Beautiful Shadow

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery. For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters she left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers. The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.

Stoichita's compelling account untangles the history of one of the most enduring challenges to beset Western art - the depiction and meanings of shadows. "discriminating, inspired interrogation ... dazzling analysis"—Marina Warner, Tate Magazine "Ambitious and a pleasure to read ... a thoroughly worthwhile book."—Times Higher Education Supplement

In Peachville, even the cheerleaders have a dark side... Harper Madison isn’t like other girls. She has extraordinary powers, but her inability to control them has gotten her kicked from so many foster homes she’s lost count. Shadowford Home is her last chance, and she hopes Peachville High will be the fresh start she needs. But when evidence ties her to the gruesome murder of a Demons cheerleader, Harper discovers this small town has a big secret.

Ever since she was young, she had disguised herself as a man, and at the age of ten, she was repudiated by the heavens and earth. At the age of fourteen, she was bestowed with the name of a king, and was given the name of the king. Accept his fate? Accept your fate! Why not? You all regard yourself as the fiend of a country who lost. You all agreed to the words of heaven's will and were defeated by you all! The people of the world viewed him as a bloodthirsty demon, and thus, he had conformed to the will of the world and slaughtered him for the people of the world to see! So what if he was a monster? In this world of extreme flames, it was called the Burning Fire Cave. She grew up in the Burning Fire Cave, and after going through countless hardships, she created a peerless martial art called the Raging Flames Soul. The coldest place in the world was called the Valley of Ice. He grew up in the Valley of Ice, and after experiencing countless hardships, he created a peerless martial art called the Breaking Ice Soul. Wishing? This King never makes a wish! Only those who are incompetent will have a wish. Everything This King asks for, will be given to you! For example ... It commanded the whole world to be in chaos, to prostrate themselves within the Six Paths. He was the complete opposite of her, yet so similar! Ice and fire mutually restrained each other. Were those two fated to fall in love and kill each other as well? He had come from the nine heavens to descend into the mortal world. He was originally an unintentional person without desire or desire, and that person named Cang Qu had overturned the very essence of his life. Before I met you, I was unreal, but now, you are my unreal self! Bloody saffron, the love of this life, how could she let him? He was a man of martial arts, a man of great stature. He was the world's greatest tyrant ... Join Collection

"[The Shadow Drawing] reorients our perspective, distills a life and brings it into focus—the very work of revision and refining that its subject loved best." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times | Editors' Choice An entirely new account of Leonardo the artist and Leonardo the scientist, and why they were one and the same man Leonardo da Vinci has long been celebrated for his consummate genius. He was the painter who gave us the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and the inventor who anticipated the advent of airplanes, hot air balloons, and other technological marvels. But what was the connection between Leonardo the painter and Leonardo the scientist? Historians of Renaissance art have long supposed that Leonardo became increasingly interested in science as he grew older and turned his insatiable curiosity in new directions. They have argued that there are, in effect, two Leonardos—an artist and an inventor. In this pathbreaking new interpretation, the art historian Francesca Fiorani offers a different view. Taking a fresh look at Leonardo’s celebrated but challenging notebooks, as well as other sources, Fiorani argues that Leonardo became familiar with advanced thinking about human vision when he was still an apprentice in a Florence studio—and used his understanding of optical science to develop and perfect his painting techniques. For Leonardo, the task of the painter was to capture the interior life of a human subject, to paint the soul. And even at the outset of his career, he believed that mastering the scientific study of light, shadow, and the atmosphere was essential to doing so. Eventually, he set down these ideas in a book—A Treatise on Painting—that he considered his greatest achievement, though it would be disfigured, ignored, and lost in subsequent centuries. Ranging from the teeming streets of Florence to the most delicate brushstrokes on the surface of the Mona Lisa, The Shadow Drawing vividly reconstructs Leonardo’s life while teaching us to look anew at his greatest paintings. The result is both stirring biography and a bold reconsideration of how the Renaissance understood science and art—and of what was lost when that understanding was forgotten.

The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition. In particular, this work explores how racial difference became central to the resolving of cinematic problems: the stationary camera, narrative form, realism, the synchronization of image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the immaterial image—the cinema’s “shadow,” which figures both the material reality of the screen image and its racist past. Discussing early “race subjects,” Alice Maurice demonstrates that these films influenced cinematic narrative in lasting ways by helping to determine the relation between stillness and motion, spectacle and narrative drive. The book examines how motion picture technology related to race, embodiment, and authenticity at specific junctures in cinema’s development, including the advent of narratives, feature films, and sound. In close readings of such films as The Cheat, Shadows, and Hallelujah!, Maurice reveals how the rhetoric of race repeatedly embodies film technology, endowing it with a powerful mix of authenticity and magic. In this way, the racialized subject became the perfect medium for showing off, shoring up, and reintroducing the cinematic apparatus at various points in the history of American film. Moving beyond analyzing race in purely thematic or ideological terms, Maurice traces how it shaped the formal and technological means of the cinema.