Photographs of the Chicago cityscape--digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged, snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses--focus specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux.

Chicago, like many urban centers throughout the world, has recently undergone a surge in new construction, grafting a new layer of architectural experimentation onto those of past eras. In early 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, with the support of U.S. Equities Realty, invited Michael Wolf as an artist-in-residence to document this phenomenon. Bringing his unique perspective on changing urban environments to a city renowned for its architectural legacy, Wolf chose to photograph the central downtown area, focusing specifically on issues of voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. This is Wolf's first body of work to address an American city. Whereas prior series have juxtaposed humanizing details within the surrounding geometry of the urban landscape, in "The Transparent City," his details are fragments of life--digitally distorted and hyper-enlarged--snatched surreptitiously via telephoto lenses: Edward Hopper meets "Blade Runner." The material resonates with all the formalism of the constructed, architectonic work for which Wolf is well-known, but also emphasizes the conceptual underpinnings of his ongoing engagement with the idea of how modern life unfolds within the framework of the ever-growing contemporary city. Michael Wolf, born in Munich in 1954, grew up in the United States and studied at UC Berkeley and with Otto Steinert at the University of Essen in Germany. Two previous books--"Sitting in China" (2002) and "Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door" (2005)--feature his much acclaimed photographs of China. Wolf lives and works in Hong Kong and Europe.

A Major work of twentieth-century American Literature.

Percival Everett's blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before. In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

It goes without saying that everyone wishes to live a life that matters. But how do we harness this potential and positively impact the world around us? In Be Audacious: Inspiring Your Legacy and Living a Life that Matters, author and motivational speaker Michael W. Leach offers a simple, four-part game plan for overcoming adversity, living authentically, uncovering purposeful passion, and developing vision. Leach encourages readers to embrace nonconformity—to "shed the shackles of societal norms"—in pursuit of their dreams. Fresh, vulnerable, and contemporary, this call to action speaks to millennials and any others who aspire to break out of the box on the path to a purposeful journey uniquely their own.

View the year's most innovative works in visual communication, in stunning, full color. The winners of the Art Directors Club Annual Awards are showcased here.

This is a strange book about design and lifestyle. In China, chairs are as varied as the occasions for sitting. They are not elegant, and not always comfortable. But neither are they mass-produced items: they are individuals. Each chair and stool has its own character, is a companion, a bastard, or a venerable elder. Their occupants sit close to the floor, without the pressure of time, watching the world go by in self-observation. However, a photographer trying to document such a scene quickly becomes the focus of attention. People passing by wonder what is going on; the person on the chair assumes a pose, though the intention was to catch him or her unawares. Michael Wolf's photographs document the beauty of the ugly, the stretching of time, the art of improvisation, and the nature of the stool as a portrait of its user. Sometimes, a photographed chair was immediately confiscated: having lost its anonymity by being singled out as a noteworthy object, it rather became an object of embarrassment -- too shoddy to ever be photographed again.