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 authorBetter 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
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Scott McCloud · 215 pages
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art
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
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
Susan Buck-Morss · 493 pages
The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature
Jose Ortega y Gasset · 204 pages
Plotted: A Literary Atlas
Andrew DeGraff · 127 pages
"This incredibly wide-ranging collection of maps -- all inspired by literary classics -- offers readers a new way of looking at their favorite fictional worlds. Andrew DeGraff's stunningly detailed artwork takes readers deep into the landscapes from The Odyssey, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Invisible Man, Lord of the Flies, A Wrinkle in Time, Watership Down, The Handmaid's Tale, and more. Sure to
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.
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
Lewis Hyde · 352 pages
Starting with the premise that the work of art is a gift and not a commodity, this revolutionary book ranges across anthropology, literature, economics, and psychology to show how the 'commerce of the creative spirit' functions in the lives of artists and in culture as a whole.
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
My Ideal Bookshelf
Maira Kalman, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Alex Ross, David Chang, Michael Chabon, Thomas Keller, Malcolm Gladwell, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Jonathan Lethem, David Sedaris, Stephenie Meyer, Rosanne Cash, James Franco, Kim Gordon, Tony Hawk, Nico Muhly, Thurston Moore, George Saunders, Nancy Pea · 225 pages
"The books that we choose to keep-let alone read-can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In THE IDEAL BOOKSHELF, dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most-books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first
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
Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Book Covers
Margaret C. Sullivan
Jane Austen’s six novels are true classics, still immensely popular some 200 years after their first publication. But although the celebrated stories never change, the covers are always different. Jane Austen Cover to Cover compiles two centuries of design, from elegant Victorian hardcovers and the famed 1894 “Peacock” edition to 1950s pulp, movie tie-in editions, graphic novels, foreign-langua
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton · 304 pages
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel · 159 pages
Pictorial presentation of the impact on contemporary society and individual man of the new developments in technology and communications media.
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
Zak Smith · 772 pages
Postmodernism For Beginners
James N. Powell · 192 pages
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton · 203 pages
The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust Can Change Your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and signif
The Pleasure of the Text
Roland Barthes · 67 pages
"What is it that we do when we enjoy a text? What is the pleasure of reading? The French critic and theorist Roland Barthes's answers to these questions constitute "perhaps for the first time in the history of criticism ... not only a poetics of reading ... but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading ... Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and