Text by Eugenia Parry.

Based on a story told to Ventura as a child. It centres on a Jewish watchmaker living in the Venice ghetto in 1943, one of the darkest periods of Nazi occupation. He decides to build an a robot to keep him company while he awaits the arrival of the police to deport the last Jews. Ventura, internationally known for his complex creative process, created the narrative script then built elaborate models and miniatures into film sets. The final artworks are the photographs of these tableaux. The Automaton is a photographic narrative from beginning to end.

A book about war, heroes, and the fictions of history.

Follows the adventures of the thirteenth-century Venetian merchant who wrote a famous account of his travels in Asia and his life at the court of Kublai Khan.

2013 is the Year of Italian Culture in the United States, and this publication aims to celebrate Italy's less familiar, unexpected beauties. The photographers presented here travel not just to museums and palaces, but also city centers and deserted country roads, offering still lifes and portraits as well as cityscapes and landscapes. With works by Gabriele Basilico, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Mario Cresci, Renato D'Agostin, Andrea Galvani, Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, Nino Migliori, Francesco Nonino, Bianca Sforni, Franco Vaccari and Paolo Ventura, Next Stop: Italygives a refreshing and informative overview of the contemporary photography scene in Italy. Each photographer opens their section with a poem; the authors range from Leopardi and Lorenzo de' Medici to Montale, Pasolini, Pavese and Ungaretti.

"What children's book changed the way you see the world?" Anita Silvey asked this question to more than one hundred of our most respected and admired leaders in society, and she learned about the books that shaped financiers, actors, singers, athletes, activists, artists, comic book creators, novelists, illustrators, teachers... The lessons they recall are inspiring, instructive, and illuminating. And the books they remember resonate as influential reading choices for families. EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED FROM A CHILDREN'S BOOK--with its full color excerpts of beloved children's books, is a treasury and a guide: a collection of fascinating essays and THE gift book of the year for families.

Jersey City-based photographer and installation artist Sandy Skoglund (born 1946) constructs sets featuring handmade sculptures and human characters, achieving the idea of a total work of art. In this way, her works are at once installations, sculptures, collages and, finally, photographs. Edited by the great Italian curator Germano Celant, this comprehensive monograph, comprised of more than 400 images, compiles Skoglund's photography, a discipline she broached in the 1970s, while in New York, in order to document her work. Ranging from the earliest photographic series of the mid '70s (which already feature the characteristic themes of the domestic setting and its transformation into a place of apparitions between the comical and the unsettling) to previously unpublished photographs that the photographer has recently created. Also included are specimens of the strange creatures that inhabit her photographs, the colorful sculptures of foxes, fish and other animals that play as foils to the otherwise everyday scenes of her tableaux.

In this compelling new study, Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown chart the rise and fall of the Zouave uniform, the nineteenth century’s most important military fashion fad for men and women on both sides of the Atlantic. Originating in French colonial Algeria, the uniform was characterized by an open, collarless jacket, baggy trousers, and a fez. As Harrison and Brown demonstrate, the Zouaves embraced ethnic, racial, and gender crossing, liberating themselves from the strictures of bourgeois society. Some served as soldiers in Papal Rome, the United States, the British West Indies, and Brazil, while others acted in theatrical performances that combined drag and drill. Zouave Theaters analyzes the interaction of the stage and the military, and reveals that the Zouave persona influenced visual artists from painters and photographers to illustrators and filmmakers.

The aim of this book is to contribute to a critical assessment of the literature on the creative city and to a clarification of some of the many questions that remain unanswered. It is a collection of essays which, in the first part, addresses concepts and theories of urban development, city marketing and branding, presented as a framework in which the discourse of the creative city is embedded. In the second part, four case studies of cities considered to be emblematic of cultural industries (Manchester, Berlin, Dublin, and a comparative study of Milan and London) serve to illustrate the social production of creativity in specific urban contexts.