A wrenching portrait of the Russian sculptor and a tribute to the potential of political art John Berger explores the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, who, after clashing with Khrushchev, was excluded from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists. Abandoned to obscurity, Neizvestny laboured to realize a monumental and very public vision of art. Exiled to the United States, he finally found recognition, returning to his homeland with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berger’s account illuminates the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy – which brought him into face-to-face conflict with Khrushchev himself – Neizvestny was fight-ing not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for recognition of the social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions.

Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic - John Berger is one of the major European intellectuals of our time. For sixty years he has been challenging the way we see the world and how we think about it, in books like Ways of Seeing, Permanent Red, To the Wedding, A Painter of Our Time, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag and G. But although Berger has always written poetry, often smuggling poems inside books like The Seventh Man and The White Bird, this is the first time his poetry has been collected in English. Collected Poems reflects Berger's longstanding concerns with art and politics, love and war, history and memory, emigration, immigration and the life of the European peasantry. It includes well-known poems like 'The Ladle', 'Village Maternity' and 'Death of La Nan M.' as well over twenty previously unpublished poems. From 'My Coney' (written in 1952 when Berger was just twenty-six) to 'They Are the Last' written in 2008, Berger the poet demonstrates an enduring commitment to the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. These are perfectly framed still-life images, sensual and plain, delicate sketches of hard lives caught between the provisional quality of language and the permanence of things. John Berger's Collected Poems reveals its author to be a major poet of our time.

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A’ida. Her insurgent lover Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’sletters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and ofits motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. Butthe area is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroachesfrom outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity—anintimate dance, a shared meal—assume for A’ida a life-affirmingsignificance, acts of resistance against the forces that mightotherwise extinguish them. From A to X is a powerfulexploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining acommunity which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, findstranscendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrowof daily existence.

Lilac And Flag

This is a collection of portraits of a shepherd, a farmer, a painter and blind man, a sylph of Byzantine arrogance and a vagabond cyclist with primroses growing in her basket. The backgrounds range from Prague, Paris, Athens, Lahore and countrysides and mountainscapes.

A hysterical new novel from the author of What's Wrong with Dorfman? Once a gangly teenager in oversized clothes, Plato G. Fussell is now handsome and independently wealthy. But inside he's still a bundle of neuroses and anxieties, with a tendency to engage in moronic word games in the presence of beautiful women. In the midst of working on his definitive ten-volume biography of Millard Fillmore, Plato finds himself dodging his vile ex-wife, trying to please his demanding elderly mother by inquiring weekly about the state of her bowels, and attempting to remain verbally coherent while courting a young woman whom he meets after her errant Frisbee connects with his cranium. As Plato blunders on in search of true love, romance, and an acceptable degree of worldwide cleanliness, he discovers that loving someone and knowing them needn't go hand-in-hand.

The bestselling editor of This Explains Everything brings together 175 of the world's most brilliant minds to tackle Edge.org's 2014 question: What scientific idea has become a relic blocking human progress? Each year, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org--"The world's smartest website" (The Guardian)--challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.

Presents essays responding to a question about what scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known, written by such authors as Jared Diamond, Richard Thaler, Richard Dawkins, Lisa Randall, Steven Pinker, and Carlo Rovelli.

The path to victory starts on the sidelines, in this fast-paced new middle grade series from #1 New York Times bestselling sportwriting powerhouse John Feinstein. Twelve-year-old Jeff Michaels, son of a Philadelphia TV sports reporter, is just learning to play soccer on the new sixth-grade team at his middle school. Andrea Carillo has fought her way onto the squad, but the coach doesn’t think girls should play with boys, so she’s riding the bench with Jeff—even though she’s one of the best players. With Jeff’s help, the Philly media gets ahold of the story, and suddenly Andi is all over the news as she shows her worth on the soccer field. But amid bullies, threats, and a media firestorm, will Andi’s skills and Jeff’s perseverance be enough to save the season? An action-packed novel about two kids who may be "benchwarmers," but prove themselves naturals when it comes to teamwork, friendship, and finding a path to victory.

Fledgling fourteen-year-old sports reporters Susan Carol and Stevie investigate suspicious activities at the Super Bowl after Stevie gets fired from his co-anchor job on a ground-breaking teen sports show.

" One would like to think that the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest Court in the land, is the one island of sanity still remaining. But if what you folks are about to read is any indication, we've all got a lot to worry about. The question that presents itself is whether the near pathological dizziness and irrationality in our society has so invaded this nation's marrow that, like a wild-infectious virus, even the Supreme Court is not immune." --from NO ISLAND OF SANITY Now, in the powerful premiere of the Library of Contemporary Thought, Vincent Bugliosi takes a timely swipe at the Supreme Court's decision in Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton. Famed as the prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of the classic bestseller HELTER SKELTER, Bugliosi argues that the high court has rarely been proved so wrong, so fast. NO ISLAND OF SANITY is only the beginning of an ongoing dialogue with some of the most original writers working today. Each month, the Library of Contemporary Thought will bring you a different voice on a hot-button topic in American life, politics, and culture. From Mickey Mouse to Tiger Woods, from how we age to how we read, no subject is too controversial or too unlikely for these powerful and provocative books.

An investigation into Biblical and Ugaritic sources for evidence relating to the theme of the cultic experience of the effective reign of God. Professor Gray argues that this theme is central to the interpretation of both Old and New Testaments.He reconsiders the debate centred on 'The Enthronement Psalms' of the Psalter, a debate between Mowinckel and his critics. He discusses the reign of God and considers how this theme was used by pre- and post-exilic prophets and how it was developed in prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology. Furthermore he considers the Davidic King as executive of the Divine King in the Psalms and the prophets.

From his extraordinary beginnings-his mother went into labor while gambling at a French casino-to escaping Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and ultimately hoping to conquer New York City, John Gruen writes a subtly revealing self-portrait in Callas Kissed Me...Lenny Too! As a boy unable to speak a single word of English, Gruen was determined to make a successful life for himself in America. Anxious to know what his adopted country was truly about, he ventured to the Midwest to attend the University of Iowa, where he emerged, five years later, as a more-or-less Americanized graduate student on his way to a PhD scholarship to the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and as the 20-year-old husband of ravishing fellow student and painter Jane Wilson. The story of the Gruens' life in New York City, from the 1950s to the present, explores a complex marriage and two parallel journeys of artistic growth. Gruen worked as a composer, photographer, and journalist; Wilson developed as a distinguished painter, though often supported the two with work as a fashion model. Life was always on the move for the couple. Though hardly well-connected and certainly not wealthy, the Gruens knew everyone during their many years in the artistic milieu of which they were an active part. From the many apartments they occupied in New York City to the countless dinner parties, nights at the Cedar bar, and weekends at their Hamptons barn, their life was a nonstop social whirlwind. There were chance encounters with Salvador Dalí, evenings spent pretending to be Chekhov characters at home with E.E. Cummings and Marion Morehouse, working vacations to Italy with the Leonard Bernsteins, and a long working visit to Gian Carlo Menotti's baronial Scottish estate. Their ever-expanding circle of acquaintances and friends also included Rudolf Nureyev, Maria Callas, Willem De Kooning, Francis Bacon, Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Bette Davis, Samuel Beckett, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and so many others. It was all quite head-spinning, at times producing hugely complicated situations, but throughout it all, John Gruen and Jane Wilson built successful careers based on hard work and a steady conviction that life should be lived to the fullest.

John Hollander's Blue Wine and Other Poems, his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume―"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"―move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

This edition is designed to meet the special needs of a major authors approach to literature. Included in these two volumes are thirty of the major authors of English literature from Beowulf to Auden.

"Comic verse," writes editor John Gross, "is verse that is designed to amuse--and perhaps that is as far as any attempt at a definition ought to go." In The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, Gross has combed the annals of literature in English from the middle ages to the present, gathering poems that provoke laughter, smiles, and even reflections on the human condition--but always poems that amuse. From limericks to social satire, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse offers a remarkable collection of outstanding light poetry. Gross has brought together the finest writers in the history of the English language--from Chaucer and Skelton to Shakespeare and Swift, Lord Byron to Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson to John Updike--offering delightful examples of their comic verse. Many of these lines dance with whimsy, such as John Skelton's Colin Clout ("For though my rhyme be ragged,/ Tattered and jagged,/ Rudely rain-beaten,/ Rusty and moth-eaten,/ If ye take well therewith,/ It hath in it some pith"); others float heavier thoughts on light rhymes--as in Matthew Prior's succinct Human Life ("What trifling coil do we poor mortals keep;/ Wake, eat, and drink, evacuate and sleep."). The range of writers who have composed comic verse is astonishing, as is the delight of the poems themselves. Here we read T.S. Eliot mocking himself ("How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!/ With his features of clerical cut"); poet and Soviet historian Robert Conquest, mingling his two professions in a limerick ("There was a great Marxist called Lenin/ Who did two or three million men in/ --That's a lot to have done in/ --But where he did one in/ That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in"); and Wendy Cope commenting on her disillusionment with poets ("I used to think all poets were Byronic./ They're mostly wicked as ginless tonic/ And wild as pension plans"). And along the way, we are treated to witty song lyrics as well, from First World War soldiers' tunes, to Irving Berlin, to Cole Porter, to Lorenz Hart ("When love congeals/It soon reveals/ the faint aroma of performing seals/The double-crossing of a pair of heels/I wish I were in love again!"). Whether it comes from anonymous popular culture or the icons of the literary canon, comic verse has been a source of pleasure and diversion through the ages--a combination of wit, verbal artistry, and even serious contemplation. This collection, compiled by one of our finest critics and anthologists, brings this tradition into the hands of today's readers, offering hours of delight.

Titles are: Dance with Me * Everybody's Girl * First You Dream * The Last Girl * Love Bird * Rita's Theme * Second Chance * Somebody Older * Steel Pier * Wet * Willing to Ride.