After her parents get divorced, Emily finds comfort in making and learning about art.

Yatora now has new materials in his tool box and a wider range of expression under his belt. But a week before the first exam, Ooba-sensei says he’s missing a crucial edge… With so much at stake, Yatora’s self-doubt brings him lower than ever before. Still, he has his fire, his resilience—and he might just get a lucky break, too.

New insights into Picasso's Blue Period, through innovative technology that reveals hidden compositions, motifs and alterations, plus hitherto unknown information on the artist's materials and process This lavishly illustrated volume reexamines Pablo Picasso's famous Blue Period (1901-04) in paintings, works on paper and sculpture. Relying on new information gleaned from technical studies performed on The Blue Room (Le Tub) (1901), Crouching Beggarwoman (La Miséreuse accroupie) (1902) and The Soup (La Soupe) (1903), this multidisciplinary volume combines art history and advanced conservation science in order to show how the young Picasso fashioned a distinct style and a pronounced artistic identity as he adapted the artistic lessons of fin-de-siècle Paris to the social and political climate of an economically struggling Barcelona. Essays, a chronology and a summary of conservation findings contextualize Picasso's experimental approach to painting during the Blue Period. A major contribution to the burgeoning field of technical art history, Picasso: Painting the Blue Period advances new scholarship on one of the most critical episodes in 20th-century modernism.

SELF-PORTRAIT Yatora makes the best of a bad situation during TUA's first exam, and he must surpass these efforts for the second. But after all he’s gone through, Yatora is feeling a little out of sorts. To get back on track, he’ll have to step out of the studio and into new lighting… With the help of an old friend, Yatora bares his soul and some skin to take on his latest challenge: the nude self-portrait.

"From rowdy Barcelona barrooms to the incandescent streets of turn-of-the-century Paris, Pablo Picasso experiences the sumptuous highs and seedy lows of bohemian life alongside his rebellious poet friend with a shadowy past, Carles Casagemas. Fleeing family misfortune and their parents’ expectations, the two young artists seek their creative outlet while chasing inspiration in drugs, decadence, and the liberated women of Montmartre—creatures far different from the veiled ones back home."--from publisher's description.

Relief is short-lived for Yatora after his first competition, where his piece was higher ranked than he expected, but far from his dream school’s standards. While he’s prepared to give Ooba-sensei’s challenges everything he’s got…what if all he’s got is still not enough? With 100 days until university exams, he must seize what’s beyond—beyond his singular drive, learned technique, and hard work—to produce an answer only he can.

"To be a Black writer in the early years of the Cold War was to face a stark predicament. On the one hand, revolutionary Communism promised egalitarianism and lit the sparks of anticolonial struggle, but was hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand, the great force opposing the Soviets at midcentury was itself the very fountainhead of racial prejudice, represented in the United States by Jim Crow. Jesse McCarthy argues that Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right and channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form. Embracing racial affect and interiority, they forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet Communism. Ranging from the end of World War II to the rise of Black Power in the 1960s, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin to Gwendolyn Brooks and Paule Marshall and others, Jesse McCarthy shows how Black writers defined a distinctive moment in American literary culture that McCarthy calls "the Blue Period.""--