer, Edith Schloss’s, amazing life. Her memories are so vivid. Each person, place, and piece of artwork leaps off the page. It makes one wonder how she recalled all the amazing details that bring this to life. She seemed to collect fascinating people from Willem and Elaine deKooning to John Cage to Fairfield Porter. She met and befriended everyone from the abstract expressionist period in New York and then during her time in Italy where she later settled. A fascinating tale of an unusual woman, artist and writer living in a colorful, changing time. 

The author of The Killing Art is an artist himself and therefore writes from an insider perspective. The location is New York City and the art movement is the New York School of Art or Abstract Expressionism, which included the artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. The main protagonist is Kate McKinnon, an art historian and former cop, who sets out to write a book about these artists, but is pulled back into solving crimes as the paintings she writes about— and their owners—are slashed. I like the female protagonist in this book as well as the more contemporary setting and art.   

This book is a great choice for anyone looking to dive deeper into the creative process and find inspiration for their own artistic journey. The book, written by the well-known art critic and historian Jerry Saltz, offers practical advice and thought-provoking insights into the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. One of the key themes in the book is the idea that every piece of art you create has the potential to make an impact, no matter how big or small, and that it is your responsibility as an artist to keep creating, even if your work may not always be perfect. Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of the creative process and find the motivation to keep pursuing their passions.

Order a Martini (straight up, or with ice chiming against the glass), then settle with this charming book and the “quintessential cocktail” that merits its own chapter in the imbiber’s US history tour. Grimes wears learning lightly while pointing out the cultural vagaries over four centuries of pleasurable distillation, brewing, and fermentation. Who knew the American Revolution was first fomented in 1700s village taverns? Or that the familiar Gilded Age “Bronx” (named by the Waldorf-Astoria’s master mixologist) was the very first cocktail to use fruit juice?

Author Grimes chides the 1960s Yuppies (a.k.a. young urban professionals) for purist insistence on “imported beer” and “the rarest of single-malt Scotches,” but concludes the country and the cocktail survived and are all the better for it. He gets no argument from me!

The Rituals of Dinner opened my eyes to the power and complexity of eating with other people – something we all do throughout our lives – and the profound ways in which this affects our relationships with friends and strangers alike.

The book delves into the history of the shared meal, dissecting various rituals which, despite regional differences, nevertheless have common threads across the world, for example in the deep, often hidden power that lies in the relationship between host and guest (words that both derive from the same root, ghostis) and the strong, even life-changing implications of knowing how to behave at dinner.

This is a fascinating and beautifully written book that will have you thinking about the way we eat long after you have finished it. 

The Big Book of Hell is the holy grail of dark humor, packaged perfectly in a comic format. Growing up as a sarcastic kid from Brooklyn, this was the first humor book I read that I felt was aimed directly at my sensibilities. It has a very unique “substance-over-style” aesthetic that is striking and somehow managed to become widely identifiable. It dances around subjects, poking fun at the absurdities of the world it was written in. It really showed me that you don’t need to be a conventionally great artist to publish comics and that there is a market for dark humor comics. The book, which reads almost like a variety show, opened my eyes to ways to play with structure of an individual comic and a whole book.