Helen Plum Library

"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch-- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories."--From publisher description "Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford,...

"Irreverent and inspiring advice for awakening your creative potential, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic. This beautiful and useful small-format hardcover--teeming with full-color art, sidebars, and contributions from art-world legends and everyday creatives--How to Be an Artist is a book for anyone who's ever yearned to make the arts a part of their life"--

Have you always wanted to write a book, but don't know where to start? Or maybe you're really great at writing the first few chapters . . . but you never quite make it to the end? Or do you finally have a finished manuscript, but you're not sure what to do next? Fear not -- if you have writing-related questions, this book has answers! Whether you're writing for fun or to build a career, bestselling author Ally Carter is ready to help you make your...

"A prize-winning Belgian poet explores the nature of creative endeavor-the godlike ambition, the crushing defeat of failure-through the stories of thirteen tragic architects. In thirteen fascinating chapters, Charlotte Van den Broeck goes in search of buildings that were fatal to their architects-architects who either killed themselves or are rumored to have done so. They range across time and space from a church with a twisted spire in seventeenth-century...

Combining memoir, social criticism, and research, the author explores what it means to be solitary and celebrates the notion, common in his Roman Catholic childhood, that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. Delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic "solitaries," including Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Bill Cunningham, Cézanne, and Zora Neale Hurston "A meditation on solitude as a font of creativity and spirituality. Known...

The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel's moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse--a great-grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa--through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led...

"This is a book about the whirlwind of creativity, the passionate drive to make art born of individuated experience that is both unique and unduplicatable... This singular new book of profiles represents not so much a summation as a culmination of Peter Guralnick's groundbreaking work over the years, covering not only the vast sweep of the American musical landscape but its profound personal impact on the author as well"--Adapted from jacket flap

An artist's drawing of a star begins the creation of an entire universe around him as each successive pictured object requests that he draw more