"Like all my favorite art, these paintings bring out that covetous feeling. I want to wear them, dance to them, show them off as an example of how life feels to me: dirty, dumb, terrifying, spiritual, and so funny."—Miranda July "In a time of ironic detachment, Margaux Williamson is a painter of extreme candor, but the violence of her vision is cut with wonder and love. Sometimes she recalls Phillip Guston, sometimes she's like a Pittsburgh-born van Gogh; usually she reminds me of nobody at all. Seeing as she sees feels like waking up."—Ben Lerner From the artist the Toronto Star called "one of the best artists of her generation," and whose 2010 movie Teenager Hamlet was praised by the likes of James Franco and William Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, comes a breakthrough work for a world where the image of a painting on one's desktop is as real as the painting hanging in the gallery. Margaux Williamson has conceived of a place that never existed, called The Road at the Top of the World Museum, located in the far north, and populated it with her most accomplished paintings yet. With essays by Chris Kraus, Leanne Shapton, David Balzer, and Mark Greif, and reproductions of eighty paintings, this, her first book, transcends the boundary between the authentic and the imaginary, and collapses the distinction between art show, museum catalog, and document of something astonishing that never was. Margaux Williamson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. She's co-author of the cultural criticism website Back to the World.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Year By: The New York Times Book Review (Notable Books of the Year) * The New York Public Library * The Washington Post * Time.com * The New York Times Critics' (Parul Seghal's Top Books of the Year) * St. Louis Post Dispatch * Apple * Publisher's Weekly An electrifying novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness from Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home. It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life. The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present--to reveal the full spectrum of our world.

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.