Biography & autobiography / Artists, Architects, Photographers

Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs they Quit

von Howard Bahr, Michelle Richmond & Sonny Brewer

Contributory essays by: Howard Bahr, Rick Bragg, Larry Brown, Pat Conroy, Connie May Fowler, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, William Gay, John Grisham, Winston Groom, Silas House, Suzanne Hudson, Joshilyn Jackson,...

Emily Carr and Her Dogs: Flirt, Punk, and Loo

von Emily Carr

This delightful book combines 25 stories about dogs with 16 playful drawings by famous Canadian writer, artist, and animal lover Emily Carr. She tells of her joys and tribulations raising Old English sheepdogs,...

Van Gogh: The Life

von Gregory White Smith & Steven Naifeh

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith galvanized readers with their astonishing Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, a book acclaimed for its...

Drinking with Strangers: Music Lessons from a Teenage Bullet Belt

von Matt Diehl & Butch Walker

The artist named by Rolling Stone as one of America’s best singer-songwriters and the 2005 Producer of the Year shares the inside story of his music career

From his days with one-hit-wonder band the Marvelous...

Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution

von Richard Brookhiser

Since 1996, Richard Brookhiser has devoted himself to recovering the Founding for modern Americans. The creators of our democracy had both the temptations and the shortcomings of all men, combined with the talents...

Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter

von Patricia Albers

“Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s

She was a steel heiress from the Midwest—Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicago’s...

A Mirror Garden

von Monir Farmanfarmaian & Zara Houshmand

In Persia in 1924, when a child still had to worry about hostile camels in the bazaar and a nanny might spin stories at her pillow until her eyes fell shut, the extraordinary and irresistible Monir Shahroudy...

Emily Carr

von Kate Braid

Carr defied convention by choosing art over marriage. Considered an eccentric by her contemporaries, she created an art unique to British Columbia.

Modigliani

von Meryle Secrest

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani

Amedeo (“Beloved of God”)...

No Way Home: A Dancer's Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World

von Carlos Acosta

Carlos Acosta, the Cuban dancer considered to be one of the world's greatest performers, fearlessly depicts his journey from adolescent troublemaker to international superstar in his captivating memoir, No Way...

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

von Vincent Van Gogh & Ronald de Leeuw

Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all’ Few artists’ letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent Van Gogh’s, and the selection included here, spanning...

Egil's Saga

von Anonymous & Bernard Scudder

Egil's Saga tells the story of the long and brutal life of tenth-century warrior-poet and farmer Egil Skallagrimsson: a psychologically ambiguous character who was at once the composer of intricately beautiful...

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life

von Ada Louise Huxtable

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography of America's greatest architect Renowned architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography Frank Lloyd Wright looks at the architect and the man,...

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

von Chris Greenhalgh

Soon to be a major motion picture

Coco Chanel and Composer Igor Stravinsky.

Their love affair inspired their art.

Their art defined an era.

In 1913, at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, the...

Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography

von Mary-Lou Weisman & Al Jaffee

Jaffee’s inventive work has enlivened the pages of MAD since 1955. To date he has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire, and continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely...

Tiepolo Pink

von Roberto Calasso & Alastair Mcewen

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany...

Double Take: A Memoir

von Kevin Michael Connolly

Double take

A rapid or surprised second look, either literal or figurative, at a person or situation whose significance has not been completely grasped at first.

Kevin Michael Connolly is a twenty-three-year-old...

Madonna: Like an Icon

von Lucy O'Brien

Material Girl . . . Immaculate sexpot . . . Superstar . . . Mother . . . Kabbalah enthusiast . . . For three decades she has defied categorization. . . . She remains one of our greatest living pop icons.

Here...

Creators

von Paul M. Johnson & Paul Johnson

Kingsley Amis described Paul Johnson's Intellectuals as “a valuable and entertaining Rogues' Gallery of Adventures of the Mind.” Now the celebrated journalist and historian offers Creators, a companion volume...

No Lifeguard on Duty

von Janice Dickinson

A rollicking memoir by one of the greatest (and most outrageous) supermodels of the 1970s.

Janice Dickinson was not only the first of the supermodels, she endured a nightmarishly traumatic childhood at the hands...