Art & Literature

Charles Handy is one of the giants of contemporary thought. His books on management – including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management – have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends – such as Beyond Certainty and The Second Curve – has changed the way we view society. In his new book, Handy, looking back over a rich and varied life, shares the lessons he has learned along the way. What things really matter? What daily worries should we learn to treat as unimportant? How do we become more accepting of ourselves and of those around us?

In Artists, Siblings, Visionaries, acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell turns her attention to British brother and sister artists Gwen and Augustus John. In many ways they were polar opposites. But as this vivid and insightful account of their lives shows, they were also remarkably alike, sharing a striving for escape, a commitment to their work and a profound if sometimes exasperating kinship throughout the course of their adult lives.

We Might Just Make It After All brings us on the rollercoaster of adventures (and misadventures) that the best friends embarked on, from transferring colleges on a whim, to falling in and out of love with suitors, cramming into roach-infested Hell’s Kitchen apartments, and eventually designing the chic, simple bag that would launch the pair to global fame. Through it all, Katy and Elyce’s friendship remained unshakeable.

When she was 52, a recruiter told Julie Wainwright that her failure as CEO of Pets.com made her unemployable. But she proved him—and Silicon Valley—wrong and built her company from an idea into the world’s largest resource for authenticated luxury resale. Since its launch in 2011, The RealReal has changed the world of fashion forever, making luxury items more accessible and sustainable. Time to Get Real spills the tea on the entrepreneurial journey from a woman’s perspective and includes all the lessons learned and mistakes made along the way to a billion-dollar business and public company.

In 1773, literary giant Samuel Johnson set off with his friend James Boswell on a tour of Scotland’s remote Highlands and Western Isles. What followed was a vivid travelogue capturing the landscapes, people, and customs of a region on the brink of change. With wit, insight, and curiosity, Johnson reflects on everything from ancient clan traditions to the decline of the Gaelic language—offering a rare glimpse into 18th-century Scotland through the eyes of one of England’s greatest minds.

A fascinating look at the real Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the designer who forever revolutionized the way women look. She was a free spirit, brilliant business woman, and beauty who never found reciprocated love. Madsen, with authority, delves into this fashion doyenne's business and private lives to reveal one woman's extraordinary progress: from orphan to millinery shopkeeper, from lodestar of feminine style to a very rich woman with a closet full of dark secrets.

The Durrells are probably the most celebrated literary family of the 20th century. Gerald turned them into celebrities with his tripartite memoir, beginning with My Family and Other Animals (1956) which told of his experiences with his widowed mother Louisa and three siblings during their time in 1930s Corfu. We know of the Durrells from their own writings and from the image of them created by TV, film and biographical accounts of specific figures. What we do not know is the truth.

Step into the vivid, paradoxical world of G. K. Chesterton—where saints dance with skeptics, riddles reveal truth, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Best known for his wit and philosophical insight, Chesterton’s poetry is a rich blend of humor, faith, social commentary, and fierce imagination. From the rousing rhythms of “Lepanto” to the introspective depth of “The Ballad of the White Horse”, this curated selection showcases Chesterton’s signature style: playful yet profound, grounded yet soaring.

Marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, What Matters in Jane Austen? solves the mysteries of Austen’s fictional world. Jane Austen’s novels have been a staple of the English canon since the nineteenth century. Yet critics of the time did not appreciate the true complexity of her work. Nothing, John Mullan argues, is accidental or coincidental in Austen. As Austen herself said, she wrote for readers who have "a great deal of ingenuity themselves."

De 1985 à 1992, j'ai transcrit des scènes, des paroles, saisies dans le R.E.R., les hypermarchés, le centre commercial de la Ville Nouvelle, où je vis. Il me semble que je voulais ainsi retenir quelque chose de l'époque et des gens qu'on croise juste une fois, dont l'existence nous traverse en déclenchant du trouble, de la colère ou de la douleur. Annie Ernaux. Marianne Denicourt s'empare avec grâce de cette série d'instantanés urbains habilement saisis par Annie Ernaux.

Author Sharon Kitchens identifies the locations that serve as the basis for King's fictional towns of Castle Rock, Jerusalem's Lot, Derry, and Haven. Drawing on historical materials and conversations with locals and people who know King, the author sheds light on daily life in places that would become the settings for Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, Cujo, IT, and 11/22/63.

This rich compilation of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters across four decades displays her warmth and generosity, her droll and sometimes wicked sense of humor, her phenomenal energy, and most of all, her mastery of the lost art of letter writing. In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, listeners will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent.

An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy — until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin’s press; through their boom — enabled by new technologies — as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet.

Andy Warhol claimed that he loved being outside a party—so that he could get in. But more often than not, the party was at his own studio, The Factory, where celebrities—from Edie Sedgwick and Allen Ginsberg to the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground—gathered in an ongoing bash.

Mary Wollstonecraft is widely hailed as the mother of modern feminism. The book that made her famous, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a work of worldwide renown. Yet the range of her achievements as a thinker and writer reach far beyond this text. She was a multi-faceted author, and although the condition of women was a constant preoccupation throughout her life, she wrote on a wide variety of topics and in a range of literary forms, some of which she created herself.

Following the Front is a compilation of WWII dispatches written by Sidney A. Olson for TIME and LIFE magazines, 1944-1945. Olson, who joined Time Inc. in 1939 and served as a senior editor there, asked to be assigned overseas as a war correspondent. In mid-December, 1944, he received his accreditation from the War Department and sailed for London. Attached to the European Theater of Operations (ETO), Olson followed the Allied Forces as they pushed the Nazis back into Germany. He typed up his reports and cabled them to his editors in New York.

A coming-of-age memoir that follows a large, working-class Irish family as it plunges into chaos in the wake of a terminal diagnosis—and the author's own hidden struggle to endure when her sister's disease becomes the dark star around which they all revolve.

"Die Charaktere aus der Feder guter Autoren sind wie echte Menschen, nur echter", sagt Donna Leon. Darum wohl ist ihr Leben auch so reich an Figuren, echten und erfundenen. In Backstage tritt eine bunte Truppe auf: das Rock-Genie Frank Zappa, Venedigs bekanntester Diamantenhändler, eine tollkühne Sexworkerin, ein cleverer Komponist, tragische Helden, bewunderte Kollegen und Kolleginnen. Donna Leon gestaltet diese Begegnungen zu funkelnden Geschichten.

La parabola spirituale e umana di Leone XIV, il primo Papa americano della storia. Con la capacità di sintesi del grande giornalista, grazie a un linguaggio semplice ed efficace, Giorgio Dell'Arti ci offre un ritratto a tutto tondo del nuovo pontefice. Dalla laurea in matematica alle prime missioni in Perù, passando per la nomina a Prefetto dei Vescovi e alla fatidica fumata bianca del maggio 2025, la sua vita si dipana come un affresco, ricco di vita e di esperienze.

War Is Not Just for Heroes rescues the incredible true stories of United States Marine Corps. Written by one marine, Claude R. "Red" Canup, a combat correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, these dispatches and private letters provide insight into the grind of war and ordinary men and women who carried out their duty. Thoughtfully edited and contextualized by a preface and prologue by his daughter, Linda M. Canup Keaton-Lima, War Is Not Just for Heroes combines documentary and biography to provide the human dimensions of those in combat and those who reported out.

В 1890 году Антон Павлович Чехов, к тому времени уже прославленный писатель, отправился в тяжелое и рискованное путешествие на самый отдаленный край империи — на каторжный Сахалин. Проделав долгий путь через всю Сибирь, он прибыл на остров не как чиновник или журналист, а движимый желанием увидеть истинное положение дел, как живут ссыльные, каторжане и переселенцы, и донести правду до читателей. Результатом глубокого, подлинно научного и человечного исследования длиною в три месяца стал труд «Остров Сахалин», уникальное произведение, сочетающее в себе научную точность и человеческую чуткость.

Невероятная история жизни одного из самых успешных и известных отечественных искусствоведов и выставочных кураторов Зельфиры Трегуловой, рассказанная ею самой – история о том, как девочка из Риги, полюбившая искусство, стала специалистом по искусству ХХ века и директором Третьяковской галереи (с февраля 2015 по февраль 2023 года).

En estas páginas acompañamos a Andy Robinson a lo largo de diez terroríficas crónicas de viaje por América, para descubrir la cara oscura del turismo postpandémico, en la que grandes monopolios nacionales y multinacinales controlan hoteles, aerolíneas, cadenas de restaurantes o de entretenimiento, dejando a las comunidades locales al margen.

We’ve all heard the story about waking up as a cockroach—but what if a crisis turned you into a clam? After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a “clam” via typo after her mother keeps texting her to “clam down.” The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to “clam down”—to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to “clam up” when we can’t speak, and to “come out of our shell” when we reemerge, transformed.