Muse Inspired

Muse inspired is a paranormal fantasy women’s fiction and fantasy novel and an action and adventure tale from USA Today Bestselling Author Donna McDonald. My body flipping between ages 40 and 60 is not inspiring. The Fates have gone missing and their mother blames me. Why would she do that? They tell me what to do. It doesn’t work the other way around. In their absence, time has gone crazy. I’ve got to fix that problem before I can worry about searching for the missing Moirai. And who knows? Maybe the Fates got tired and wanted a vacation. Gaia knows, I could certainly use one. But going to Tibet to throw myself off a mountain in order to find Shangri-la is not my idea of rest and relaxation. One man’s paradise is another’s prison, but I have to go there. I'm searching for the original Titan timekeeper—Father Time—to fix time in the Mortal Realm so I can work on the prophecy before I get too decrepit to care. I have to move quickly. It looks like I may have to stop another full-out Dragon war now that Ares is loose again. The Dragons are out for his blood and Ares is out for mine. My wicked half-brother knows that he’s never going to sit on the Olympian throne while there’s breath left in my body. I intend to put my annoying sister there instead because Athena deserves to spend eternity babysitting our pantheon. Of course, if I don’t get time fixed, Ambrosia-eating Ares won’t get much fight from a Goddess who keeps getting older and older every day. Ironically, the older I get, the more I need inspiration to keep going. You can’t inspire those around you if you don’t have faith that you can win in the end.

Already celebrated far beyond his native Iceland, the novels of Sjón arrive on waves of praise from writers, critics, and readers worldwide. Sjón has won countless international awards and earned ringing comparisons to Borges, Calvino, and Iceland's other literary superstar, the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. The Whispering Muse is his masterpiece so far. The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilization, has had the extraordinary good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travelers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel the Argo on its quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. What unfolds is a slender but masterful, brilliant, and always entertaining novel that ranges deftly from the comic to the mythic as it weaves together tales of antiquity with the modern world in a voice so singular as to seem possessed.

Psychoanalysts have long been fascinated with creative artists, but have paid far less attention to the men and women who motivate, stimulate, and captivate them. The Muse counters this trend with nine original contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts, art historians, and literary scholars—one for each of the nine muses of classical mythology—that explore the muses of disparate artists, from Nicholas Poussin to Alison Bechdel. The Muse breaks new ground, pushing the traditional conceptualization of muses by considering the roles of spouse, friend, rival, patron, therapist—even a late psychoanalytic theorist—in facilitating creativity. Moreover, they do so not only by providing inspiration, but also by offering the artist needed material and emotional support; tolerating competitive aggression; promoting reflection and insight; and eliciting awe, anxiety and gratitude. Integrating art history and literary criticism with a wide spectrum of contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, The Muse is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in the relationships that enhance and support creative work. Fully interdisciplinary, it is also accessible to readers in the fields of art, art history, literature, memoir, and film. The Muse sheds new light on that most mysterious dyad, the artist and muse—and thus on the creative process itself.

A Whole Lot of Inspiration (in a Little Bit of Space!) &break;&break;The Pocket Muse is your key to finding inspiration when and where you want it. With hundreds of thought-provoking prompts, exercises and illustrations, you'll immediately: &break;&break; Get started writing&break; Overcome writer's block&break; Develop a writing habit&break; Think more creatively&break; Master style, revision and other elements of the craft &break;&break;The rich variety of exercises will help you to create stories, focus on a single aspect of your writing, and encourage you to think about how and why you write in new and surprising ways. &break;&break;A truly unique book, The Pocket Muse is fun and effective. It will teach you, cheer you and inspire you to write as never before.

Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vitalforms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists -- or victims -- in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fatesand explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings from nearly two centuries of fashion, this irresistible volume is a history of the ongoing love affair between designers and their muses. Lavishly illustrated and thematically arranged, Fashion Muse looks at the many iterations a muse can take: Greek goddess, fairy-tale princess, wife, lover, supermodel, celebrity, and artist. A prominent art historian with a profound knowledge of the culture of fashion, Debra N. Mancoff delves far and wide to present pairings both familiar and surprising, including the first couturier Charles Frederick Worth and his wife; Elsa Schiaparelli and the Surrealists; Yves Saint Laurent and the painter Mondrian; Oleg Cassini and Jacqueline Kennedy; and Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy. She reveals numerous designers whose muse was their own image, from Coco Chanel to Diane von Furstenberg to the Olsen twins. And she examines the influence of figures from the worlds of art, celebrity, and pop culture. Entertaining, inspiring, and surprising, this enthralling exploration places the muse where he or she belongs: at the highest peaks of the creative process. ILLUSTRATION: 250 illustrations 100 in colour

'Exhilarating and fascinating' KATY HESSEL | 'Rich and detailed' CHLOË ASHBY | 'Enlightening' TABISH KHAN | 'Sheds light on an uncharted area of art history' JENNY PERY | 'An essential read' EDWARD BROOKE-HITCHING Meet the unexpected, overlooked and forgotten models of art history. Who was Picasso's 'Weeping Woman'? Why was Grace Jones covered in graffiti? How did Francis Bacon meet the burglar who became his muse? The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model, at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth? Far from posing silently, muses have brought emotional support, intellectual energy, career-changing creativity and practical help to artists. Muse tells the true stories of the incredible muses who have inspired art history's masterpieces. From Leonardo da Vinci's studio to the covers of Vogue, art historian, critic and writer Ruth Millington uncovers the remarkable role of muses in some of art history's most well-known and significant works. Delving into the real-life relationships that models have held with the artists who immortalised them, it will expose the influential and active part they have played and deconstruct reductive stereotypes, reframing the muse as a momentous and empowered agent of art history.

The first in an action-packed debut middle grade fantasy duology about a Cuban American girl who discovers that she’s one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology. Perfect for fans of The Serpent’s Secret, the Aru Shah series, and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Callie Martinez-Silva didn’t mean to turn her best friend into a pop star. But when a simple pep talk leads to miraculous results, Callie learns she’s the newest muse of epic poetry, one of the nine Muses of Greek mythology tasked with protecting humanity’s fate in secret. Whisked away to Muse Headquarters, she joins three recruits her age, who call themselves the Muse Squad. Together, the junior muses are tasked with using their magic to inspire and empower—not an easy feat when you’re eleven and still figuring out the goddess within. When their first assignment turns out to be Callie’s exceptionally nerdy classmate, Maya Rivero, the squad comes to Miami to stay with Callie and her Cuban family. There, they discover that Maya doesn’t just need inspiration, she needs saving from vicious Sirens out to unleash a curse that will corrupt her destiny. As chaos erupts, will the Muse Squad be able to master their newfound powers in time to thwart the Cassandra Curse . . . or will it undo them all?