3 results for "Picture Books"

The tale of the Mandarin duck: a modern fable

Midler, Bette
"How do you get people to appreciate what is right in front of them? In The Tale of the Mandarin Duck, it takes a mysterious, beautiful duck and a clear-eyed kid to point out the obvious! Bette Midler's distinctive voice joins striking photos of the real duck by Michiko Kakutani and charming black-and-white drawings by Joana Avillez. This book will have readers of all ages coming back to visit the fantastical interpretation of New York City and its odd ducks--both feathered and human."--Amazon.
Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC 2021-02-16 40 pages

Here and there

Levitt, Helen
“…Helen Levitt is one of the living treasures of New York, widely admired for her devotion to candid street photography in a style influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans…[Her] vignettes of domestic, daily city life, taken on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, are a form of poetry that evokes the fortitude and forbearance of New Yorkers past and present.” —Andy Grundberg,The New York Times Book Review Selected as the best photography book of 2001 by The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, and Photo-Eye, among others, Helen Levitt’s magnum opus Crosstown (powerHouse Books 2001) all but sold out of its one and only, six-thousand-copy print run. Here and There is Levitt’s new collection of personally-selected images a charming monograph featuring over ninety never-before-published photographs, including portraits of her friends James Agee and Walker Evans. The recently discovered photographs featured in Here and There represent Levitt’s own favorite images selected from her immense private collection. Shot over seven decades, Here and There reveals Levitt’s acute sense of how cosmetically street life has changed—and how substantially it has remained the same. The sheer determination of this inimitable photographer to walk the streets of her beloved city for this length of time and take pictures of what she saw, reaffirms her unofficial status as New York City’s visual poet laureate. “[Levitt’s photographs] have the quality of frozen street-corner conversation: she went out, saw something wonderful, came home to tell you all about it, and then, frustrated, said, ‘You had to be there,’ and you realize, looking at the picture, that you were.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
PowerHouse Books 2003 119 pages

The reservoir

Duchovny, David
"The Reservoir follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he, in his enforced quarantined solitude, looks back upon his life. He examines his wins, his failures, the gnawing questions-his career, his divorce, his estranged daughter-and wonders what it all means and who he really is. Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is, this fellow quarantine damsel in distress trapped in her own Fifth Avenue tower, leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate. Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time; beyond that, into the enduring mysteries of love and fatherhood; and deeper still, into the bedrock mystery of life itself. As Ridley's actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir. The Reservoir is a twisted rom-com for our distanced time, when the merest touch could kill and conspiracy theories propagate like viruses-a contemporary union of Death in Venice, Rear Window, and The Plague"--
Akashic Books 2022 128 pages