Some Sort Of Genius

"A man of undoubted genius," T.S. Eliot said of Wyndham Lewis, ". . .but genius for what precisely it would be remarkably difficult to say." Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Wyndham Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorization. He launched the only twentieth century English avant–garde art movement, Vorticism, in 1914. Brilliant both as painter and writer, the precise, mechanistic formality of his visual style crossed over into a unique satirical prose which, emphasizing the external, turned his characters into automata. It enabled Lewis to pit himself against a prevailing orthodoxy, the stream of consciousness technique favoured by contemporaries as diverse as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Combining years of research with dry wit and creative storytelling, Paul O'Keeffe's Some Sort of Genius crackles with intense details of Lewis's work, life and times, simultaneously dismantling longstanding assumptions about his subject and offering brilliant new perspectives. Employing narrative creativity that reinvents the genre of biography itself, O'Keeffe delivers an unparalleled portrait that does full justice to Lewis's complexity. Throughout O'Keeffe's definitive account, readers will be introduced to one of the most compelling and misunderstood figures of twentieth century modernism.

Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this “well-written and easy-to-follow” guide (Library Journal). Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more. Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews). “How different the painter at the easel and the physicist in the laboratory! Yet the Root-Bernsteins recognize the deep-down similarity of all creative thinking, whether in art or science. They demonstrate this similarity by comparing the accounts that various pioneers and inventors have left of their own creative processes: for Picasso just as for Einstein, for Klee just as for Feynman, the creative impulse always begins in vision, in emotion, in intuition. . . . With a lavishly illustrated chapter devoted to each tool, readers quickly realize just how far the imagination can stretch.” —Booklist “A powerful book . . . Sparks of Genius presents radically different ways of approaching problems.” —American Scientist

New York Times Bestseller Discover the critical link between your brain and the food you eat and change the way your brain ages, in this cutting-edge, practical guide to eliminating brain fog, optimizing brain health, and achieving peak mental performance from media personality and leading voice in health Max Lugavere. After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country’s best neurology departments—all in the hopes of understanding his mother’s condition. Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood. Weaving together pioneering research on dementia prevention, cognitive optimization, and nutritional psychiatry, Lugavere distills groundbreaking science into actionable lifestyle changes. He shares invaluable insights into how to improve your brain power, including the nutrients that can boost your memory and improve mental clarity (and where to find them); the foods and tactics that can energize and rejuvenate your brain, no matter your age; a brain-boosting fat-loss method so powerful it has been called “biochemical liposuction”; and the foods that can improve your happiness, both now and for the long term. With Genius Foods, Lugavere offers a cutting-edge yet practical road map to eliminating brain fog and optimizing the brain’s health and performance today—and decades into the future.

Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read about a former historian ruminating on her own life and the lives of others--named a best book of the century by Vulture. In the hypnotic, masterful American Genius, A Comedy, a former historian spending time in a residential home, mental institute, artist’s colony, or sanitarium, is spinning tales of her life and ruminating on her many and varied preoccupations: chair design, textiles, pet deaths, family trauma, a lost brother, the Manson family, the Zulu alphabet, loneliness, memory, and sensitive skin--and what “sensitivity” means in our culture and society. Showing what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod. All this is folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating in a seance that may offer escape and transcendence--or perhaps nothing at all. This new edition of a contemporary classic features an introduction by novelist Lucy Ives.

Tag along on this New York Times bestselling “witty, entertaining romp” (The New York Times Book Review) as Eric Winer travels the world, from Athens to Silicon Valley—and back through history, too—to show how creative genius flourishes in specific places at specific times. In this “intellectual odyssey, traveler’s diary, and comic novel all rolled into one” (Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness), acclaimed travel writer Weiner sets out to examine the connection between our surroundings and our most innovative ideas. A “superb travel guide: funny, knowledgeable, and self-deprecating” (The Washington Post), he explores the history of places like Vienna of 1900, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, Song Dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley to show how certain urban settings are conducive to ingenuity. With his trademark insightful humor, this “big-hearted humanist” (The Wall Street Journal) walks the same paths as the geniuses who flourished in these settings to see if the spirit of what inspired figures like Socrates, Michelangelo, and Leonardo remains. In these places, Weiner asks, “What was in the air, and can we bottle it?” “Fun and thought provoking” (Miami Herald), The Geography of Genius reevaluates the importance of culture in nurturing creativity and “offers a practical map for how we can all become a bit more inventive” (Adam Grant, author of Originals).

Nicholas Nickleby, the second volume of the new Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens, is Dickens's third novel, originally published in monthly parts between March 1838 and September 1839. Brilliantly comic, the novel quickly developed a strong strand of social criticism, exploring themes such as love and family, selfishness, work, and charity. It showcases a host of characters, from the earnest and passionate young hero Nicholas, the pathetic Smike, and the brutal schoolmaster Wackford Squeers, to sparkling minor players like John Browdie, Mrs. Squeers, Mr. Mantalini, Mr. Crummles, and the infuriatingly inept Mrs. Nickleby. Solidifying the reputation for comedy and pathos Dickens had established with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, this novel reached—and delighted—the widest audience Dickens had yet known. The manuscript of Nicholas Nickleby survives only in fragments, with the British Library, the Charles Dickens Museum, and The Rosenbach library holding substantial portions, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Morgan Library also holding pages. This edition is presented in two volumes: the text in Volume I and Essay on the Text and Notes in Volume 2. The editors have closely examined all the surviving manuscript, recovering scores of deletions and recording all variants of wording in the textual apparatus. The text is based on that of the original serial instalments; all emendations from that text are fully documented. All lifetime British editions (the Cheap, the Library, the Illustrated Library, the People's and the Charles Dickens) have been carefully collated, and all verbal variants are recorded.

During the U.S. Civil War, Robert Henry Newell, an American humorist, wrote a series of satirical articles using the pseudonym Orpheus C. Kerr, commenting on the war and contemporary society. His articles appeared weekly in the New York Sunday Mercury, where he was the literary editor until 1862, and were published in a series of books. This is the first of the books in the series.