What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLiving, Thinking, Looking
Siri Hustvedt · 384 pages
Silence
John Cage · 276 pages
Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, "to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them." Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called "writing t
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
The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature
Jose Ortega y Gasset · 204 pages
On Art and Life
John Ruskin · 109 pages
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilizatio
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
About Looking
John Berger · 198 pages
This successor to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, written over the last ten years, searches for meaning within and beyond what is looked at. Why do zoos disappoint children? Why do we take snapshots of those we love? How do the media use photographs of agony? When an animal looks us in the eyes, what does that look mean? Berger describes how a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s com
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.
In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki · 69 pages
Thinking Architecture
Peter Zumthor · 77 pages
Featuring four essays by Peter Zumthor, this volume exhibits the essence of Zumthor's architectural ideas.
Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality
Thomas Lynch · 256 pages
"Thomas Lynch, called a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats, reminds us not only of how we die but also of how we live.". "The essays assembled here explore the human condition at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by mergers and acquisitions, numbed by math and technologies, in search of the meaning of life and time, our lives and ti
White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World
Geoff Dyer · 256 pages
"From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded, but elegant, witty, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer's perennial search for tranquility, for "something better," continues in this series of fascinating and seemingly unrelated pilgrimages--wi
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art
Eileen Myles · 365 pages
Poet and post-punk hero Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing ab
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Robert Fulghum · 240 pages
Mythologies
Roland Barthes · 158 pages
"This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
Milan Kundera · 280 pages
Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera once again celebrates the art of the novel, from its birth in a spirit of humor unique to European culture and sensibility - illustrated by some wonderful examples from the work of Rabelais and Cervantes - through
What Is Your Dangerous Idea? : Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
John Brockman · 320 pages
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Charles Baudelaire · 224 pages
"Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet and writer, has also been called 'the father of modern criticism'. This stimulating volume gathers together some of his most celebrated critical writings."--Amazon.