Bastian and Max meet at a Nazi-American summer camp. Neither boy knows what to do about their blooming, confusing feelings for one another. Before they can understand, the pair is yanked back into reality and forced in opposite directions. Years later as the pair is brought together by circumstance and war the two find one another again in Rome.
A tragic-comic love story set in the New York art world during the late Depression and the prelude to the Second World War, "Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse" traces the triumphs, loves, and tribulations of an emerging young artist.
At the center of this book are the World War II letters (Feldpostbriefe) of a German artist and art teacher to his wife. While these letters address many of the topics usually found in war letters, they are unusual in two respects. Each letter is lovingly decorated with a drawing and the letters make few references to the war itself.
"The Ghost Army" is full of art and photographs telling the story of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, an extraordinary US Army unit that used inflatable tanks and sound effects records to stage a traveling road show of deception on the battlefields of Europe during WWII. Many who served in this to-secret unit were artists destined for illustrious post-war art careers, including a budding fashion designer named Bill Blass. In their spare time they painted and sketched their way across war-torn Europe. The book is a catalog for a museum exhibit about the unit, and a companion to the forthcoming documentary film.
Nola Brown, the U.S. Army's artist-in-residence--a painter and trained soldier--sees something nobody was supposed to see and earns a dangerous enemy in this novel as powerful as "a launched torpedo slashing through 400 pages of deep water before reaching impact...one of the best thrill rides ever" (David Baldacci). Who is Nola Brown? Nola is a mystery Nola is trouble. And Nola is supposed to be dead. Her body was found on a plane that mysteriously fell from the sky as it left a secret military base in the Alaskan wilderness. Her commanding officer verifies she's dead. The US government confirms it. But Jim "Zig" Zigarowski has just found out the truth: Nola is still alive. And on the run. Zig works at Dover Air Force Base, helping put to rest the bodies of those who die on top-secret missions. Nola was a childhood friend of Zig's daughter and someone who once saved his daughter's life. So when Zig realizes Nola is still alive, he's determined to find her. Yet as Zig digs into Nola's past, he learns that trouble follows Nola everywhere she goes. Together, Nola and Zig will either reveal a sleight of hand being played at the highest levels of power or die trying to uncover the US Army's most mysterious secret--a centuries-old conspiracy that traces back through history to the greatest escape artist of all: Harry Houdini. "Meltzer is a master and this is his best. Not since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have you seen a character like this. Get ready to meet Nola. If you've never tried Meltzer, this is the one." -- Harlan Coben
On September 12, 2001, a year and a half after finishing his military service, Sean Davis strolled into the Oregon National Guard's recruiting office and re-enlisted. After dropping out of art school and working a dead-end government job, September 11 gave him a new sense of purpose and direction. Follow Sean Davis' life as he discovers the oddities of a pop-up America in a hostile desert wasteland; loses his best friend in a violent ambush; returns, critically wounded, to confinement in a place that's not his home; deals with the fallout of PTSD and the horror of what he experienced in that war zone; and finally, as he rediscovers art and its power to heal.
Claude Cahun is the most important artist you've never heard of - until now. Writer, photographer, lesbian; revolutionary activist, surrealist, resistance fighter - Cahun witnessed the birth of the Paris avant-garde, lived through two World Wars and, as 'Der Soldat ohne Namen', risked death by inciting mutiny on Nazi-occupied Jersey. And yet, she's until recently been merely a peripheral figure in these world-shaping events, relegated by academics to the footnotes in the history of art, sexual politics and revolutionary movements of the last century. Now more so than ever, Cahun demands a significant presence in the history of surrealism and the avant-garde - even, in the literary canon of early twentieth-century literature. Indeed her one major book, Disavowals, is a masterpiece of anti-memoir writing. Much has been made of her as a photographer, but Claude Cahun 'the writer' was one of the most radical and prescient leftists of the century. At a time when her star is rising like never before Claude Cahun: The Soldier With No Name represents the first explicit attempt in English to posit Cahun as an important figure in her own right, and to popularise one of the most prescient and influential artists of her generation. ,
"New Yorker cartoonist and painter Joseph Farris chronicles his experience in World War II through letters and sketches that he wrote at the time. The letters, some of which are reproduced as facsimiles, are illustrated with photographs, artifacts, and other archival documents as well as newly commissioned maps. The voice of the 20-something narrator in the letters is balanced with the voice of the man today, who interweaves his own commentary into the book to explain gaps in the correspondence. All told, the book is a rich and poignant glimpse at the experience of one man's journey through the European theater of war"--
The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.