The best Andy Warhol books

Johnny Hiro is about a young sushi chef-in-training and his Japanese girlfriend Mayumi trying to live a happy-enough life in NYC. But such a big, chaotic city is hard, especially when filled with giant lizards, chef rivalries, ancient gods, ronin businessmen, and NY Times food reviewers. But with all the chaos, it’s essentially about trying to live happily enough as a young couple.

I felt like there was so much drama in romance stories, and I wanted to tell a story about a healthy-enough relationship with the responsibilities of rest of the world often causing the stresses that hurt us. Because, well, sometimes simply making rent is hard enough.

The definitive biography of Alice Neel tells the riveting story of an artist whose dramatic life spanned the 20th century. In both her life and work, Neel constantly challenged convention. Neel died 38 years ago, but her scathingly honest (and frequently naked) portraits couldn’t be more of the moment. Long before the Black Lives Matter and LBGTQ movements, not to mention #Metoo, Neel incisively documented America’s remarkable and resilient diversity, from her Black and brown Spanish Harlem neighbors to Civil Rights and Feminist leaders, from the children of immigrants to transgender members of Andy Warhol’s coterie. As she herself put it, “I have painted life itself right off the vine—not a copy of an old master with new figures inserted—because now is now.”

When it comes to viewing art, living in the information age is not necessarily a benefit. So argues Michael Findlay in this book that encourages a new way of looking at art. Much of this thinking involves stripping away what we have been taught and instead of trusting our own instincts, opinions, and reactions. Including reproductions of works by Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Jacob Lawrence, and other modern and contemporary masters, this book takes readers on a journey through modern art. “The most important thing for us to grasp,” writes Findlay, “is that the essence of a great work of art is inert until it is seen. Our engagement with the work of art liberates its essence.”

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense--economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

Many years ago, I started to ask questions about the Nazi regime and its impact on the fashion industry in Berlin. I discovered there were about 90,000 employees in 2,700 Jewish fashion firms. All of these Jewish fashion companies were closed or confiscated. How did the state-run theft happen and how did the Nazis do it?

I advertised in England, the US, and France for eyewitnesses and I received many – often handwritten letters from former Berlin Jewish fashion designers or seamstresses. I condensed many of these reports into one fictional fashion firm, run by Kurt Ehrenfried and Simon Cohn. Ehrenfried & Cohn not only lose their property, their success, and their homes, they are forced to leave Berlin, the city of their success. After the war, Kurt Ehrenfried and designer Simon Cohn return from exile back to Berlin with the intention of reclaiming what had been so viciously stolen from them.

The Grim Reaper comes for us all eventually. When he comes, how do we know it is the real deal? After eons of acting as Death, Grim has turned his job into the Afterlife’s best profession. He also ushered in an era of commercialization in the realms of the dead. Grim is now the CEO of Death Incorporated, Death Inc. for short. Milo Anderson is Death Inc’s newest recruit, but when he botches his first Reaping, it sets off a chain of events throughout the Veil of Souls that will leave the Afterlife reeling with the fate of the Universe on the edge of oblivion.

Can Milo complete his task and bring balance back to the Veil? Or will the Morningstar finally have his revenge and his place atop the throne?

New York, New York, New York, Thomas Dyja’s sweeping account of this metamorphosis, shows it wasn’t the work of a single policy, mastermind, or economic theory, nor was it a morality tale of gentrification or crime. Instead, three New Yorks evolved in turn. After brutal retrenchment came the dazzling Koch Renaissance and the Dinkins years that left the city’s liberal traditions battered but laid the foundation for the safe streets and dotcom excess of Giuliani’s Reformation in the ‘90s. Then the planes hit on 9/11. The shaky city handed itself over to Bloomberg who merged City Hall into his personal empire, launching its Reimagination.

From Hip Hop crews to Wall Street bankers, D.V. to Jay-Z, Dyja weaves New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown—Yuppies, hipsters, tech nerds, and artists; community organizers and the immigrants who made this a truly global place—into a narrative of a city creating ways of life that would ultimately change cities everywhere.

Through compelling narrative and stunning photography, At Home in the Wine Country features architecture, style, and design in California’s picturesque wine country, showcasing the work of California’s top architects and designers in styles ranging from modern farmhouse to refined rustic to updated agrarian to unapologetically modern. This virtual tour documents a native terroir-derived style that has evolved dramatically since the days when the region looked to European chateaux for inspiration. The range of styles is broad and pays homage to wine-country living in an atmosphere of understated, family-focused, nature-intensive hospitality.