Beauty Unframed


Book Description

Is there a sublime beauty in the commonplace? How do we know it? How do we see it? How do we learn to taste, touch, feel, and see all the joys of creation in a more meaningful way? "Unframed Beauty" is a book about the commonplace. Elizabeth Elmers creatively sets out new ideas for observing the world more thoughtfully in order to find joy in everyday living. It's precisely because we fail to appreciate enough of the miracles around us that we need a book like this to remind us of all the amazing treasures of life right at our fingertips. T. DAVID GORDON writes: ""Beauty Unframed" is that extremely rare book that is hard to put down, though not narrative. There is probably an argument in it, but it does not feel like an argument; it feels like an invitation. It is an invitation--to look longer, smell longer, taste, hear, and feel longer, and more thoughtfully--at things that are well crafted. Whether at God's crafts or our own, this wonderful volume invites us, chapter by chapter, to notice what is worthy of our notice. I found it very hard to put down, and you will too."




Artists Unframed


Book Description

Tucked away among the letters, diaries, and other ephemera in the Smithsonian's archives lies a trove of rarely seen snapshots of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated artists. Unlike the familiar official portraits and genius-at-work shots, these humble snaps capture creative giants with their guard down, in the moment, living life. Pablo Picasso stands proudly on a balcony with young daughter Maya—a tiny, meticulously inked annotation penned by an unknown hand proclaims that "he's very much in love." Jackson Pollock morosely carves a turkey while his mother, Stella, and wife, Lee Krasner, look on. A young Andy Warhol clowns for the camera with college friend Philip Pearlstein, and in a later shot more closely resembles his famously enigmatic public self at a gallery opening with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.




Girl, Unframed


Book Description

Seven starred reviews! “A riveting, meticulously plotted mystery with plenty of drama.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A teen girl’s summer with her famous mother turns sinister in this gripping thriller inspired by a real-life Hollywood murder from Printz Honor–winning and National Book Award finalist author Deb Caletti—perfect for fans of Courtney Summers’s Sadie. Sydney Reilly has a bad feeling about going home to San Francisco before she even gets on the plane. How could she not? Her mother is Lila Shore—the Lila Shore—a film star who prizes her beauty and male attention above all else…certainly above her daughter. But Sydney’s worries multiply when she discovers that Lila is involved with the dangerous Jake, an art dealer with shady connections. Jake loves all beautiful objects, and Sydney can feel his eyes on her whenever he’s around. And he’s not the only one. Sydney is starting to attract attention—good and bad—wherever she goes: from sweet, handsome Nicco Ricci, from the unsettling construction worker next door, and even from Lila. Behaviors that once seemed like misunderstandings begin to feel like threats as the summer grows longer and hotter. But real danger, crimes of passion, the kind of stuff where someone gets killed—it only mostly happens in the movies, Sydney is sure. Until the night something life-changing happens on the stairs that lead to the beach. A thrilling night that goes suddenly very wrong. When loyalties are called into question. And when Sydney learns a terrible truth: beautiful objects can break.




Window to the Soul…A personal journey


Book Description

All of us experience a life journey. None of it is by chance. The life journey is rich with experiences, which many of us keep within ourselves because we are reluctant to reveal them. However, I feel that we do have much to share, and that in sharing we will realize how closely we are all bound together by unrealized ties. Many of our experiences - and certainly our feelings - are the same, and we are not alone. We share a common soul, and we all seek the same answers.




Art and Music


Book Description

God made us to enjoy beauty wherever we find it, whether it's music or the visual arts. But sin finds ways to obscure what is right in front of our eyes and ears. Drawing on years of teaching experience, two professors offer tips for understanding, evaluating, and appreciating art in all its forms while highlighting the important ways in which art and music reflect the glory of God. This book will help you better understand and appreciate humanity's pursuit and imitation of beauty through artistic expression—a vital means by which we bear witness to the beauty of our Creator.




The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named


Book Description

The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, in conjunction with Northwestern University Press, is delighted to announce that Nicole Sealey is the winner of the fourth annual Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named will be published by Northwestern University Press with a planned launch party at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in January 2016. At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well as an acute political awareness. Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, the poems included in this slim volume excavate the shadows of both personal and collective memory and are, at all points, relentless. To quote the poet herself, here is a debut as luminous and unforgiving "as the unsparing light at tunnel's end."




The Present Personal


Book Description

Hagi Kenaan argues that philosophy's concern with abstract forms of linguistic meaning and the objective, propositional nature of language has obscured the singular human voice. In this strikingly original work Kenaan explores the ethical and philosophical implications of recognizing and responding to the individual presence in language. The Present Personal fuses phenomenology and aesthetics and the traditions of Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, drawing on Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger as well as literary works by Kafka, Kundera, and others.







Girl, Unframed


Book Description

A teen girl’s summer with her mother turns sinister in this gripping thriller about the insidious dangers of unwanted attention, from Printz Honor medal–winning and National Book Award finalist author Deb Caletti—perfect for fans of Courtney Summers’s Sadie. Sydney Reilly has a bad feeling about going home to San Francisco before she even gets on the plane. How could she not? Her mother is Lila Shore—the Lila Shore—a film star who prizes her beauty and male attention above all else…certainly above her daughter. But Sydney’s worries multiply when she discovers that Lila is involved with the dangerous Jake, an art dealer with shady connections. Jake loves all beautiful objects, and Sydney can feel his eyes on her whenever he’s around. And he’s not the only one. Sydney is starting to attract attention—good and bad—wherever she goes: from sweet, handsome Nicco Ricci, from the unsettling construction worker next door, and even from Lila. Behaviors that once seemed like misunderstandings begin to feel like threats as the summer grows longer and hotter. It’s unnerving, how beauty is complicated, and objects have histories, and you can be looked at without ever being seen. But real danger, crimes of passion, the kind of stuff where someone gets killed—it only mostly happens in the movies, Sydney is sure. Until the night something life-changing happens on the stairs that lead to the beach. A thrilling night that goes suddenly very wrong. When loyalties are called into question. And when Sydney learns a terrible truth: beautiful objects can break.




Grotesque Tenderness


Book Description

Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into “tide-rows of burning debris”; children chase snakes in summer meadows. The primordial past spins off “rogue by-products and flawed replicas,” while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep. The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering. But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that “the lit / world goes on living” and life justifies itself through its own workings. From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.