Winner of the 2004 Prix Saint-Exup�ry, an award given yearly to the best illustrated picture book in France by the family of The Little Prince author, Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry . In the big gray city, Lived a little boy who never played... With A Blue So Blue, Jean-Fran�ois Dumont has created an outstanding picture book that will dazzle the eye, stir the imagination, and warm the heart. The exquisitely written tale whisks children off of a fantastic journey across land and sea. Every page features breathtaking paintings, rich in color and detail. It is simply a magical tour de force of illustration and storytelling. The adventure begins with a little boy's marvelous dream of a perfect blue, a blue both soft and strong, a blue so blue you want to curl up inside it. Armed with a paintbrush, he travels the globe in search of this special color--from a famous art gallery to a mid-Atlantic fishing boat, from a remote blues club in the Mississippi Delta to a sun-drenched desert with a purple sky--only to realize that what he was looking for was right in his very own home after all.

A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife. So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.

A “delightful . . . nonstop action” thriller from the author of In a Lonely Place—“readers new to this forgotten classic are in for a treat” (Publishers Weekly). At the age of twenty-four, Griselda Satterlee has already lived two lifetimes. A star of the silver screen, she gives up Hollywood after a year, and moves to New York to become a designer. While her ex-husband, Con, is out of town, she is staying in his apartment. Walking back one night, she meets two cheerful young men who want to go home with her—and won’t take no for an answer. David and Danny are twins, and they are the most beautiful men Griselda has ever seen. They are also the most dangerous. They want something from her: a lustrous blue marble, which they insist is in Con’s apartment. Though they leave without hurting her, Griselda knows that next time, they won’t be so amiable. To save herself, she must discover the secret of the marble—a secret with death at its core.

Collection of poems about the sea, accompanied by watercolors by the artist Meilo So.

A book about choices inspired by the vision of a world where children feel free to explore and be themselves.The book teaches young readers that they should be free to choose what they like without someone dictating what it should be.

"So Black and Blue is the best work we have on Ellison in his combined roles of writer, critic, and intellectual. By locating him in the precarious cultural transition between Jim Crow and the era of promised civil rights, Warren has produced a thoroughly engaging and compelling book, original in its treatment of Ellison and his part in shaping the history of ideas in the twentieth century."—Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles What would it mean to read Invisible Man as a document of Jim Crow America? Using Ralph Ellison's classic novel and many of his essays as starting points, Kenneth W. Warren illuminates the peculiar interrelation of politics, culture, and social scientific inquiry that arose during the post-Reconstruction era and persisted through the Civil Rights movement. Warren argues that Ellison's novel expresses the problem of who or what could represent and speak for the Negro in an age of limited political representation. So Black and Blue shows that Ellison's successful transformation of these limits into possibilities has also, paradoxically, cast a shadow on the postsegregation world. What can be the direction of African American culture once the limits that have shaped it are stricken down? Here Warren takes up the recent, ongoing, and often contradictory veneration of Ellison's artistry by black writers and intellectuals to reveal the impoverished terms often used in discussions about the political and cultural future of African Americans. Ultimately, by showing what it would mean to take seriously the idea of American novels as creatures of their moment, Warren questions whether there can be anything that deserves the label of classic American literature.

Alice wants everything in her bedroom to be blue before she falls asleep.