"Trust me," the insect repeated. Franz did not. What if Franz Kafka did not succumb to tuberculosis at the age of 40? What if he awoke the day after his supposed death to find himself attended by the giant insect he once imagined in his own story The Metamorphosis? And what if he were recruited by a mysterious agency to investigate a rash of bizarre, mysterious murders plaguing 1924 Vienna? Murders that are possibly connected to an equally mysterious performer who commits suicide every night at the music hall (but cannot be connected to any crimes)? The Hanging Artist leads the newly rehabilitated Franz Kafka on an absurdist round of discoveries, the solution of which is more fantastical than anything he imagined. “Terrific” The Washington Post (‘The best science fiction and fantasy of 2019’).

To meet Freeman Vines is to meet America itself. An artist, a luthier and a spiritual philosopher, Vines' life is a roadmap of the truths and contradictions of the American South. He remembers the hidden histories of the eastern North Carolina land on which his family has lived since enslavement. For over 50 years Vines has transformed materials culled from a forgotten landscape in his relentless pursuit of building a guitar capable of producing a singular tone that has haunted his dreams. From tobacco barns, mule troughs, and radio parts he has created hand-carved guitars, each instrument seasoned down to the grain by the echoes of its past life. In 2015 Vines befriends photographer Timothy Duffy and the two begin to document the guitars, setting off a mutual outpouring of the creative spirit. But when Vines acquires a mysterious stack of wood from the site of a lynching, Vines and Duffy find themselves each grappling with the spiritual unrest and the psychic toll of racial violence living in the very grain of America.

The gripping story of post-Mao China and the harrowing fate of the artist and activist Ai Weiwei In October 2010, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds appeared in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern. In April 2011, he was arrested and held for more than two months in terrible conditions. The most famous living Chinese artist and activist, Weiwei is a figure of extraordinary talent, courage, and integrity. From the beginning of his career, he has spoken out against the world's most powerful totalitarian regime, in part by creating some of the most beautiful and mysterious artworks of our age, works which have touched millions around the world. Just after Ai Weiwei's release from illegal detention, Barnaby Martin flew to Beijing to interview him about his imprisonment and to learn more about what is really going on behind the scenes in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. Based on these interviews and Martin's own intimate connections with China, Hanging Man is an exploration of Weiwei's life, art, and activism and also a meditation on the creative process, and on the history of art in modern China. It is a rich picture of the man and his milieu, of what he is trying to communicate with his art, and of the growing campaign for democracy and accountability in China. It is a book about courage and hope found in the absence of freedom and justice.

In her multifaceted artistic practice, which ranges from sculpture, video, drawing, and installation, Aya Ben Ron (*1967 in Haifa, Israel) explores the perception of death and morality, the morbid body, as well as the unconscious collective memory of pain in its sociohistorical dimension. Over the years she has established a rich body of works that has been widely recognized and included in numerous art exhibitions.This first monograph features works selected from all of the series Aya Ben Ron has produced in the last ten years. With essays by renowned art, philosophy, and medical professionals, such as Michal Ben-Naftali, Suhail Malik, and Yechiel Michael Barilan, this publication opens a new perspective on the artist's stunning oeuvre-including her most recent works for the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité. Exhibition schedule: Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin, April 29-September 9, 2012 | AANDO FINE ART, Berlin, April 28-June 22, 2012

A subversively comic, genre-bending satire of bourgeois life by an essential Chinese American voice, featuring an introduction by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, author of the acclaimed memoir Stay True A Penguin Classic It's Depression-era New York, and Mr. Nut, an oblivious American everyman, wants to strike it rich, even if at the moment he's unemployed, with no job prospects in sight. Over the course of a single night, in a narrative that unfolds hour by hour, he meets a cast of strange characters—disgruntled workers at a Communist cafeteria, lecherous old men, sexually exploited women, pesky authors—who eventually convince him to cast off his bourgeois aspirations for upward mobility and become a radical activist. Absurdist, inventive, and suffused with revolutionary fervor, and culminating in a dramatic face-off against capitalist power in the figure of the greedy businessman Mr. System, The Hanging on Union Square is a work of blazing wit and originality. More than eighty years after it was self-published, having been rejected by dozens of baffled publishers, it has become a classic of Asian American literature—a satirical send-up of class politics and capitalism and a shout of populist rage that still resonates today. Celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month with these three Penguin Classics: America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan (9780143134039) East Goes West by Younghill Kang (9780143134305) The Hanging on Union Square by H. T. Tsiang (9780143134022)

An unsolved murder. A reluctant psychic. Hanging House never sleeps, and neither will you. Emmie Rose Fisher just wanted to get as far away from her psychic past as possible. Who can blame her? Seeing dead children isn't a "gift". Struggling and isolated, there's only one place left to go, back into the heart of her trauma and fears. Her childhood home. Hanging House. Determined to make the best of her new life, she soon realizes she can't outrun the ghosts of her youth. Either face the looming darkness or she won't get out alive. Hanging House is the first novel in a new Paranormal Mystery series that delivers murder, ghostly mysteries, and a twist of horror. Fans of Wendy Wang, Darcy Coates, Abe Moss, Cheryl Bradshaw, or Heather Graham will love this exciting new supernatural suspense book.

A picture book biography of the remarkable folk artist Clementine Hunter. Can you imagine being an artist who isn't allowed into your own show? That's what happened to folk artist Clementine Hunter. Her paintings went from hanging on her clothesline to hanging in museums, yet because of the color of her skin, a friend had to sneak her in when the gallery was closed. With lyrical writing and striking illustrations, this picture book biography introduces kids to a self-taught artist whose paintings captured scenes of backbreaking work and joyous celebrations of southern farm life. They preserve a part of American history we rarely see and prove that art can help keep the spirit alive.

"For two decades Shane Cotton (ONZM, Ngapuhi) has been one of New Zealand's most acclaimed painters. His works of the 1990s played a pivotal part in that decade's debates about place, belonging and bicultural identity. In the mid 2000s, however, Cotton headed in a spectacular and unexpected new direction: skywards. Employing a sombre new palette of blue and black, he painted the first in what would become a major series of skyscapes -- vast, nocturnal spaces where birds speed and plummet. The Hanging Sky brings together highlights from this period with four distinctive new responses. New York essayist Eliot Weinberger offers a poetic meditation on what he calls 'the ghosts of birds' in Cotton's paintings. Christchurch Art Gallery senior curator Justin Paton plots his own encounters with Cotton across six years in which the artist was constantly 'finding space'. Melbourne-based curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow confronts the haunting role of Toi moko -- tattooed Maori heads -- in the paintings and in her own past. And Institute of Modern Art Director Robert Leonard argues the case for Cotton as a cultural surrealist exploring 'the treachery of images'." -- www.craigpotton.co.nz