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Showing 1 - 11 of 11 matches in All Departments
Waiting at the Shore chronicles the extraordinary life of the Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla, championed by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Elliot Paul, and many other American and European writers and artists. In 1912, at the age of 18, he ran off to Montmartre where, under the influence of his fellow countryman Juan Gris, he began his artistic career as a Cubist. Returning to Madrid before the war he befriended prominent Spaniards, including Juan Negrin, the Premier during the Spanish Civil War. In April 1931 he and Negrin participated in the peaceful revolution which ousted the monarchy and installed the Second Spanish Republic. When civil war broke out Quintanilla helped lead troops on Madrid's Montana Barracks, which saved the capital for the Republic. "Because great painters," as Hemingway put it, "are scarcer than good soldiers," the Spanish government [Negrin] ordered Quintanilla out of the army after the fascists were stopped outside Madrid. The artist completed 140 drawings of the various fronts of the war which were exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art, with a catalogue by Hemingway. After the Republic lost the war Quintanilla was forced into an exile which lasted several decades. Living in New York and in Paris he strove to perfect his art, shunning the modernist vogues of the time. Although a celebrity when he first arrived in the United States he eventually fell into obscurity. This volume, which is heavily illustrated, brings him out of the shadows of neglect, and provides the compelling story of an artist who led not just an extraordinary life but left a legacy of paintings and drawings which, in both their skill and great imaginative variety, should be known to all art lovers.
"I saw my magnificent aesthetic monument wilting and fading all about me, dissolving away, losing what little substance it had for not having been cultivated. For that spirit-world I sought had to be exercised and though drink offered me a certain freedom, a certain easy unity with that world, my sober cold productive hours were fully occupied now by my job! And though the world told me over and over and over again that I had to work, had to support myself, bitterly I wondered at the quality of life this demand returned to me if its truest recompense was to rob me of my life? For work did nothing more for me than merely grant the brute necessities of life. And by complying with this fundamental demand I received nothing in return: not life nor adventure nor even any respect much less any form of basic consideration or kindness or rewards at that office." Barry Miles
Life is good. And Michael Howard believes he has been uniquely chosen by fate for there is a singular brightness about the world he uniquely enjoys. All he has to do is continue choosing correctly. Part anti-war novel, part love story, part coming of age adventure, this novel is yet another exploration of the "American dream."
How can one man own another man? What takes place in the heads of such men? How could slavery ever have been seen as natural and normal? This novel explores that most odd of relationships.
It is 1967. Jamie Budlow is a freshman in college, in love, and his world on campus is rocked by student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. This is a coming of age tale. These are books two and three of a five book novel.
These modest lines which I wouldn't dare call poetry for lacking the power of art may at least bring a smile or a new thought into bold momentary relief for being something new, unexpected, though not very deep or certainly profound. My voice may be odd, too and may not harmonize immediately or comfortably with your own inner voice or what you expect or hope for in lines like these. And you may be right! But if there's any worth in these words and if they touch a few hearts and minds and spirits perhaps a certain commonality may have briefly come to life here among us and the foolishness and vanity of wasted time, wasted days pursuing art may not becomemy epitaph.
Ernest Hemingway stood out in a significant manner back in the fifties. He had a beard. And he went about flaunting his beard in an "I don't give a damn" manner. We should remember that the fifties were a time of great conformity. Those who flouted society by wearing a beard could be severely punished. Today such a rigid display of personal conformity may seem odd. Few people would care about such facial hair. But that's the way it was back then. This then is a novel about the ridiculous. Through a variety of deviations we, the human race, continue to create a great deal of needless suffering for ourselves. For the same senseless strife in human affairs seems to appear over and over again.
If travel is "broadening" then John Sawyer's adventures in the Land of the Dacks, an ancient third world country, are quite transformative. And he becomes a new man. This is also a novel of ideas
"Hell is other people," a character in Sartre's No Exit tells us. And for the employees of the Red and Black Fire Equipment Company this is mostly true. Written as a series of interior monologues (with a touch of omniscient commentary) The Industrial Park enters into the inner lives of these conflicted and conflicting souls. A tragedy? A comedy? You as the reader would have to decide.
Most novelists consider the daily routine of a menial job in an office to be too dull and uninteresting to merit the treatment of a full length novel. How can such an unchanging dull monotony hold the reader's attention, they may ask? Though the clashes of the titans at the top have been fully explored often enough. The daily experience, though, of being at work in an office is one of the most common experiences of everyday life. And for that reason merits our attention. What's more, these basic realities should be more openly dealt with. Abuses which are not covered in any union contract occur. Great ambitions flourish. And petty cruelties can abound all within a larger framework of a deep boredom and monotnoy. This is a novel about the simple daily experience of being on the job. Of going to work everyday. A drama which is large enough on its own.
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