Surrealistic Midnight Ride

Joseph Goodwin desires a woman who despises him. After enduring one rejection after the other in his marital bed, Joseph decides to seek physical satisfaction in the arms of a woman who will do anything to please himas long as he shows her the money. When fate causes Joseph to change direction and head to a local club instead, he meets Crystal, a married billionaire who soon promises him a memorable romp in her bedroom. Joseph is practically drooling in anticipationuntil her bogus husband suddenly appears. In a matter of seconds, Joseph realizes he has just been caught, literally with his pants down, in the middle of a corrupt game of blackmail. Con man Brown is armed, dangerous, and hungry for cold hard cash. But Crystal has other ideas. She wants to own Joseph. After she pays off Brown to leave her new lover alone, Crystal sends Joseph on his way. But as Joseph returns home to his wife, he is about to discover that all is never as it seems, especially when lust rules the roost. In this suspenseful tale, one mans journey to seek satisfaction unwittingly leads him down a path lined with danger, blackmail, murder, and wealthy young women who want nothing more than to trade in their comfortable worlds for risk, thrills, and, naturally, pleasure.

Poetry in Literature for Youth offers teachers, librarians, parents, and students with an instrumental guide for incorporating all forms of poetry into the curriculum. More than 900 annotated entries provide descriptions of books and other resources, including anthologies, classics, various poetry formats, poetry novels, multicultural poetry, performance poetry, teen poetry, poet biographies, and curriculum connections. Lists for building a core poetry collection, along with resources for teaching poetry criticism and writing, electronic poetry resources, booktalks, classroom activities, and lesson plans complement this guide. For anyone interested in knowing about poetry in literature, this is an indispensable guide.

In a world filled with great museums and great paintings, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the reigning queen. Her portrait rules over a carefully designed salon, one that was made especially for her in a museum that may seem intended for no other purpose than to showcase her virtues. What has made this portrait so renowned, commanding such adoration? And what of other works of art that continue to enthrall spectators: What makes the Great Sphinx so great? Why do iterations of The Scream and American Gothic permeate nearly all aspects of popular culture? Is it because of the mastery of the artists who created them? Or can something else account for their popularity? In Famous Works of Art—And How They Got That Way, John B. Nici looks at twenty well-known paintings, sculptures, and photographs that have left lasting impressions on the general public. As Nici notes, there are many reasons why works of art become famous; few have anything to do with quality. The author explains why the reputations of some creations have grown over the years, some disproportionate to their artistic value. Written in a style that is both entertaining and informative, this book explains how fame is achieved, and ultimately how a work either retains that fame, or passes from the public consciousness. From ancient artifacts to a can of soup, this book raises the question: Did the talent to promote and publicize a work exceed the skills employed to create that object of worship? Or are some masterpieces truly worth the admiration they receive? The creations covered in this book include the Tomb of Tutankhamun, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz, Rodin’s The Thinker, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Picasso’s Guernica. Featuring more than sixty images, including color reproductions, Famous Works of Art—And How They Got That Way will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered if a great painting, sculpture, or photograph, really deserves to be called “great.”

In this posthumous collection of John Updike’s art writings, a companion volume to the acclaimed Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), readers are again treated to “remarkably elegant essays” (Newsday) in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges” (The New York Times Book Review). Always Looking opens with “The Clarity of Things,” the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities for 2008. Here, in looking closely at individual works by Copley, Homer, Eakins, Norman Rockwell, and others, the author teases out what is characteristically “American” in American art. This talk is followed by fourteen essays, most of them written for The New York Review of Books, on certain highlights in Western art of the last two hundred years: the iconic portraits of Gilbert Stuart and the sublime landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church, the series paintings of Monet and the monotypes of Degas, the richly patterned canvases of Vuillard and the golden extravagances of Klimt, the cryptic triptychs of Beckmann, the personal graffiti of Miró, the verbal-visual puzzles of Magritte, and the monumental Pop of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein. The book ends with a consideration of recent works by a living American master, the steely sculptural environments of Richard Serra. John Updike was a gallery-goer of genius. Always Looking is, like everything else he wrote, an invitation to look, to see, to apprehend the visual world through the eyes of a connoisseur.

The 1930s are routinely considered sound film's greatest comedy era. Though this golden age encompassed various genres of laughter, clown comedy is the most basic type. This work examines the Depression decade's most popular type of comedy--the clown, or personality comedian. Focusing upon the Depression era, the study filters its analysis through twelve memorable pictures. Each merits an individual chapter, in which it is critiqued. The films are deemed microcosmic representatives of the comic world and discussed in this context. While some of the comedians in this text have generated a great deal of previous analysis, funnymen like Joe E. Brown and Eddie Cantor are all but forgotten. Nevertheless, they were comedy legends in their time, and their legacy, as showcased in these movies, merits rediscovery by today's connoisseur of comedy. Even this book's more familiar figures, such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, are often simply relegated to being recognizable pop culture icons whose work has been neglected in recent years. This book attempts to address these oversights and to re-expose the brilliance and ingenuity with which the screen clowns contributed a comic resiliency that was desperately needed during the Depression and can still be greatly appreciated today. The films discussed are City Lights (1931, Chaplin), The Kid From Spain (1932, Cantor), She Done Him Wrong (1933, Mae West), Duck Soup (1933, Marx Brothers), Sons of the Desert (1933, Laurel and Hardy), Judge Priest (1934, Will Rogers), It's a Gift (1934, W.C. Fields), Alibi Ike (1935, Brown), A Night at the Opera (1935, Marx Brothers), Modern Times (1936, Chaplin), Way Out West (1937, Laurel and Hardy), and The Cat and the Canary (1939, Bob Hope).

Any number can win as two slick crooks mastermind a daring plan to heist the Syndicate’s richest casino. Tension and terror mount as Karl and his partner make their “foolproof” play—with fortune or sudden death as the final stakes.