The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 is the first book to bring together all aspects of Italian visual culture from this fascinating period. Through seventeen scholarly essays and hundreds of lavish full-color and duotone reproductions, this volume captures the era's greatest achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, artists' crafts, literature, photography, cinema, fashion, architecture, and design.
This volume presents information on 20 short stories. It contains concise synopses of the plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.
In these eight stories Piri Thomas takes us with him into El Barrio—Puerto Rico in New York City—and recreates the scenes he knows so well from his own childhood. He leads us through streets teaming with life, up crumbling front stoops, down dark hallways, into crowded rooms, and into the hearts and minds of his people. He takes us into the ring for a hard-fought boxing match and out of the city on a Boy Scout outing. He sits us in the barber’s chair and right under the burning scalp of a kid getting his hair straightened. He puts us into a boy’s mind for a wild fantasy trip, and into the heart of a sixteen-year-old trying to impress a pretty girl. He draws vivid stories from his part experiences and makes us feel what it means to be poor and proud and generous; to be streetwise and full of bravado but frightened, too; to struggle to go straight; to be ashamed of being ashamed; to dream. Piri Thomas, who reached thousands of readers with his bestselling autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, now gives young readers a vivid slice of the life in El Barrio—a place where people face their problems with energy, ingenuity, and love. Speaking in the voice of the streets and from his heart, he captures their spirit, their laughter, and their hope.
Maupassant and the American Short Story isolates and develops more fully than any previous study the impact of Maupassant's work on the writing of Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Kate Chopin, and Henry James. It introduces a new perspective to assess their canons, reviving the importance of many often-ignored stories and, in the cases of Maupassant and O. Henry, reasserting the necessity of studying such writers to understand the history of the genre. An important moment in the history of the short story occurred with the American misreading of Maupassant's use of story structure. Before the turn of the century, Jonathan Sturges and others published mostly surprise-inversion tales in translation. Especially inspiring Bierce and O. Henry, this skewed sample implied to American writers that Maupassant constructed such plots exclusively. Only a few writers, such as James and Chopin, both of whom read Maupassant in French, appreciated his deft handling of form more fully. Their vision and the impact of Maupassant upon their fiction was largely ignored by later generations of writers who preferred to associate Maupassant and O. Henry with the "trick ending" story. This book details the origins and consequences of this misperception. The book further contributes to the study of the short-story genre. Through an adaptation of Aristotelian concepts, Richard Fusco proposes an original approach to short-story structure, defining and developing seven categories of textual formulas: linear, ironic coda, surprise-inversion, loop, descending helical, contrast, and sinusoidal. As a practitioner of all these forms, Maupassant established his mastery of the genre. By studying his use of form, the book asserts a major reason for his pivotal importance in the historical development of the short story.
Though best known for The Red Badge of Courage, his classic novel of men at war, in his tragically brief life and career Stephen Crane produced a wealth of stories—among them "The Monster," "The Upturned Face," "The Open Boat," and the title story—that stand among the most acclaimed and enduring in the history of American fiction. This superb volume collects stories of unique power and variety in which impressionistic, hallucinatory, and realistic situations alike are brilliantly conveyed through the cold, sometimes brutal irony of Crane's narrative voice.
"In this volume, which accompanies the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, twenty-one essays by eminent scholars from Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States explore the activity of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde in all its diversity and complexity. These essays trace the work of Malevich's Unovis (Affirmers of the New Art) collective in Vitebsk, which introduced Suprematism's all-encompassing geometries into the design of textiles, ceramics, and indeed whole environments; the postrevolutionary reform of art education and the creation of Moscow's Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), where the formal and analytical princples of the avant-garde were the basis of instruction; the debates over a "proletarian art" and the transition to Constructivism, "production art," and the "artist-constructor"; the organization of new artist-administered "museums of artistic culture"; the "third path" in non-objective art taken by Mikhail Larionov; the return to figuration in the mid-1920s by the young artists - and former students of the avant-garde - in Ost (the Society of Easel Painters); the debates among photographers, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, on the superiority of the fragmented or continuous image as a representation of the new socialist reality; book, porcelain, fabric, and stage design; and the evolution of a new architecture, from the experimental projects of Zhivskul'ptarkh (the Synthesis of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture Commission) to the multistage competition, in 1931-32, for the Palace of Soviets, which "proved" the inapplicability of a Modernist architecture to the Bolshevik Party's aspirations."
