A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock's greatest talents: Prince. Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote "3 Chains o' Gold," Prince's "rock video opera," as well as the...

I worked, toured, and recorded with Duke Ellington for the last two years of his life – a period that was the highlight of my career. In my memoirs, The Essence and Duke Ellington, I aim to convey the spirit within the heart of the jazz musician, particularly Duke Ellington. I want to show what drove him and other musicians, past and present, to play and compose this wonderful music. I also depict Duke Ellington's greatness as a human being, not...

Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives. Soon the whole world knew about her...

The 1st installment in a 3-part oral history, Welcome to the Silver Factory introduces the members of Andy Warhol's inner circle and their dazzling world of art, parties, drugs, and drama In the 1st volume of this fascinating oral history based on her documentary Andy Warhol's Factory People, Catherine O'Sullivan Shorr illuminates the early years of Andy Warhol's Factory scene through interviews with the artist's collaborators, close friends, and...

"Profound, overwhelmingly moving . . . a richly complex love story." - New York Times Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford brings to life the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda Sayre and clarifies as never before Zelda's relationship with her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald-tracing the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband's career and her own talent. Zelda Sayre's stormy life spanned from notoriety...

Departing from a discussion on what it would be a mannerist attitude in the architecture of today, and theorizing around it, this book analyzes some works of contemporary European practices including Lutjens Padmanabhan, architekten de vylder vinck taillieu, TEd'A, Maio, 6a architects and AOffice KGDVS. Art critics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries imprinted a long-standing derogatory meaning to the word "mannerism". Even though scholars...

Angela Gregory is considered by many the doyenne of Louisiana sculpture and is a notable twentieth century American sculptor. In A Dream and a Chisel, Angela Gregory and Nancy Penrose explore Gregory's desire, even as a teenager, to learn the art of cutting stone and to become a sculptor. Through sheer grit and persistence, Gregory achieved her dream of studying with French artist Antoine Bourdelle, one of Auguste Rodin's most trusted assistants and...

As she builds her own life anew, an Italian journalist embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi—her disappearance from India, her persecution by the Nazis, and her pursuit of freedom at any cost. On a sweltering summer day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself standing before a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess at...

A New York Times Notable Book: A revealing look at the famous twentieth-century children's author who brought us The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Few writers have had the enduring cultural influence of Roald Dahl, who inspired generations of loyal readers. Acclaimed biographer Jeremy Treglown cuts no corners in humanizing this longstanding immortal of juvenile fiction.  Roald Dahl explores this master of children's literature from childhood-focusing...

A thrilling page-turner that also happens to be the biography of one of Russia's most controversial figures This is how Emmanuel Carrère, the magnetic journalist, novelist, filmmaker, and chameleon, describes his subject: "Limonov is not a fictional character. There. I know him. He has been a young punk in Ukraine, the idol of the Soviet underground; a bum, then a multimillionaire's butler in Manhattan; a fashionable writer in Paris; a lost soldier...