The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable. The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums. From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.
A collaboration of activists, artists, journalists, and academics working together to depict the historic uprising - with comics that show what would be censored in photos and film in Iran - in solidarity with the Iranian people, in defence of feminism. On September 13th 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn't properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to the hospital, where she fell into a deep coma. She died three days later. The plight of this 22-year-old woman raised a wave of protests that soon spread through the whole country, and crowds adopted the slogan 'Woman, Life, Freedom.' Around the world, these words have been chanted during solidarity rallies. In this powerful visual collection of graphic novel style essays, Marjane Satrapi has gathered together intense narration by herself and an array
Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today''s global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees - and everything in between.
In 1971, in the wake of George Jackson's killing by San Quentin prison guards, a poem entitled 'Enemy of the Sun' was found among ninety-nine books in the revolutionary's cell. The handwritten poem came to be circulated in Black Panther newspapers under Jackson's name, assumed to be a vestige of his more than a decade long incarceration. But Jackson never wrote the poem; it was authored by the Palestinian poet Sameeh Al-Qassem and had been included in an anthology of the same title a year before Jackson's death. Originally published by Drum & Spear, the publishing arm of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance links twelve poets working in a poetics of refusal and of hope. Bearing witness to decades of Zionist occupation, to a diaspora exiled in refugee camps and writers held captive in Israeli jails, the collection offers a means to an end: 'as poetry, yes it sings-as bullets on a mission; it calls for change.' In each poem is a whole life-joy, love, beauty, rage, sorrow, suffering-and in each life is a record of resistance: the traces of a people who refuse to leave their homeland, who time and again alchemize grief into principled struggle. In the intertwined histories of this book, and in the unyielding political edge of the poems themselves, is a long story of solidarity between oppressed peoples: from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria to Vietnam to the United States.
When Tymofiy is five years old, his small family in Cherkasy, Ukraine grows by one. Not with the birth of a baby sister or brother, but with the appearance of Felix - mentor and tormentor, enemy and friend - Tymofiy's grandmother's sometime-boyfriend. 'Who are you?' Felix screams in the depths of a confused and drunken rage at all who cross his path, his memories of the Soviet-Afghan war clouding his eyes and senses. 'Who are you?' Tymofiy asks himself as he drifts through the streets of his hometown, searching for love and protection, for a better, happier way of life. A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches out and opens the curtains, letting in a little light.
Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet - from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafes of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the 'gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.''Ruby is a public intellectual with an accessible style and an appealing candor who promises to bring poetry and philosophy together again on the stage of literary criticism.' - The judges of the Robert B. Silvers Prize.
Ana is eleven when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bukovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan. She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of storytelling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great granddaughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candour, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map. The narration is interspersed with songs that transform into poems, and prayers spoken in the past that become prayers in the present. What links the narration is not so much a plot as it is the reader''s astonishment. How could Ana survive such a series of experiences, and do so with her mind and heart intact? A history of cruelty and trauma lies behind the banal markers of contemporary life. These realisations combine in the central theme of the book, one which the narrator describes as, ''stories bring you youth.''
The Arabic word sumud is often loosely translated as ''steadfastness'' or ''standing fast.'' It is, above all, a Palestinian cultural value of everyday perseverance in the face of Israeli occupation. Sumud is both a personal and collective commitment; people determine their own lives, despite the environment of constant oppressions imposed upon them. This anthology spans the 20th and 21st centuries of Palestinian cultural history, and highlights writing from 2021-2024. The collection of writing and art features work from forty-six contributors including: Dispatches from Hossam Madhoun, co-founder of Gaza''s Theatre for Everybody, as he survives the post-October 2023 war on Gaza; novelist Ahmed Masoud with ''Application 39,'' a sci-fi short story about a Dystopian bid for the Olympics; Sara Roy and Ivar Ekeland with ''The New Politics of Exclusion: Gaza as Prologue,'' an analysis of Israel''s divide and conquer policies of fragmentation; historian Ilan Pappe with a review of Tahrir Hamdi''s book, Imagining Palestine, in which he unpacks the relationship between culture and resistance; essayist Lina Mounzer with ''Palestine and the Unspeakable,'' an offering on the language used to dehumanize Palestinians; and poetry by the next generation of poets who have inherited the mantle of the late Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). The essays, stories, poetry, art and personal narrative collected in Sumud: A New Palestinian Reader is a rich riposte to those who would denigrate Palestinians'' aspirations for a homeland. It also serves as a timely reminder of culture''s power and importance during occupation and war.
The respected Italian economist and journalist offers a bold and provocative argument that the speed of technological transformation is threatening our future. At the dawn of the digital revolution, the internet was going to be the great equalizer, a global democratic force. Instead, with the money printed electronically to bail out banks, Wall Street ended up funding a new breed of serial capitalists, the Techtitans, who embraced rapid, transformational change while stripping their workers of rights and enriching themselves beyond anybody''s wildest imagination; and the Space Barons, who mine new frontiers for precious resources. Then came the gig-economy, another supposed digital equalizer, where everybody was his or her own boss, but it was just another illusion. Tech pioneers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft never had any intention of spreading democracy. Those who control and own the technology are the absolute masters. As artificial intelligence enters the labour
In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Czechna, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Czechna, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the ''angel of death'' for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings. This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters'' relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbour a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka''s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.
Simpatia is set in the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro amid a mass exodus of the intellectual class who have been leaving their pets behind. Ulises Kan, the protagonist and a movie buff, receives a text message from his wife, Paulina, saying she is leaving the country (and him). Ulises is not heartbroken but liberated by Paulina''s departure. Two other events end up disrupting his life even further: the return of Nadine, an unrequited love from the past, and the death of his father-in-law, General Martn Ayala. Thanks to Ayala''s will, Ulises discovers that he has been entrusted with a mission - to transform Los Argonautas, the great family home, into a shelter for abandoned dogs. If he manages to do it in time, he will inherit the luxurious apartment that he had shared with Paulina. This novel centers on themes of family and orphanhood in order to address the abuse of power by a patrilineage of political figures in Latin America, from Simon Bolivar to Hugo Chavez. The untranslatable title,
This is a story of hidden gay and trans relationships, the effects of a near-fatal accident, and an oppressed childhood, where Ivana Bodrozic tackles the issues addressed in her previous works - issues of otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence. A daughter is paralyzed after a car crash, left without the ability to speak, trapped in a hospital bed, unable to move anything but her eyes. Although she is immobilized, her mind reels, moving through time, her memories a salve and a burden. A son is stuck in a body that he doesn''t feel is his own. He endures misperceptions and abuse on the way to becoming who he truly is. A mother who grew up being told she was never good enough, in a world with no place for the desires and choices of women. She carries with her the burden of generations. These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another''s truth, pain, and struggle to survive.
In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lazaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men - and of their mothers, lovers and companions - Mendoza explores her characters'' passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them. After winning the International Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Poetry Prize, Clyo Mendoza has written a novel of extraordinary beauty where language embarks on a hallucinatory trip through eroticism, the transitions of conscience, and the possibility of multiple beings inhabiting a single body. In this journey through madness incest
The eight stories collected in this volume are all populated by seekers-of holiness, illumination, liberation, meaning, love. Their journeys unfold in the U.S., Israel, Poland, China, often in the very heart of the Jewish world, and are rendered with an insider''s authority. The narrative voice bringing all this to life has been described as fearlessly satiric and subversive, with a moral but not moralizing edge, equally alive to the sacred and the profane, comically absurd to the point of tragedy. From the opening story, ''The Lost Girl'' (winner of a National Magazine Award in Fiction) to ''Dead Zone'' in the closing pages of this collection, we are confronted with souls unable to rest, unable to find release, searching for their place in this life, and beyond. Between these two stories, we encounter a true believer seeking personal redemption in China (''Forbidden City''), an aged woman longing at the end of her life to find a way back to her mother (''The Plot''), and a man of faith strugg
Fourteen-year-old Orla''s mum is dead. She lives in England with her unemployed father and baby sister Lily, but she''s planning to run away to live in Northern Ireland, where her mother is buried. Preoccupied with trouble at home and at school, she accidentally crashes her bike into a man who calls himself Jesus and says he is the Son of God. He has never seen a smartphone. He can raise animals from the dead by blowing into their mouths, including Orla''s cat Sneaky. Orla convinces Jesus to come with her to Ireland to bring her mum back to life and she teaches him how to ride a bike to get there. But Jesus has plans of his own, and after one of his revivals goes horribly wrong, Orla must decide how far she is willing to go to save her mother. A hilarious coming-of-age story, road novel, and meditation on the mysteries of faith and grief, this debut novel heralds an important new voice in world literature.
No one knows more than strippers about being looked at. In this anthology, twenty-three dancers whose careers span decades, geographies, and identities demand to be seen. Through stories from first nights on the job to the day they hung up their sky-high heels - or decided they never will - these writers offer glimpses into lives of camaraderie and celebration, joy, pride, despair, frustration, self-doubt, and fear.
Emilia Codrescu had been responsible for the burning and shredding of Romanian censors'' notebooks, viewed as State secrets, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she had stolen one. Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to ''Liliana Corobca'' for the newly instituted Museum of Communism The Censor''s Notebook is a window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, steeped in mystery and secrets and lies, confirming the power of literature to capture personal and political truths.
Whether he''s describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder (''Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....'') or the installations of Barbara Kruger (''Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are...''), Indiana is never just describing. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it''s also political, plus it''s a riot of fun on the page.
Set in the Five Points neighbourhood of New York City in the years 1857-1863, when America''s attitudes towards people of colour and slavery shifted - painfully, transformationally - to the point where a war that began to restore the union becomes one that owes much to black fighting regiments, and common cause grows for the abolition of slavery. We experience the daily life of Five Points through the eyes of Theo, aged 7 at the start of the book and 13 at its close. Theo is half Black and half Irish, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandparents. Through her eyes we see everything from P.T. Barnum''s circus to the Draft Riots that tore NYC asunder, and the daily maelstrom of work and camaraderie and hardship necessary just to survive in Five Points.
A very short novel with the power and resonance of a much longer one, Anne-Marie la Beaute is a profound and moving act of remembrance, a clear-eyed assessment of the hard-edged nature of fame, a meditation on aging - and a wonderfully observant and comic exploration of human foibles. In short, another thought-provoking master class in how we perform life by the peerless Yasmina Reza.
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