Arts, Architecture & Design Books

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama"To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost...

An audacious new play that explores the ways in which historical trauma affects the present-day intersections of race, gender, and sexuality."The single most daring thing I've seen in a theater in a long time." -- Wesley Morris, New York...

When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student named Christopher, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become...

"There is a muscularity, not to mention wisdom and truth, to Seth's techniques. He is a wonderful teacher, and I know that having him as my first guide is one of the luckiest things to have happened to me in my career and life." -Anne Hathaway, from her...

Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2018Other awards for Cost of Living: Edgerton New Play Prize (2016), Jean Kennedy Smith Prize-The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (2016), Women's Invitational-Ashland New Plays Festival2016 NY Times...

In his introduction, Christopher Bayes describes the pursuit of the clown as the search for "the authentic, playful self and its unique relationship to the comic world." An essential read for performers of all kinds, this text takes a deep dive into...

In his five decades of work in theatre, Richard Foreman has become known as the figurehead of the "downtown" scene, the king of all things experimental and unconventional. This brand new anthology is a tribute to his mammoth acclaim, including such...

"Cho's playwriting style...lures us into caring about characters who never fail to surprise us with their simple humanity."-Los Angeles Times"...a strength of Cho's writing is her empathy for those who stumble toward and slip away from intimacies they...

Winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Play Winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play "THE BEST PLAY OF THE...

"One of the most spectacularly original plays in recent memory."-Entertainment Weekly"Fascinating and hilarious . . . With each of its three acts, Mr. Burns grows grander."-Village Voice"When was the last time you met a new play that was so smart it made...

"This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls."-Charles Isherwood, The New York Times"The staggering purity of this show will touch all open...

Acknowledged as the nation's foremost expert on audience development involving America's growing multicultural population by the Arts and Business Council, Donna Walker-Kuhne has now written the first book describing her strategies and methods to engage...

"A landmark musical, one of those few shows that enter the permanent lore of the theatre by altering the vocabulary of dramatic possibilities." Time"There's never been a franker, more sophisticated work written for the musical stage." San Francisco...

"Ms. Finley hasn't lost the power to disturb."-Ben Brantley, The New York TimesNo other performing artist has captured the psychological complexity of this decade as Karen Finley has. In her inimitable style, she has embodied some of the most troubling...

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander responds to the provocative photographs of Jack Shear.The elements are timeless and fundamental-a male nude and a piece of black linen-and the photographic results are miraculous. Within Knot are twenty-three...

The movie that inspired filmmakers to direct is like the atomic bomb that went off before their eyes. The Film That Changed My Life captures that epiphany. It explores 30 directors' love of a film they saw at a particularly formative moment, how it...

Examining the dynamics of hip-hop from every region and in every form -- mainstream and underground, current and classic -- this compelling how-to discusses everything from content and flow to rhythm and delivery in relation to the art and craft of rap...

For fans of Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Part civic history and part memoir from this veteran scene-builder and co-founder of the acclaimed Wavelength concert series, Any Night of the Week charts the evolution of Toronto's diverse independent music scene in the latter half of the nineteenth...

A Queer Film Classic on IshmaelBernal's 1980 film that follows a dozencharacters, all denizens of Manila's sordid yet exuberant underworld, as theypursue life, love, and pleasure. Bernal cited Robert Altman's Nashville as one of the influences onhis...

A Queer Film Classic on the 2005 film debut by French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee (best known for Dallas Buyers Club and Wild), about a young gay man named Zac growing up in the 1960s who struggles to find his sense of...

A Queer Film Classic on the 1992 feature documentary on lesbian experience from the 1940s to the 1960s as seen through the lens of lesbian pulp fiction. The film interweaves an historical dramatization with interviews with women who speak frankly about...

A gorgeous full-colour coffee table book celebrating the art of one of BC's finest potters, My Life as a Potter recounts Mary Fox's long journey to the peak of her craft. Part memoir, part coming-of-age story and part handbook for ceramicists, Fox's...

This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the 'photobook'. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographer's book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as...

This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is...

Reception studies have made film audiences increasingly visible, while surveys track trends and policymakers gather information about audience preferences and demographics. But little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and...

This book examines issues of censorship, publicity and teenage fandom in 1950s Britain surrounding a series of controversial Hollywood films: The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock. It also...

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts...

Doctor Who new dawn explores the latest cultural moment in this long-running BBC TV series: the casting of a female lead. Analysing showrunner Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker's era means considering contemporary Doctor Who as an inclusive, regendered...

As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for...

Why must we live in homes and in communities built around a shared grid for our needs? For over a century, creative architects and urbanists have dreamed of self-sufficient living, whether to cut themselves off from society or in preparation for some...

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 - the formal end-point of the thirty-year modern 'Troubles' - contemporary visual artists have offered diverse responses to post-conflict circumstances in Northern Ireland. In Ghost-Haunted Land -...

Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled 'hood' film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social...

The avant garde is dead, or so the story goes for many leftists and capitalists alike. But in an era of neoliberal austerity, neocolonial militarism and ecological crisis, this postmodern view seems increasingly outmoded. Rejecting 'end of ideology'...

Shakespeare by McBean collects 300 images, many never before published, taken by the renowned photographer Angus McBean. Incorporating images from every one of Shakespeare's plays performed at the RSC, with some from the Old Vic, between the years...

This is a book for all those who have been absorbed and moved by Brief Encounter in the seventy or so years since its first appearance. It explores the central relationship of the film, where two people who fall unexpectedly in love come to realise that...

This man and music asks two central questions: what can literature contribute to the art of composition, and how can music influence the writer? Anthony Burgess, famed novelist, journalist, and composer, answers these questions and many more. As a person...

The book examines how increasing engagement with the rest of the world transformed European art, architecture and design. It considers how commercial activity and colonial ventures gave rise to new and diverse forms of visual and material culture across...

Inspired by recent approaches to the field, the book reexamines the field of Renaissance art history by exploring the art of this era in the light of global connections. It considers the movement of objects, ideas and technologies and its significance...

The period since 1945 has been a transformative era for the fashion industry. Over the course of seventy years, the fashion world has moved from celebrating the craftsmanship of haute couture to revelling in ever-changing fast-fashion. This volume...

This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social...

The creation of Soviet culture in the 1920s and the 1930s was the most radical of modernist projects, both in aesthetic and in political terms. Modernism and the Making of the New Man explores the architecture of this period as the nexus between...

In a world defined by the flow of people, goods and cultures, many contemporary French films explore the multicultural nature of today's France through language. From rival lingua francas such as English to socio-politically marginalised languages such...

Chic, sophisticated, seductive and enigmatic, the Parisienne possesses a je ne sais quoi that makes her difficult to define. But who or what is the Parisienne, and how is she depicted in cinema? The first book-length study on the subject combines...

This topical and innovative study is the first book on Algerian cinema to be published in English since the 1970s. At a time when North African and Islamic cultures are of increasing political significance, Algerian National Cinema presents a dynamic,...

A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinemaThe history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era...

Who's worse, the Young-Girl or the Man-Child?Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl is a controversial work of anticapitalist philosophy that has attracted musicians, playwrights, feminist theorists, and men's-rights activists...

A tour diary of life on the road with one of Minnesota's greatest bands-with nearly 100 never-before-seen photographs"Don't bore us, get to the chorus" is Bill Sullivan's motto, which will come as no surprise to anyone who opens Lemon Jail. A raucous...