In recipes and reminiscences equally delicious, Edna Lewis celebrates the uniquely American country cooking she grew up with some fifty years ago in a small Virginia Piedmont farming community that had been settled by freed slaves. With menus for the four seasons, she shares the ways her family prepared and enjoyed food, savoring the delights of ea...more

In this smart survival guide for students and teachers - the only book of its kind - James Elkins examines the "curious endeavor to teach the unteachable" that is generally known as college-level art instruction. This singular project is organized around a series of conflicting claims about art: Art can be taught, but nobody knows quite how; Art ca...more

In 1998, a prestigious group of artists, critics, and literati offered in a single collection their incisive reflections on the question of beauty—past, present, and future. This esteemed collection of essays, entitled Uncontrollable Beauty, provoked debates about beauty in art and culture, arousing widespread curiosity and stimulating passionat...more

"The wardens climbed into their truck, ready to leave. 'You'll need about seven cords of firewood. Concentrate on that. You'll have to get it all in before the snow grounds your truck.'""Though I didn't want to ask, it seemed important. 'What's a cord?'"So begins Pete Fromm's seven winter months alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness g...more

The most disastrous family reunion in the history of fiction. The Drummond family, reunited for the first time in years, has gathered near Cape Canaveral to watch the launch into space of their beloved daughter and sister, Sarah. Against the Technicolor unreality of Florida's finest tourist attractions, the Drummonds stumble into every illicit acti...more

"The larger struggle we are witnessing today . . . [is] an ecological drama where the outcome rests not only on our realization that the natural physical environment is one and the same as our bodies, but that nature itself is a form of Mind." -- Bill Viola Chosen to represent the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale, Bill Viola, a New ...more

New York City is the undisputed center of the North American art world, and its public art is one of the most evident signs of its cultural wealth. For more than 30 years, Creative Time has been an avatar of public art in the city, working to engage art and the environment, artists and the public. Creative Time: The Book shows how a single organiza...more

Richard Sennett is one of the world's leading sociologists, and this book, first published in 1970, was his first single-authored work. It launched his exploration of communities and how they live in cities, and outlined his view that order breeds narrow, violence-prone lives, while an 'equilibrium of disorder' brings vigour and diversity to urban ...more