🧲 Books like this
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Lewis Hyde · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMyths to Live By
Joseph Campbell · 276 pages
Includes material on "the buffalo-gods, Quetzalcoatls, Buddhas, fairy queens and other such figures."
The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature
Jose Ortega y Gasset · 204 pages
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
On Photography
Susan Sontag · 207 pages
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with
What is Art?
Leo Tolstoy · 208 pages
"Leo Tolstoy is one of the most celebrated novelists of all time. As well as writing literary classics such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace he was also the author of some hugely influential critical and philosophical works. First published in 1898 his book length essay What is Art? has lost none of its power to challenge our perception of art and its function in society today. In this provocati
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
A.O. Scott · 282 pages
"The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever. Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Sc
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Susan Buck-Morss · 493 pages
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Johan Huizinga · 227 pages
Ein klassischer Essay der Kulturgeschichte und Anthropologie Ein grundlegendes Element unserer Kultur ist das Spiel. Der Mensch ist ein Spieler – und ohne seine Lust und Fähigkeit zum Spielen hätten sich ganze Bereiche seiner Kultur nicht entwickelt: die Dichtung, das Recht, die Wissenschaft, die bildende Kunst, die Philosophie und viele andere. Johan Huizinga, der große holländische Historiker u
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard · 241 pages
This book is another of the French philosopher's explorations into the meaning and being of art.
What We See When We Read
Peter Mendelsund · 419 pages
"A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading--how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke · 240 pages
The "Philosophical Enquiry" is a study of the relationship between strong feelings and forms of art, that considers the inspired persuasiveness of certain kinds of writing alongside experience of the natural landscape, and is gradually being recognized as an important work of aesthetic theory. This eloquent and sometimes erotic book was long considered to be a piece of Burke's juvenilia, published
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Hal Herzog · 334 pages
Does living with a pet really make people happier and healthier? What can we learn from biomedical research with mice? Who enjoys a better quality of life -- the chicken destined for your dinner plate or the rooster in a Saturday night cockfight? Why is it wrong to eat the family dog? Drawing on more than two decades of research into the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal
The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History
Mircea Eliade · 195 pages
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Walter Benjamin · 374 pages
A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Emile Durkheim · 416 pages
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge
Terence McKenna · 323 pages
The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton · 288 pages
One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings and streets that surround us.And yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues th
History of Beauty
Umberto Eco, Girolamo De Michele · 438 pages
From the Publisher: What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual