Barry Le Va is back. After more than 10 years without a major exhibition in the United States, a mini-blockbuster of a retrospective at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Contemporary Art in early 2005 rescattered Le Va's felt, reimbedded his cleavers in a wall, and rebroke his sheets of plate glass--to extraordinary critical acclaim. Now, to complement that exhibition and for insight into a mind that has remained consistently true to a renegade vision for some 35 years, we have a collection of writings, studies, notes, drawings, sketches, and more from a cult artist who has influenced a younger generation that includes Jason Rhoades, Cady Noland, Karen Kilimnik, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The book brings together for the first time in one place three major early interviews, and adds a new one with Christophe Cherix.

Murder at the New York Stock Exchange And not just one dead stockbroker but two Both men, it is soon learned, were mysteriously poisoned, much to the irritation of the man in charge of the case, the sardonic Inspector Bullock. "Don't tell me it's a strange, oriental poison known only to the high priests of an obscure tribe in the upper Himalayas," he wisecracks. "Don't tell me that, 'cause I'm way behind on my Fu-Manchu stories." Inspector Bullock scoffs at Great Detectives like Philo Vance and Drury Lane ("those mincing, namby-pamby, know-it-alls"), but he soon finds himself confronting one of those fiendishly complicated murder problems that so delight fans of Golden Age detective fiction. Willoughby Sharp, the son of a stockbroker who in the 1890s had clerked for J. P. Morgan, had himself held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange between 1925 and 1931 and knew his subject down to the ground. This authentic background knowledge greatly enriches Murder of the Honest Broker, as does the author's "sharp" sense of humor and his deftness at constructing an ingenious murder puzzle. "An amusing yarn and a puzzling one," declared the New York Times Book Review back in 1934, when the novel was originally published. Modern readers will surely agree.

While placidly pedaling his bicycle on the morning before Easter, Constable Simmons, a twenty-year veteran of the Bermuda Police Force, discovers a beautiful woman's lifeless body on Snake Road. She has been stabbed to death. Incongruously, a bouquet of lilies lies by her side. From this slender clue of the Easter lilies an intricately interlaced murder problem quickly blossoms in Bermuda. Soon another person, a man this time, is found dead in Hamilton, the territorial capital. He has been struck down by mercury bichloride. Can the intrepid Bermuda Police Force send Death, a most unwelcome visitor, packing, before a third victim is found? A pioneering police procedural crime novel, Willoughby Sharp's Murder in Bermuda focuses not on the investigative activities of a solitary super-detective, but rather on those of several ordinary policemen. The author, who at the time he wrote the novel lived with his family in Bermuda, also presents his readers with appealing local color and a tricky, fair play problem that is in the best tradition of Golden Age detective fiction. Originally published in 1933, Murder in Bermuda provides readers with, as a contemporary reviewer stated, "as complicated and satisfying a mystery as one could hope to find."