InDime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic refects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned. In a work that is in various degrees biography, criticism, and sheer poetry, Simic tells the story of Cornell’s life and illuminates the hermetic mysteries of his extraordinary boxes–objects in which private obsessions were alchemically transformed into enduring works of art. Simic sees Cornell’s work as exemplifying a distinctively American aesthetic, open to the world, improvisatory, at once homemade and universal, modest and teasing and profound. Full of unexpected riches,Dime-Store Alchemyis both an entrancing meditation on the nature of art and a perfect introduction to a major American artist by one of his peers–a book that can be perused at length or dipped into at leisure again and again.

Now in Paperback In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

Now in Paperback In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

With affection and critical respect, a celebrated art historian has gathered an unprecedented wealth of material about the shy but immensely influential artist who lived on incongruously named Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York.

Many scholars recognize the importance of Harry Potter as a vehicle for discussions about society—from race relations and gender studies to economic, political, religious and educational applications of the texts. This interdisciplinary collection of new essays brings to the forefront a critique of modern Western society, using Harry’s world as a mirror to our own. Covering issues surrounding parenting and family relations, social class, life and death, the link between identity and morality and even the risks of time travel, this collection provides many jumping-off points for scholars and nonscholars alike to spark discussions about both Harry’s world and our own.

Deborah Solomon’s definitive biography of Joseph Cornell, one of America’s most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists, now reissued twenty years later with updated and extensively revised text Few artists ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his enigmatic shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Legends about Cornell abound—the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent—but never before has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions.

The first retrospective of the work of Joseph Cornell in the past 20 years reflects a personal exploration of art and culture that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination.