Julie Powell thought cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the craziest thing she'd ever do -- until she embarked on the voyage recounted in her memoir, Cleaving. Her marriage challenged by an insane, irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerse herself in a new obsession: butchery. She finds her way to Fleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the details of food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French a rack of ribs -- tough physical work that only sometimes distracts her from thoughts of afternoon trysts. The camaraderie at Fleischer's leads Julie to search out fellow butchers around the world -- from South America to Europe to Africa. At the end of her odyssey, she has learned a new art and perhaps even mastered her unruly heart.

Robert Williams: The Father of Exponential Imagination is a comprehensive career spanning, comprehensive collection of the iconic painter’s fine art, including every one of his remarkable oil paintings along with a presentation of his drawings, sculptures, and works in other media. Simply put, this is the art book of the decade, and the book that Williams has been working toward his entire career. In the late 20th and early 21st century, diverse forms of commonplace and popular art appeared to be coalescing into a formidable faction of new painted realism. The new school of imagery was a product of art that didn’t fit comfortably into the accepted definition of fine art. It embraced some of the figurative graphics that formal art academia tended to reject: comic books, movie posters, trading cards, surfer art, hot rod illustration, to mention a few. This alternative art movement found its most apt participant in one of America’s most controversial underground artists, the painter, Robert Williams. It was this artist who brought the term “lowbrow” into the fine arts lexicon, with his groundbreaking 1979 book, The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams. Williams pursued a career as a fine arts painter years before joining the art studio of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mid-1960s. From this position he moved into the rebellious, anti-war circles of early underground comix, as one of the celebrated ZAP cartoonists. Featuring an introductory essay by Coagula Art Journal founder Mat Gleason along with a new art manifesto and foreword by Williams himself, as well as tons of rare photos and ephemera.

"For the last decade, artist Lucio Parrillo has painted some of the most stunning images ever seen in comics! He has beautifully rendered iconic images of the most legendary characters in Dynamite's library--Vampirella, Dejah Thoris, Red Sonja and many others! Now all this incredible art is presented in one hardcover collection featuring select process and preliminary pieces of art from Parrillo himself, including hand-drawn Vampirella sketches!" -- Page [4] of cover.

Zoom meets Beautiful Oops! in this memorable picture book debut about the creative process, and the way in which "mistakes" can blossom into inspiration One eye was bigger than the other. That was a mistake. The weird frog-cat-cow thing? It made an excellent bush. And the inky smudges… they look as if they were always meant to be leaves floating gently across the sky. As one artist incorporates accidental splotches, spots, and misshapen things into her art, she transforms her piece in quirky and unexpected ways, taking readers on a journey through her process. Told in minimal, playful text, this story shows readers that even the biggest “mistakes” can be the source of the brightest ideas—and that, at the end of the day, we are all works in progress, too. Fans of Peter Reynolds’s Ish and Patrick McDonnell’s A Perfectly Messed-Up Story will love the funny, poignant, completely unique storytelling of The Book of Mistakes. And, like Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, it makes the perfect graduation gift, encouraging readers to have a positive outlook as they learn to face life’s obstacles.

Writer/artist Eric Powell presents the lost tale from his Eisner Award winning title, The Goon, in the graphic novella The Lords of Misery. Bridging the gap between Once Upon a Hard Time and A Ragged Return to Lonely Street, this standalone story reveals the adventure the Goon, along with several other mysterious figures, found himself entangled in after he departed the Nameless Town.

The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence. Using his own film criticism as a starting point--everything from his infamous dismissal of the international blockbuster The Avengers to his intense affection for Pixar's animated Ratatouille--Scott expands outward, easily guiding readers through the complexities of Rilke and Shelley, the origins of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, the power of Marina Abramovich and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' Drawing on the long tradition of criticism from Aristotle to Susan Sontag, Scott shows that real criticism was and always will be the breath of fresh air that allows true creativity to thrive. "The time for criticism is always now," Scott explains, "because the imperative to think clearly, to insist on the necessary balance of reason and passion, never goes away."

Almost forty years after moving to Manhattan, author Richard Morris has achieved if not stratospheric renown then at least the accomplished career and caliber of fame that he envisioned for himself as a younger man. Now financially comfortable and artistically embittered, Richard is at his home upstate recuperating from heart surgery and nursing resentment toward his publisher and his reading public who have found new, more exciting writers and left his star to wane. In his attic, Richard comes across a stack of notebooks, the journals he began keeping when he arrived in New York in the late '70s. He is alternately fascinated and repelled by the young man he meets in these pages: hilariously naïve and egotistically misguided, the younger Richard compulsively absorbs everything around him from art and creativity to sex and drugs. As he reads more about himself, written by himself, Richard discovers that the pivotal moments of self-invention -- and self-realization -- occur far outside the conventional chronology of a lifetime. Perforated Heart explores two wholly different characters -- a young, ambitious artist and his older self, jaded by both success and failure -- and creates an unforgettable portrait of the two men who inhabit the one individual. By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, Eric Bogosian re-creates the landscape and atmosphere of 1970s New York City with fresh, vivid imagery and reveals a powerful commentary on the dynamic between creativity and commerce in the artistic world. Perforated Heart is his most rewarding and penetrating novel yet, with prose that reflects an equally astonishing range of experience and emotion.

"The headline screams on Central City newspapers: "Who Killed The Spirit?" Commissioner Dolan, his daughter Ellen, and former sidekicks Ebony White and Sammy Strunk attempt to discover why The Spirit has been missing and presumed dead for the past two years. Has the famous blue-masked hero finally fallen victim to one of the malicious felons or beautiful femme fatales from his lengthy rogues' gallery of enemies?"--