Imagine The Girl In The Painting

This beautiful gift book takes girls into the world of fine art, encouraging them to step inside the canvas to imagine the stories behind 20 well-known American works of art and biographies of the artists. Eight images are reproduced on interchangeable cards that fit inside the photo frame on the book's cover. Consumable.

While her husband Gideon is recording a new album with his band NightHawk, Abi Hawk is busy getting her own career as a portrait painter back on track. Following the death of her father, which coincides with the opening night of her first exhibition in London, Abi and her daughter come across an old painting in his attic that sets them on a journey of discovery to Paris. They uncover an astonishing and unexpected love story, one that has repercussions to the present day. Meanwhile Gideon, in America to promote the new album, ignores Abi’s warnings and manages to put himself in a vulnerable situation that threatens to rock the stability of their marriage. Separated from Abi by nearly five thousand miles, and unable to speak to her, will he be able to resolve the situation before any real damage is done?

Imagine a Forest will pull you into a whimsical world where you learn to draw scenes of nature, fantasy, and human beings in a distinctive Eastern European folk art style.

In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.

This collection, spanning nearly a decade of artistic activity, features selections of writings that trace the intellectual influences and track the development of one of the more formidable and productive minds in the contemporary art world. The writings comprise Enrique Martínez Celaya’s public lectures; essays; interviews; correspondence with artists, critics, and scholars; artist statements; blog posts; and journal entries. These texts were written during Martínez Celaya’s appointment as Visiting Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska; Roth Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College; and, most recently, as the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California. Marked by Martínez Celaya’s encyclopedic curiosity and considerable knowledge about the world, these writings and interviews explore the role of art in life, evaluate texts by other modern and contemporary artists and thinkers, and reveal the artist’s deep engagement with artistic, philosophical, and literary lines of inquiry.

Renaissance is a word with hope infused in every letter. Since she was a child, Meg has dreamed of taking a promised trip to Florence, Italy, and being able to finally step into the place captured in a picture at her grandmother’s house. But after her grandmother passes away and it falls to her less-than-reliable father to take her instead, Meg’s long-anticipated travel plans seem permanently on hold. When her dad finally tells Meg to book the trip, she prays that the experience will heal the fissures left on her life by her parents’ divorce. But when Meg arrives in Florence, her father is nowhere to be found, leaving aspiring memoir-writer Sophia Borelli to introduce Meg to the rich beauty of the ancient city. Sofia claims to be one of the last surviving members of the Medici family and that a long-ago Medici princess, Nora Orsini, communicates with her from within the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. When Sophia, Meg, and Nora’s stories intersect, their lives will be indelibly changed as they each answer the question: What if renaissance isn’t just a word? What if that’s what happens when you dare to believe that what is isn’t what has to be?

Drawing on a trove of personal accounts and cutting-edge research, a “timely and extremely important” book (The Washington Post) from the acclaimed, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon that shows how our worldviews are shaped—and what that might mean for the shared future of the United States and China. As East and West become more and more entwined, we also continue to baffle one another. What’s more important—self-sacrifice or self-definition? Do we ultimately answer to something larger than ourselves—a family, a religion, a troop? Or is our mantra “To thine own self be true”? Gish Jen shows how our worldviews are shaped by what cultural psychologists call "independent" and "interdependent" models of selfhood. Coloring what we perceive, remember, do, make, and tell, imbuing everything from our ideas about copying to our conceptions of human rights, these models help explain why the United States produced Apple while China created Alibaba—and what that might mean for our future. As engaging as it is fascinating, The Girl at the Baggage Claim is a book that profoundly transforms our understanding of ourselves and our time.