5 results for "Fantasy"

In the street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City, 1938-1948

Levitt, Helen
"All over the city on streets and walks and walls the children ... have established ancient, essential and ephemeral forms of art, have set forth in chalk and crayon the names and images of their pride, love, preying, scorn, desire. ... The Lady in this House is Nuts. ... Lois I have gone up the street. Don't forget to bring your skates. ... Ruby loves Max but Max hates Ruby. ... And drawings, all over, of ... ships, homes ... western heroes ... and monsters ... which each strong shower effaces."So wrote James Agee in 1939. He shared this fascination with children's street drawings and messages with his friend Helen Levitt. Here now are over one hundred of her photographs, made in the years between 1938 and 1948. Most of these pictures have never before been published. They have been selected and arranged by the photographer and carefully reproduced. Robert Coles has written especially for this book an essay on the imaginative live of children and of a time when ". . . children still had some visual independence, some keen-eyed interest in laying pictorial claim to the world around them. ... I have not seen scenes such as Helen Levitt offers in my wanderings through America's city streets twenty and thirty and forty years after these were taken. They offer, then, a look backward--though they are also timeless in certain aspects. For children will never really stop being tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell--to let others see what they find themselves conceiving in thought and fantasy and dream."
Duke University Press 1987 105 pages

Novels and stories of the 1940s & 50s

Malamud, Bernard
Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and coming of age in Depression-era New York, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) began his career writing stories of unsparing precision and power, plumbing the depths of an impoverished urban world. His early, naturalistic style evolved into an inventive, often surreal idiom that blurs reality and fantasy. His first novel, The Natural (1952), is a dazzling reimagining of the possibilities of sports fiction, and it remains one of the greatest and most beloved novels about baseball ever written. In The Assistant (1957), Malamud created a searing drama of guilt and redemption about a struggling grocer's family and the mysterious drifter who comes to rob, and then to work at, his store, transforming all of their lives in unforeseen ways. Joining these novels are twenty-six short stories, ranging from the early tale "Armistice," set in Brooklyn during the troubling weeks of the German invasion of France in 1940, to one of his deepest and most celebrated stories, "The Magic Barrel," a deep fable about a rabbinical student and the matchmaker who leads him to an utterly unexpected bride--
The Library of America 2013 712 pages