Julia is an aspiring painter without money or direction, haunted by a strange family history. Mark is a successful architect who suddenly finds himself unemployed with a baby on the way. Alice is a well-known artist and museum curator disgraced when her last exhibit proved fatal. Running from their failures, this trio is drawn toward a strange new cult that seeks to obliterate the individual-and which may be the creation of a mysterious and dangerous avant-garde artist. John Pistelli unforgettably portrays three people desperate to lead meaningful lives as they confront the bizarre new institutions of a fraying America. A suspenseful and poetic novel in the visionary tradition of Don DeLillo, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Jos� Saramago, PORTRAITS AND ASHES is a scorching picture of our troubled age.

The art of the human image arose millennia ago as a way beyond impermanence and, especially, to keep the dead among us. The pictorial object - the icon - often carried a charge as ritual or ceremonial artifact and, indeed, as a thing with a certain power. The artist Heide Hatry has extended this tradition by creating realistic portraits made out of the actual ashes of the departed person portrayed. Are the results reminiscent of ancient sacred and secular traditions and their complex, even mysterious function to, say, calm, enrich or transform our experience? Icons in Ash includes twenty of Hatry's portraits and twenty-seven contemporary writers who explore this phenomenon in original and engaging meditations on death, the dead body, art, relics, psychology, philosophy, religion, mourning, evolution, transformation, and immortality. Contributors include, among others, Hans Belting, Mark Dery, Eleanor Heartney, Siri Hustvedt, Jonas Mekas, Rick Moody, Mark Pachter, Steven Pinker, Wolf Singer, Luisa Valenzuela, and Peter Weibel. Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAX-NONE

This raw and powerful story is for anyone who has felt unworthy, who has hit rock bottom, who has been hurt by the church, or who has felt like an outcast. From drug dealer to pastor on a mission to bring church "to the wild," Michael Beck invites you into a journey of healing where all are met with compassion and where transformation happens as we make space for each other's wounds. Discover how God can bring forth beauty from ashes by getting down in the gray soot of our wounds to paint our lives beautiful again.

Photographs of discarded items present an alternative portrait of residents of The Jungle refugee camp in Calais, France

a verse memoir about the author's parents' experiences in a Nazi slave labor camp in Germany

"Steppping Through the Ashes" is a photographic elegy to those who died on September 11, and a portrait of how people are coping in the wake of the terrorist attack on New York. Many photographers have recorded the devastation, but Eugene Richards transcends description to offer instead a way of coming to terms with this tragedy. Interviews with survivors and victims' relatives complement Richards' beautiful and poignant images. It may be the best photo book yet on those hard days. --"Albuquerque Journal" Richards is arguably the most empathetic photographer working when it comes to showing the hard parts of people's lives... Once again, Richards has wrought a personal elegy for those who are just learning to cope with what has happened to them. --"New Yorker"