Being an artist doesn't mean that you have to suffer!Bad days happen to everyone. But how do you keep working when there are more bad days than good days? When your mental health takes a toll on your creativity? When anxiety, depression, self-doubt or imposter syndrome prevent you from doing your best work?In a world where artists are perceived as "drama queens" and are expected to "get on with it", this book shows you that there is a way to take care of your mental health while continuing to create.There's no need to be a tortured artist anymore. You can be a happy artist instead.

Being a creative with a job-to-pay-the-bills is not easy. Between the lack of consideration from society in general, the ever-growing costs of living, and the demands of adulthood, it is more and more difficult to find time and energy to create.Have you ever been super excited for a project, only to lose all motivation before you finished? Have you felt so tired that you could not bring yourself to do anything artistic? Have you felt so down on yourself about not doing anything that you started to doubt you had any talents in the first place?I know these feelings, because I've had them too! I am a writer, and all along my career I've tried to find a good balance so that I could keep writing while earning a living. It was a difficult battle. I've had day jobs in several different industries, from science to theatre. I've been so burned out at times that I didn't write for months. I've felt so low about my writing that I didn't perform well in my job. I've had so little free time that I neglected my relationships and my mental health.Thankfully, these years of struggle have taught me a lot, and I decided that I should share that knowledge and experience with other artists. This is why I have decided to write this book, The Part-Time Artist.In my book, I talk about my experience and all the lessons I've learned on my path to becoming a writer. I strongly believe that these lessons can be valuable to all of you. It doesn't matter if you are a writer like me, or a painter, or an actor, or a musician, or a designer, or any other type of artists. I know we all face the same struggles!When you get a copy of the book, here are some of the things you'll get: * An easy way to build productive habits to do more art on a daily basis* The common myth about the tortured artist, and why you don't have to be one* A step-by-step guide to build a business plan for your artistic career* The best way to set goals for your creativity* A strategy to make your day job work with your art (instead of the other way around!)* And much more!Not only that, but you will also benefit from several resources and useful tools, such as a weekly planner, a budget tool, a business spreadsheet and a FREE workbook

Great art comes from great pain. Or that's the impression left by these haunting profiles. Pieced together, they form a revealing mosaic of the creative mind. It's like viewing an exhibit from the therapist's couch as each entry delves into the mental anguish that afflicts the artist and affects their art. The scope of the artists covered is as varied as their afflictions. Inside, you will find not just the creators of the darkest of dark literature, music, and art. While it does reveal what everyday problem kept Poe's pen to paper and the childhood catastrophe that kept Picasso on edge, it also uncovers surprising secrets of more unexpectedly tormented artists. From Charles Schultz's unrequited love to J.K. Rowling's fear of death, it's amazing the deep-seeded troubles that lie just beneath the surface of our favorite art. As much an appreciation of artistic genius as an accessible study of the creative psyche, Tortured Artists illustrates the fact that inner turmoil fuels the finest work.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

A fun, whimisical primer to the New Thought movement. THE MYTH: Success makes you happy. THE FACT: Happiness makes you successful. It's not about who you know, or even what you know. It's about how good you feel, which, luckily for you, is entirely within your own power. Discover how to feel good, replace patterns of fear and failure with love and kindness, and create the life of abundance you've always dreamt of: • Doing work you love • Surrounded by people you love • And with the love of your life 'In a Nutshell' features throughout provide useful reminders of the key valuable lessons in each chapter. How Life Works is illustrated with 90 of Andrew's trademark sketches. "My cartoons illustrate the message", says Andrew. "Cartoons also remind us not to take life too seriously."

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.