“Superb . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of [Janet Malcolm’s] long career.” —Charles Finch, The New York Times Book Review For decades, Janet Malcolm’s books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and prodded at reportorial and biographical convention, gesturing toward the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. In Still Pictures, she turns her gimlet eye on her own life—a task demanding a writer just as peerlessly skillful as she was widely known to be. Still Pictures, then, is not the story of a life but an event on its own terms, an encounter with identity and family photographs as poignant and original as anything since Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Malcolm looks beyond the content of the image and the easy seductions of self-recognition, constructing a memoir from memories that pose questions of their own. Still Pictures begins with the image of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague for New York at the age of five in 1939. From her fitful early loves, to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House, to her fascination with what it might mean to be a “bad girl,” Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escapes the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Still Pictures delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn’s New Yorker, and the libel trial that led Malcolm to become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like few others in our literature.

A heart-wrenching, yet enlightening collection of children's drawings forged in the fires of war. Of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Franco's tyranny in the relative security of Republican-controlled eastern Spain, more than 200,000 were children. The Republic responded to this crisis by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies), often in country estates and mansions that had been abandoned by fascist sympathizers. In these colonies, the young refugees -- many of them orphaned or sent by their parents to safety -- received schooling and medical care, kept each other company, and produced thousands of drawings that serve as a moving, collective testimony of the experience of being a child in wartime. Companion to a major traveling exhibition, They Still Draw Pictures collects and comments on a cross-section of the children's art produced in the colonias infantiles. Born of the trauma of exile and separation, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies and preserve the children's clear memories of life before the war and hope for life after it. They are supplemented by a smaller selection of drawings from later wars. "Once I drew like Rafael, " Picasso said, "but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child." Deceptively transparent, these drawings speak with a poignant immediacy of war's consequences for its youngest victims.

"Much of the of the content of these pictures is concerned, I think, with a kind of visual play, and therefore with agility, surprise, balance, unexpected moves, and grace. The subjects of the pictures are these virtues in themselves, and also the fact that these virtues can flower in such unlikely circumstances. At first aquaintance, the pictures might seem casual. I believe, on the contrary, that their very point and purpose is order. Like much of the best photography being done today, they concern photography's ability to know and rationalize reaches of our visual life that are so subtle, fugitive, and intuitive that until now they have been undefinable and unsharable." -- John SzarkowskiBill Dane (aka Bill Zulpo-Dane, born William Thacher Dane on November 12, 1938) is a North American street photographer. Dane pioneered a way to subsidize his public by using photographic postcards. He has mailed over 69,000 of his pictures as photo-postcards since 1969. As of 2007, Dane's method for making his photographs available shifted from mailing photo-postcards to offering his entire body of work on the internet. In Bill Dane Pictures ... it's not pretty. he mixes his idiosyncratic writing with a selection of photographs from the past 50 years.

A successful international artist offers a no-holds-barred approach to making it in the arts and selling your work. "This profound, funny book, full of hard truths and smart advice, is must reading for artists. Read it and you just might transform your life and jolt your art career awake! Are you ready for some high voltage inspiration? Then come listen to the master's voice." —Eric Maisel, A Life in the Arts "The best bunch of advice I've ever seen for someone who is serious about this crazy addiction called art." —Barnaby Conrad, artist and best-selling author.

A #1 New York Times bestseller, this innovative and wildly funny read-aloud by award-winning humorist/actor B.J. Novak will turn any reader into a comedian—a perfect gift for any special occasion! You might think a book with no pictures seems boring and serious. Except . . . here’s how books work. Everything written on the page has to be said by the person reading it aloud. Even if the words say . . . BLORK. Or BLUURF. Even if the words are a preposterous song about eating ants for breakfast, or just a list of astonishingly goofy sounds like BLAGGITY BLAGGITY and GLIBBITY GLOBBITY. Cleverly irreverent and irresistibly silly, The Book with No Pictures is one that kids will beg to hear again and again. (And parents will be happy to oblige.)

Providing a thorough and comprehensive introduction to the study of photography, this second edition of Photography: The Key Concepts has been expanded and updated to cover more fully contemporary changes to photography. Photography is a part of everyday life; from news and advertisements, to data collection and surveillance, to the shaping of personal and social identity, we are constantly surrounded by the photographic image. Outlining an overview of photographic genres, David Bate explores how these varied practices can be coded and interpreted using key theoretical models. Building upon the genres included in the first edition – documentary, portraiture, landscape, still life, art and global photography – this second edition includes two new chapters on snapshots and the act of looking. The revised and expanded chapters are supported by over three times as many photographs as in the first edition, examining contemporary practices in more detail and equipping students with the analytical skills they need, both in their academic studies and in their own practical work.An indispensable guide to the field, Photography: The Key Concepts is core reading for all courses that consider the place of photography in society, within photographic practice, visual culture, art, media and cultural studies.

This illustrated report sets out a global review of the state of the world's freshwater resources, based on the collective work of 24 United Nations agencies, following on from the conclusions of the first UN World Water Development Report 'Water for People, Water for Life' published in 2003 (ISBN 9231038818). This second edition discusses progress towards the water-related targets of the UN Millennium Development Goals and examines a range of key issues including population growth and increasing urbanisation, changing ecosystems, food production, health, industry and energy, as well as risk management, valuing and paying for water and increasing knowledge and capacity. It contains 16 case studies which consider key challenges in water resource management and makes a number of recommendations to guide future action and encourage sustainable use, productivity and management of our increasingly scarce freshwater resources.