Judith Thurman Knihy

Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the twentieth century. Guy Davenport was perhaps the last great American polymath. He provided links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present--and pretty much everything in between. Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In these forty essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, Lois Zukovsky, and many others. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition.

A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Her magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established Isak Dinesen as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman's classic work explores Dinesen's life. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been--as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale-- "a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other." Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.Winner of the National Book Award

'Everyone who cares about freedom and justice for women should read The Second Sex' Guardian Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'. In this groundbreaking work of feminism she examines the limits of female freedom and explodes our deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity. Liberation, she argues, entails challenging traditional perceptions of the social relationship between the sexes and, crucially, in achieving economic independence. Drawing on sociology, anthropology and biology, The Second Sex is as important and relevant today as when it was first published in 1949.

A set of meditations, written over several years, concerning the painting of Balthus and "its kinship with the poetry of Rilke (Balthus's childhood mentor), with Picasso and others

This biography charts the extraordinary life of Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette, often seen as the first modern woman and lesbian icon of the 20th-century. From her arrival in Paris as a child bride, she became a best selling French novelist before launching a flamboyant stage career.

In a book with 175 color illustrations, the author aims to show the similarities between fashion designers Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, including their preferences for exotic colors, interesting textiles and prints, their bold approach to style and accessories and much more.