Reflections on books and art
The Savings Bank Foundation (SBF) of Norway The Savings Bank Foundation DNB (Sparebankstiftelsen DNB) of Norway has for the past decade been building up a collection of classic 20th century American urban and street photography. It now numbers roughly 150 significant works focusing on urban motifs and street life across East and West Coast American [ ]
This is a massive, wonderful, thoughtfully curated and beautifully designed exhibition about a major contemporary artist. In her relatively short career, from the early 1970s until her untimely death in 1985, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (1948 to 1985) developed a personal style of land art, a feminist land art, which explored the interaction of the [ ]
Jack looked at him he saw a sort of whipped misery in Pat s eye that reminded him of his own father. (A Man In The Way) Pat was forty-nine with red-rimmed eyes and a soft purr of whiskey on his breath. (Fun in an Artist s Studio) The Penguin collection of Pat Hobby stories contains 17 stories. [ ]
Warning: This review discusses sexual abuse, incest and madness. If these are a troubling subjects for you, do not read this review. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated — it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the [ ]
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote 5 novels and some 150 short stories, as well as numerous articles for magazines. In the 1960s, Penguin Books published all the novels, four collections of short stories and this volume, which combines five autobiographical pieces and five short stories. I ve summarised the five essays in a separate blog post. In [ ]
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote 5 novels and some 150 short stories, as well as numerous articles for magazines. In the 1960s Penguin Books published all the novels, four collections of short stories and this volume, which combines five key autobiographical pieces and five short stories. This blog post summarises the five autobiographical pieces, numbers 1 [ ]
This is our way of doing things, he thought. Generous and fresh and free; a sort of Virginia-plantation hospitality, but at a different pace now, nervous as a ticker tape. (Michael Curly watching the extravagant wedding in The Bridal Party , page 93) A Penguin selection of seven of the 150 or so short stories which [ ]
Each year the Royal Academy holds its well-known Summer Exhibition, which is always packed to the rafters. Alongside this, they hold a parallel exhibition of young artists, for students aged 4 to 18. It s a free, open-submission competition which means tens of thousands of schoolchildren send in their artworks – over 25,000 this year – and [ ]
Richard Dadd (1 August 1817 to 7 January 1886) is known as the promising Victorian artist who was just gaining a reputation for his colourful fairy paintings when, at the age of 26, he suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown, murdered his father (August 1843) and was confined for the rest of his life (43 years) [ ]
What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? cried Daisy, and the day after that, and the next thirty years? (The ennui of the very rich, one of the themes of The Great Gatsby, page 124) The Great Gatsby is an amazingly, spectacularly brilliant novel, surely one of the greatest short novels ever written. Obviously it s [ ]