A 1925 book by Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican cartoonist. The book features several dozen black-and-white caricatures of famous American (mostly New York-based) personalities from the 1920s. Many of the drawings were originally published in Vanity Fair magazine, which employed Covarrubias as a staff cartoonist. Cartoons of people including: Florence Mills, Otto Kahn, Willa Cather, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, Calvin Coolidge, H.L. Menchen, George Jean Nathan, John D. Rockefeller, Ann Pennington, Al Smith, Jascha Heifetz, Mary Pickford, Theodore Dreiser, Harold Lloyd, Alfred Stieglitz, Ed Wynn, George Gershwin, George Horace Lorimer, Rudolph Valentino, Leopold Stokowski, Babe Ruth, Carl Van Vechten, Eddie Cantor, Alexander Woollcott, Mrs. Fiske, Joseph Hergesheimer, Emily Lewis.

A treasury of literary history featuring caricatures of bohemian life in 1920s New Orleans with captions by William Faulkner. After meeting in the French Quarter, Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Faulkner and renowned silver artist William Spratling shared a house together—and collaborated on a parody volume that offered a witty portrait of the creative denizens of the city, a group that included such future icons as publisher and Broadway producer Horace Liveright, Pulitzer-winning biographer Carl Van Doren,; novelist John Dos Passos, actress and screenwriter Anita Loos, and others. This unique book provides both an enjoyable glimpse into the early lives of prominent literary and artistic figures and a snapshot of New Orleans history.

Before he fell in love with Wallis Simpson, Edward VIII had fallen in love with America. As a young Prince of Wales, Edward witnessed the birth of the American century at the end of the First World War and, captivated by the energy, confidence, and raw power of the USA as it strode onto the world stage, he paid a number of subsequent visits: surfing in Hawaii; dancing with an American shop-girl in Panama; and partying with the cream of New York society on Long Island. Eventually, of course, he fell violently in love with Wallis, a Southern belle and latter-day Scarlett O'Hara. Forceful, irreverent, and sassy, she embodied everything that Edward admired about modern America. But Edward's fascination with America was not unreciprocated. America was equally fascinated by the Prince, especially his love life, and he became an international media celebrity through newsreels, radio, and the press. Indeed, even in the decades after his abdication in 1936, Edward remained a celebrity in the US and a regular guest of Presidents and the elite of American society.

In A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 Paul Bevan explores how the cartoon (manhua) emerged from its place in the Chinese modern art world to become a propaganda tool in the hands of left-wing artists. The artists involved in what was largely a transcultural phenomenon were an eclectic group working in the areas of fashion and commercial art and design. The book demonstrates that during the build up to all-out war the cartoon was not only important in the sphere of Shanghai popular culture in the eyes of the publishers and readers of pictorial magazines but that it occupied a central place in the primary discourse of Chinese modern art history.

New York in the 1920s and 1930s was a modernist mecca that drew artists, writers, and other creators of culture from around the globe. Two such expatriates were Mexican artist and Renaissance man Miguel Covarrubias and Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray. Their lifelong friendship gave Muray an entrée into Covarrubias's circle of fellow Mexican artists—Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Juan Soriano, Fernando Castillo, Guillermo Meza, Roberto Montenegro, and Rafael Navarro—whose works Muray collected. This outstanding body of Mexican modernist art, now owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, forms the subject of this beautifully illustrated volume. Produced in conjunction with the Ransom Center's exhibition "Miguel Covarrubias: A Certain Clairvoyance," this volume contains color plates of virtually all the items in Nickolas Muray's collection of twentieth-century Mexican art. The majority of the works are by Covarrubias, while the excellent works by the other artists reflect the range of aesthetic shifts and modernist influences of the period in Mexico. Accompanying the plates are five original essays that establish Covarrubias's importance as a modernist impresario as influential in his sphere as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Cocteau were in theirs. Likewise, the essays reestablish the significance of Nickolas Muray, whose success as a master of color photography, portraiture, advertising imagery, and commercial illustration has made him difficult to place within the history of photography as a fine art. As a whole, this publication of the Nickolas Muray Collection vividly illustrates the transgression of generic boundaries and the cross-fertilization among artists working in different media, from painting and photography to dance and ethnography, that gave modernism its freshness and energy. It also demonstrates that American modernism was thoroughly infused with a fervor for all things Mexican, of which Covarrubias was a principal proponent, and that Mexican modernists, no less than their American and European counterparts, answered Pound's call to "make it new."