Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) was best known for his metaphysical paintings, but he also wrote poems, articles about art, an autobiography, and the first surrealist novel. Even more mysterious than the paintings, is the man himself: secretive, self-centered and contradictory, supercritical, ironic, and humorless, yet creative in ways he probably hardly understood. He did not share the Surrealists' overt preoccupation with the erotic, but was obsessed with memories of ancient mythology, 19th century German philosophy, metaphysics, and the secrets of creativity. With these obsessions, he tried, unconsciously, to solve the problems of his own sexuality which he concealed within. A loner, who never formally aligned himself with the Surrealists, or any other artistic movement, he produced several thousand works of art, with many changes of style. These were praised by Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and paul Eluard. He has remained one of the most baffling and memorable of those associated with the Surrealists.

Gathered from early twentieth-century Italian magazines, manuscripts, correspondence, television recordings, and ephemeral art volumes, Geometry of Shadows is the first comprehensive collection of Giorgio de Chirico's Italian poetry, with award-winning poet Stefania Heim's translations presented alongside the Italian originals.

Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City examines the two most salient dimensions of the artist’s early imagery: its representations of architectural space and its sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Centering upon a single painting from 1914 – deemed by the painter “the fatal year” – each chapter examines why and how de Chirico’s self-declared “Nietzschean method” takes architecture as its pictorial means and metaphor. The first, full-length study in English to focus on the painter’s seminal work from pre-war Paris, the book places de Chirico’s “literary” images back in the context of the city’s avant-garde, particularly the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire. Merjian’s study sheds light on one of the most influential and least understood figures in 20th-century aesthetics, while also contributing to an understanding of Nietzsche’s paradoxical consequences for modernism.

"The unexpected encounter of a rubber glove, a green ball, and the head from the classical statue gives rise to one of the most compelling paintings in the history of modernist art: Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love (1914). This uncanny image exemplifies what de Chirico called 'metaphysical' painting, which creates a disturbing sense of unreality, outside the usual logics of space and time, through the novel depiction of ordinary things. Emily Braun's essay explores the work's enigmatic motifs, showing how their roots range from the ancient culture of the Mediterranean, through the commercial scenarios de Chirico observed in the streets of Paris in the years around World War I, to the work of the avant-garde painters and poets of the time. The Song of Love continues to captivate viewers as de Chirico intended, even a century after it was made." - Back cover.

"Hebdomeros, originally written in French by Giorgio de Chirico and published in Paris in 1929, was immediately accepted by critics as one of the capital novels of surrealist literature. It should also be said that Hebdomeros is a fundamental document for better understanding the artistic revolution that De Chirico operated in those years with his metaphysical painting. The story does not proceed from event to event, but passes from one image, from one word, from one analogy to another. The singularity of this process lies in its distance from both the dream and the interior monologue, it does not involve the reader, but seduces him with a spectacle of images that smell of hallucination and dreams, of vanishing anguish and frigid rhetorical invention."--Www.goodreads.com

Set in the tense and uncertain years before the Second World War, when America was still largely conflicted about entering the war on either side, Andrew Rosenheim's thriller Fear Itself offers a rich depiction of history as it was--and as it might have been. Jimmy Nessheim, a young Special Agent in the fledgling FBI, is assigned to infiltrate a new German-American organization known as the Bund. Ardently pro-Nazi, the Bund is conspiring to sabotage American efforts against Adolf Hitler. But as Nessheim's investigation takes him into the very heart of the Bund, it becomes increasingly clear that something far more sinister is at work, something that seems to lead directly to the White House. Drawn into the center of Washington's high society, Nessheim finds himself caught up in a web of political intrigue and secret lives. But as he moves closer to the truth, an even more lethal plot emerges, one that could rewrite history. With sharp wit and a keen eye for period details, Rosenheim fully immerses the reader in Depression-era America. He seamlessly weaves into the narrative larger-than-life figures such as J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson, and Lucy Mercer Rutherford, as well as historical events like the 1939 pro-Nazi rally held at New York City's Madison Square Garden. The first in a series chronicling Agent Nessheim's adventures throughout the war, Fear Itself establishes Andrew Rosenheim as a spectacular new talent.