"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post "The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." —David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

This richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncraticphenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, anisland nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reservedsocial attitudes.Structured across three interrelated phases, readers firstencounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s,when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism,intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent cultureproliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscapeof amateur clubs and governing organizations alongsidehigh circulation publications and censorship-challengingphotographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines themovement's redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles andits struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in thepermissive 1960s.Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool ofBritish naturism's photographic propaganda. They drewattention to the cause and drove publication sales but theyalso attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism's shiftingvisual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of Britishmoral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapidsocial change, revealing evolving perspectives on health andsex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power.

The inaugural winner of The Novel Prize, an international biennial award established by Giramondo (Australia), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and New Directions (USA). Cold Enough for Snow was unanimously chosen from over 1500 entries. A novel about the relationship between life and art, and between language and the inner world – how difficult it is to speak truly, to know and be known by another, and how much power and friction lies in the unsaid, especially between a mother and daughter. A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafés and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s own formative experiences. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken? Cold Enough for Snow is a reckoning and an elegy: with extraordinary skill, Au creates an enveloping atmosphere that expresses both the tenderness between mother and daughter, and the distance between them. 'So calm and clear and deep, I wished it would flow on forever.' — Helen Garner 'Rarely have I been so moved, reading a book: I love the quiet beauty of Cold Enough for Snow and how, within its calm simplicity, Jessica Au camouflages incredible power.' — Edouard Louis 'Au’s prose is elegant and measured. In descriptions of bracing clarity she evokes ‘shaking delicate impressions’ of worlds within worlds that are symbolic of the parts of ourselves we keep hidden and those we choose to lay bare. Put simply, this novel is an intricate and multi-layered work of art — a complex and profound meditation on identity, familial bonds and our inability to fully understand ourselves, those we love and the world around us.' — Jacqui Davies, Books+Publishing

Eakins, Hunt, French, Morse, Trumbull, et al. and their struggle to make art respectable in 19th-century America. 211 illus.

Cold Revolution. Central and Eastern European Societies in Times of Socialist Realism, 1948?1959' is the outcome of an international conference organized by the Zach?ta ? National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, in January 2020, and an exhibition project.0Both the conference and the show deal with Socialist Realism, a sensitive and problematic period in contemporary art history. The publication inquires about the relationship between the visual culture of the 1950s and the radical social revolution that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the ?cold? climate of growing international tensions and the strengthening of communist dictatorships. Covering and linking together a wide range of areas of study?art history, but also social, political, and cultural history?thirty contributors explore deeply the 1950s? social transformations, presenting intersectional essays on cultural and art history, short key study texts and profound analysis examples from the fields of painting, architecture and urban planning, design, photography, film and graphic design, representative of different countries, such as Poland, GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.00Exhibition: Zach?ta ? National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (23.04 ? 01.08.2021).

The Australian Council for the Arts, once the sole public benefactor of the arts, is now one among many, writes Keith Gallasch. How well does it nurture and sustain our art in the 21st century? Gallasch surveys the history of the Councils relationship with innovation in the arts, describes the cooperative workings of arts ecosystems and how new media and hybrid arts are revitalizing our experience of, and thinking about, art. He argues for a radically restructured Australia Council, one focused on contemporary arts and with its eye firmly on innovation and experimentation.

Hot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings—some long, some short—that taken together forma group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans, Schjeldahl ranges widely through the diverse and confusing art world, an expert guide to a dazzling scene. No other writer enhances the reader’s experience of art in precise, jargon-free prose as Schjeldahl does. His reviews are more essay than criticism, and he offers engaging and informative accounts of artists and their work. For more than three decades, he has written about art with Emersonian openness and clarity. A fresh perspective, an unexpected connection, a lucid gloss on a big idea awaits the reader on every page of this big, absorbing, buzzing book.

In the first, most intense years of the Cold War (1947–1954), New Deal liberals often found themselves in great disfavor. Ben Shahn's experience presents something of a paradox, however, since his paintings appealed in different ways to both liberals and conservatives. Blacklisted by CBS during the McCarthy era and yet, ironically, incorporated into presidential "campaigns of truth" aimed at improving the U.S. image abroad, Ben Shahn is a pivotal figure, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent in this highly polarized moment in American history. In this pathbreaking study, Frances Pohl traces the political and artistic struggles Ben Shahn became embroiled in as he tried to remain a socially concerned artist during the early Cold War period. She shows how he rejected the argument, voiced by many Abstract Expressionists, that art and politics should not mix, yet at the same time searched for a way to depict, in universal and allegorical terms, the broad human condition rather than simply specific instances of injustice. Perhaps most important, she makes critical connections between U.S. social and political history and the art it provoked, thus illuminating both the later career of Ben Shahn and the Cold War era in American cultural history.

When the mysterious connections between the disappearance of a small plane and the murder of a Native-rights activist are revealed, Inuit police inspector Matteesie Kitologitak of the RCMP must use his keen abilities to unravel the truth. Twists and turns throughout the case pose increasing danger as Matteesie uncovers a link between the murders and drug trafficking. Murder in a Cold Climate is the first of two Scott Young novels to feature the indomitable Inspector Matteesie, who returns for another investigation in The Shaman’s Knife.