"The Imperial Wife is a smart, engaging novel that parallels two fascinating worlds and two singular women. Irina Reyn writes beautifully of immigrants, art and the vagaries of love". --Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins Two women's lives collide when a priceless Russian artifact comes to light. Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying to entice Russia's wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden and unexplained departure of her husband. As questions arise over the provenance of the Order and auction fever kicks in, Reyn takes us into the world of Catherine the Great, the infamous 18th-century empress who may have owned the priceless artifact, and who it turns out faced many of the same issues Tanya wrestles with in her own life. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past. Can a contemporary marriage withstand an “Imperial Wife”?

A memoir of revolution, reaction, and Russian men’s fashion In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside—and closely observing—the media and cultural elite of Putin’s Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia’s top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite—until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind. In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humor and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.

Essays and stories on fashion, art, and culture in the New York of the 2010s. We were supposed to meet Rose McGowan at Café d'Alsace after the party, but she cancelled at the last minute. I saw on Twitter that she had been hit with a drug possession charge, which she insisted was a scheme to keep her Weinstein dirt quiet. I hadn't even read her Weinstein story… I still wanted to know that the articles were being published, and in large quantities, but reading stories of abuse and humiliation was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn't feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless. I wanted to watch the patriarchy go up in flames, but I wasn't excited about what was being pitched to replace it. If we got all of it out in the open, what would we have left? My fear was that guilt would destroy the classics and there'd be no one left to fuck. All movies would be as low-budget and as puritanical as the stuff they play on Lifetime, all of New York would look like a Target ad, every book or article would be a cathartic tell-all, and I'd be sexually frustrated but too ashamed to hook up with assholes, or even to watch porn. —from Sleeveless Eve Babitz meets Roland Barthes in Sleeveless, Natasha Stagg's follow up to Surveys, her 2016 novel about internet fame. Composed of essays and stories commissioned by fashion, art, and culture magazines, Sleeveless is a scathing and sensitive report from New York in the 2010s. During those years, Stagg worked as an editor for V magazine and as a consultant, creating copy for fashion brands. Through these jobs, she met and interviewed countless industry luminaries, celebrities, and artists, and learned about the quickly evolving strategies of branding. In Sleeveless, she exposes the mechanics of personal identity and its monetization that propelled the narrator of Surveys from a mall job in Tucson to international travel and internet fame.

The long-awaited retrospective from the internationally renowned film director celebrated for his visually lush and atmospheric films. Wong Kar Wai is known for his romantic and stylish films that explore—in saturated, cinematic scenes—themes of love, longing, and the burden of memory. His style reveals a fascination with mood and texture, and a sense of place figures prominently. In this volume, the first on his entire body of work, Wong Kar Wai and writer John Powers explore Wong’s complete oeuvre in the locations of some of his most famous scenes. The book is structured as six conversations between Powers and Wong (each in a different locale), including the restaurant where he shot In the Mood for Love and the snack bar where he shot Chungking Express. Discussing each of Wong’s eleven films, the conversations also explore Wong’s trademark themes of time, nostalgia, and beauty, and their roots in his personal life. This first book by Wong Kar Wai, lavishly illustrated with more than 250 photographs and film stills and featuring an opening critical essay by Powers, WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wei is as evocative as walking into one of Wong’s lush films.

Explores the influence of Russian aesthetics on British modernistsIn what ways was the British fascination with Russian arts, politics and people linked to a renewed interest in the unseen? How did ideas of Russianness and 'the Russian soul' - prompted by the arrival of the Ballets Russes and the rise of revolutionary ideals - attach themselves to the existing British fashion for theosophy, vitalism and occultism? In answering these questions, this study is the first to explore the overlap between Slavophilia and mysticism between 1900 and 1930 in Britain. The main Russian characters that emerge are Fedor Dostoevsky, Boris Anrep, Vasily Kandinsky, Petr Ouspensky and Sergei Eisenstein. The British modernists include Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Mary Butts, John Middleton Murry, Michael Sadleir and Katherine Mansfield. Key Features: Draws on unpublished archive material as well as on periodicals, exhibition catalogues, reviews, diaries, fiction and the visual artsAddresses the omission in modernist studies of the importance of Russian aesthetics and Russian discourses of the occult to British modernismChallenges the dominant Western European and transatlantic focus in modernist studies and provides an original contribution to our understanding of new global modernismsCombines literary studies with aesthetics, modernist history, the history of modern esotericism, film history, periodical studies and science studies

"as indispensable to confronting, say, your domineering mother-in-law or your local city council as it is to helping foment an ongoing and ever-escalating insurrection against, say, a sexist, racist, nepotistic power-mad oligarchy threatening to destroy democracy as we know it...My advice: Buy one" - VOGUE A guerrilla guide to radical protest and joyful political resistance from artist, activist and Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova. The face of modern protest is wearing a brightly colored ski mask. Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of the Russian activist group Pussy Riot, is a creative activist, professional protestor, brazen feminist, shocking visual artist, and force to be reckoned with. Her spontaneous, explosive approach to political action has involved jumping over barbed wire, kissing police officers, giving guerilla performances in crowded subway cars, and going on a hunger strike to protest the abuse of prisoners. She's been horse-whipped by police in Sochi, temporarily blinded when officers threw green paint in her eyes, and monitored by the Russian government. But what made Nadya an activist icon overnight happened on February 21, 2012, when she was arrested for performing an anti-Putin protest song in a Moscow church. She was sent to a Russian prison for 18 months and emerged as an international symbol of radical resistance, as calls to "Free Pussy Riot" resounded around the world. With her emblematic ski mask, black lipstick, and unwavering bravery, Nadya has become an emissary of hope and optimism despite overwhelming and ugly political corruption. Read & Riot is structured around Nadya's ten rules for revolution (Be a pirate! Make your government shit its pants! Take back the joy!) and illustrated throughout with stunning examples from her extraordinary life and the philosophies of other revolutionary rebels throughout history. Rooted in action and going beyond the typical "call your senator" guidelines, Read & Riot gives us a refreshing model for civil disobedience, and encourages our right to question every status quo and make political action exciting--even joyful.

In more than 2,000 issues, British Vogue magazine has acted as a cultural barometer, putting fashion in the context of the larger world in which we live - how we dress, how we entertain, what we eat, listen to, watch, who leads us, excites us and inspires us. The century's most talented photographers, illustrators and a rtists have contributed to it. In Lee Miller it had, unexpectedly, its own war photographer; in Norman Parkinson, Cecil Beaton, David Bailey, Snowdon and Mario Testino the greatest portrait and fashion photographers of their generation; and in Beaton and Irving Penn two giants of twentieth - century photography. From 1892, American Vogue chronicled the life of beautiful people - their clothes, parties, houses and habits - and the magazine was exported for intrigued British readers. In 1916, when the First Wo rld War made trans atlantic shipments impossible, its proprietor, Condé Nast, authorised a British edition. It was an immediate success, and over the following ten decades of uninterrupted publication continued to mirror its times - the austerity and optimi sm that followed two world wars, the 'Swinging London' scene of the sixties, the radical seventies, the image - conscious eighties - and in its second century remains at the cutting edge of photography and design. Decade by decade, Vogue 100 : A Century of St yle celebrates the greatest moments in fashion, beauty and portrait photography. Illustrated throughout with well - known images, as well as th e less familiar and recently rediscovered, the book focuses on the faces that shaped the cultural landscape: from Matisse to Bacon, Freud and Hirst, from Dietrich to Paltrow, from Fred Astaire to David Beckham, from Lady Diana Cooper to Lady Diana Spencer. It features the fashion designers who defined the century - Dior , Galliano , Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, McQueen - and explores more broadly the changing form of the twentieth - century woman.