A self-portrait through one hundred portraits, Artists Authors Thinkers Directors explores cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier’s sketchbook renderings of those who shaped his (and many others’) artistic views. Culled from his drawing blog ― The Daily Forlorn, now one of Tumblr’s featured illustration blogs, adding thousands of new followers every week ― these portraits are as stylistically varied as the subjects they portray. A scrawled, single line drawing of Lenny Bruce shares space with a triangular Werner Heisenberg. A monochromatic, stippled Stanley Kubrick stares intently at a muppetheaded Frank Oz. Each turn of the page offers a new take on a familiar face. In the afterword, Hornschemeier includes brief notes on each portrait and that creator’s particular work or insight that spoke specifically to him. And in that specificity, much of what is universally affecting in each creator shines through. Hornschemeier’s graphic novels hop from one aesthetic to the next, varying the line and color quality to depict his narrative’s mood. He plays with the language of comics. In these portraits we can clearly see him hard at experimentation, adding to his vocabulary.

In 1976, a fledgling magazine held forth the the idea that comics could be art. In 2016, comics intended for an adult readership are reviewed favorably in the New York Times, enjoy panels devoted to them at Book Expo America, and sell in bookstores comparable to prose efforts of similar weight and intent. We Told You So: Comics as Art is an oral history about Fantagraphics Books’ key role in helping build and shape an art movement around a discredited, ignored and fading expression of Americana. It includes appearances by Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Harlan Ellison, Stan Lee, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and more.

Packed with practical advice, guidance and inspiration about all aspects of the writing process, this Yearbook is the essential resource on how to get published. It will guide authors and illustrators across all genres and markets: those looking for a traditional, hybrid or self-publishing route to publication; writers of fiction and non-fiction, poets and playwrights, writers for TV and radio, newspapers and magazines. New articles for the 2020 edition include: - Raffaella Barker Writing romantic fiction - Chris Bateman Writing for video games: a guide for the curious - Dean Crawford Going solo: self-publishing in the digital age - Jill Dawson On mentoring - Melissa Harrison So you want to write about nature ... - Kerry Hudson Writing character-led novels - Mark Illis Changing lanes: writing across genres and forms - Maxim Jakubowski Defining genre fiction - Antony Johnston Breaking into comics - Suzanne O'Sullivan Writing about science for the general reader - Tim Pears Writing historical fiction: lessons learned - Di Redmond Ever wanted to write a saga? - Anna Symon Successful screenwriting - Nell Stevens Blurring facts with fiction: memoir and biography - Ed Wilson Are you ready to submit?

Re-viewing surrealism in Charles Henri Ford's Poem posters (1964-5) -- Encountering surrealism : Nadja (1928) and autobiographical beat writing -- Blackening surrealism : Ted Joans' ethnographic surrealist historiography -- Turning on surrealism : queer psychedelia -- Hystericising surrealism : the marvelous in popular culture.

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.