Providing a thematic overview of the multifarious work produced by Derek Boshier (b.1937) from the post-war period to the digital age, this fascinating publication reveals how Boshier’s deceptively playful imagery offers analytical commentaries on societal issues and the fragility and fragmentation of human identity. Among contemporaries such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips, Boshier was a central figure in the British Pop Art movement. Embracing Pop sensibilities, his early work juxtaposed figurative painting and imagery to call attention to nuclear anxieties and the growing consumerism of 1960s Britain. Yet this is just one aspect of Boshier's remarkable artistic journey, which has drawn in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, graphic design and printmaking. The book's broad sweep includes recent paintings and drawings created in America at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and features commentaries by artists, academics, curators and writers who explore how Boshier's ground-breaking activity interrogates truth and logic, fantasy and reality in the modern age. With contributions by James Cahill, Philip Colbert, Eddie Chambers, Susan Compo, Rachele Dini, Inga Fraser, Jann Haworth, Leslie Jones, Emily Langridge, Gregory Salter, Penny Slinger and John Stezaker.

Booklist called Susan Compo "smart, sassy, and tough," while Publishers Weekly praised her "witty, unflinching prose." Compo's narrative voice--satirical and allusive--has been compared to Dorothy Parker's, and her characters display the same irresistible blend of smart-ass wit, despair, and whistling-in-the-dark bravado. Pretty Things offers both a sparkling portrait of a talent agent juggling the interests of her oddball clients, and a haunting memoir of growing up in suburban Orange County and coming of age in 1970s glitter-era Los Angeles. "No one writes prose like Susan Compo. She's a complete Los -Angeles original--elegant, wistful, funny?.?.?. and not to be missed."--Sandra Tsing Loh

'Before there was Star Wars before there was Close Encounters there was The Man Who Fell To Earth. advertising tag line for 1981 reissue of the film. Earthbound is the first book-length exploration of a true classic of twentieth-century science-fiction cinema, shot under the heavy, ethereal skies of New Mexico by the legendary British director Nicolas Roeg and starring David Bowie in a role he seemed born for as an extra-terrestrial named Thomas Newton who comes to Earth in search of water. Based on a novel by the highly regarded American writer Walter Tevis, this dreamy, distressing, and visionary film resonates even more strongly in the twenty-first century than it did on its original release during the year of the US Bicentennial. Drawing on extensive research and exclusive first-hand interviews with members of the cast and crew, Earthbound begins with a look at Tevis s 1963 novel before moving into a detailed analysis of a film described by its director as 'a sci-fi film without a lot of sci-fi tools and starring a group of actors Bowie, Buck Henry, Candy Clark, Rip Torn later described by one of them (Henry) as 'not a cast but a dinner party. It also seeks to uncover the mysteries surrounding Bowie s rejected soundtrack to the film (elements of which later ended up his ground-breaking 1977 album Low) and closes with a look at his return to the themes and characters of The Man Who Fell To Earth in one of his final works, the acclaimed musical production Lazarus.