"Sarah Kaufman offers an old-fashioned cure for a modern-day ailment. The remedy for our culture of coarseness is grace…This is an elegant, compelling, and, yes, graceful book." —Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive In this joyful exploration of grace’s many forms, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Sarah L. Kaufman celebrates a too-often-forgotten philosophy of living that promotes human connection and fulfillment. Drawing on the arts, sports, the humanities, and everyday life—as well as the latest findings in neuroscience and health research—Kaufman illuminates how our bodies and our brains are designed for grace. She promotes a holistic appreciation and practice of grace, as the joining of body, mind, and spirit, and as a way to nurture ourselves and others.

"Sarah Kaufman offers an old-fashioned cure for a modern-day ailment. The remedy for our culture of coarseness is grace…This is an elegant, compelling, and, yes, graceful book." —Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive In this joyful exploration of grace’s many forms, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Sarah L. Kaufman celebrates a too-often-forgotten philosophy of living that promotes human connection and fulfillment. Drawing on the arts, sports, the humanities, and everyday life—as well as the latest findings in neuroscience and health research—Kaufman illuminates how our bodies and our brains are designed for grace. She promotes a holistic appreciation and practice of grace, as the joining of body, mind, and spirit, and as a way to nurture ourselves and others.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic teaches us to appreciate—and enact—grace in every dimension, from the physical to the emotional. Grace has long been taught as essential to civilized living. The Three Graces—goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity—exemplify ease and harmony with one another and the world around them. But what has happened to this simple, marvelous concept of being at ease in the world? With warmth, humor, and an ever-perceptive eye, Sarah L. Kaufman sifts the graceful from the graceless, celebrating heart-catching moments of physical elegance in sports, movies, dance, fashion, and music; rare sightings of celebrity grace; the secrets of gracious hosts; and grace found unexpectedly, in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant and among strippers in a basement bar. Kaufman’s thought-provoking reflections on these physical and social acts of grace offer hope for even the clumsiest, most awkward among us. Guided by the muse of Cary Grant (with further inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Roger Federer, Nelson Mandela, Margot Fonteyn, Amy Purdy, Beyoncé, and others), Kaufman illuminates the importance of grace in the small moments of everyday life. In The Art of Grace, she inspires us to walk taller, spend time on unnecessary kindnesses, and celebrate the grace notes in our lives and those of others.

Iris Grace is a beautiful little girl who, from a very young age, barely communicated, avoided social interaction with other people, and rarely smiled. From both before her diagnosis of autism and after, she seemed trapped in her own world, unable to connect with those around her. One day, her mother brought home a Maine Coon kitten for Iris, even though cats aren’t typically thought of as therapy pets. Thula, named after one of Iris’s favorite African lullabies and meaning “peace” in Zulu, immediately bonded with Iris. Thula knew right away how to assuage Iris when she became overstimulated; when to intervene when Iris became overwhelmed; and how to provide distraction when Iris started heading toward a meltdown. Whether exploring, playing, sleeping, or taking a bath with Iris or accompanying the family on a bike ride, Thula became so much more than a therapy cat. With Thula’s safe companionship, Iris began to talk and interact with her family. This heartwarming story is illustrated with sixty of Iris’s gorgeous impressionistic paintings, works of art that have allowed her to express herself since the age of three. A gifted artist, Iris sees the natural world in a profoundly vivid and visceral way. With Thula by her side, she’ll sit and paint for hours, and the results are stunning. Inspiring and touching, Iris Grace follows the struggles and triumphs of a family—and a miracle cat—as they learn to connect with an amazing child.

#1 New York Times Bestseller By the host of The Grace Helbig Show on E! and the it’sGrace YouTube channel, comedian Grace Helbig offers an irreverent and illustrated guide to life for anyone faced with the challenge of growing up. Infused with her trademark saucy, sweet, and funny voice, Grace’s Guide is a tongue-in-cheek handbook for millennials, encompassing everything a young or new (or regular or old) adult needs to know, from how to live online to landing a job to surviving a breakup to decorating a first apartment, and much more. Charmingly illustrated, Grace’s Guide features full-color photos, interactive worksheets, and exclusive stories from Grace’s own misadventures, including her disastrous interview for NBC’s Page Program, her lifelong struggles with anxiety, the first (and also last) time she entered a beauty pageant, meeting her first boyfriend at a high school Latin convention, and many other hilarious lessons she learned the hard way. Amusing and unexpectedly educational, this refreshing and colorful guide proves that becoming an adult doesn’t necessarily mean you have to grow up.

A study of Group Material, the influential but underexamined New York–based artist collective, investigating a series of key works. Key predecessor of contemporary art’s most radical activist gestures, the 1980s collective Group Material seized upon the temporary exhibition as a prime mode of intervention. Projects sited on walls, subways, and billboards targeted some of the most sensitive political conflicts of the era, from U.S. military interventions in Latin America to the AIDS crisis. In Art Demonstration, Claire Grace examines Group Material’s New York–based collaboration across a decade that saw a wave of renewed interest in art as a domain of political mobilization. As Grace argues here, Group Material’s art was never just a means to an end; looking itself held urgency. Grace distinguishes between two types of Group Material projects: room-scale interiors featuring distinctive wall treatments, soundtracks, and boundary-crossing arrangements of objects, and works in spaces usually reserved for advertising. Grace analyzes the group’s practice in both categories, examining such well-known projects as AIDS Timeline (1989) and Democracy (1988–1989) and lesser-known works including Subculture (1983) and The Castle (1987). Grace shows that the politics running through Group Material’s practice ultimately resides in the artists’ particular recourse to the exhibition form. With that bearing, Group Material’s work insisted on the material in the face of postmodern theory’s privileging of the discursive, and redistributed authorship within protean and pivotally diverse collective structures, testing in so doing the ever fragile contours of democratic participation as art became a commodity for speculative investment.

From the author of Grace's Guide and the host of The Grace Helbig Show on E! comes an illustrated, tongue-in-cheek book about style that lampoons fashion and beauty guides while offering practical advice in her trademark sweet and irreverent voice.