The Blighted Eye

The Blighted Eye is the most copious, the most diverse, and the most lavish compilation of original comic art ever published ― all from the mind-boggling collection of Glenn Bray. Bray was an enthusiast of marginal or outsider American pop culture when he started to collect original comic art in 1965 ― a time when very few people, including the artists themselves, truly valued the original art. Bray has, over the last nearly 50 years, amassed the most eclectic collection of original comic art in private hands. The book features work by a pantheon of cartooning masters, including Charles Addams, Carl Barks, Charles Burns, Al Capp, Dan Clowes, Jack Cole, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, Kim Deitch, Will Elder, Al Feldstein, Virgil Finlay, Drew Friedman, Chester Gould, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, George Grosz, V.T. Hamlin, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Al Hirshfeld, Graham Ingels, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Gary Panter, Virgil Partch, Savage Pencil, Peter Pontiac, Charles Rodrigues, Spain Rodriguez, Charles Schulz, Gilbert Shelton, Joost Swarte, Stanislav Szukalski, Irving Tripp, Chris Ware, S. Clay Wilson, Basil Wolverton, Wallace Wood, Jim Woodring, Art Young, and ― it should go without saying ― many more.

Presents the work of America's most popular and influential comic artists, and includes critical essays accompanying each artist's drawings.

Overflowing with wit and invention, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes is the beguiling tale of a ten-year-old blind orphan who has been schooled in a life of thievery by his brutal master, Mr. Seamus. One fateful afternoon, as he's picking the pockets of townspeople enraptured by a travelling haberdasher, he "discovers" (steals) a box of magical eyes. When he tries on the first pair, he is instantly transported to the island at the top of the world, where he meets the maker of the eyes, Professor Cake. The Professor gives Peter a choice: travel to the mysterious Vanished Kingdom and try to rescue a people in need ... or return back to his master and a life of crime. Peter chooses wisely, and together with Sir Tode, a knight errant who has been turned into a rather unfortunate combination of human, horse and cat by a grumpy witch, he embarks on an unforgettable adventure in a book destined to become a classic.

In The Eye of the Sandpiper, Brandon Keim pairs cutting-edge science with a deep love of nature, conveying his insights in prose that is both accessible and beautiful. In an elegant, thoughtful tour of nature in the twenty-first century, Keim continues in the tradition of Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, and David Quammen, reporting from the frontiers of science while celebrating the natural world’s wonders and posing new questions about our relationship to the rest of life on Earth. The stories in The Eye of the Sandpiper are arranged in four thematic sections. Each addresses nature through a different lens. The first is evolutionary and ecological dynamics, from how patterns form on butterfly wings to the ecological importance of oft-reviled lampreys. The second section explores the inner lives of animals, which science has only recently embraced: empathy in rats, emotions in honeybees, spirituality in chimpanzees. The third section contains stories of people acting on insights both ecological and ethological: nourishing blighted rivers, but also caring for injured pigeons at a hospital for wild birds and demanding legal rights for primates. The fourth section unites ecology and ethology in discussions of ethics: how we should think about and behave toward nature, and the place of wildness in a world in which space for wilderness is shrinking. By appreciating the nonhuman world more fully, Keim writes, "I hope people will also act in ways that nourish rather than impoverish its life—which is, ultimately, the problem that needs to be solved at this Anthropocene moment, with a sixth mass extinction looming, once-common animals becoming rare, and Earth straining to support 7.5 billion people. The solution will come from a love of nature rather than chastisement or lamentation."

An overview of the art of Stanislav Szukalski. Szukalski (1893-1987) was one of the great sculptors of the 20th Century. Due to geopolitical upheavals in his native land, Poland, a large proportion of his work was destroyed. Yet thanks to the efforts of a group of dedicated art patrons, art critics, and personal acquaintances, the work of Szukalski is being rediscovered. This is the first critical view of his work published since 1923, and contains writings, drawings, and photographs of his sculpture.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The New York Times bestselling author of the Cal Leandros series delivers a bold new supernatural thriller where one man’s extraordinary abilities come with an equally phenomenal cost. Picking up a small, pink shoe from the grass forever changed young Jackson Lee’s life. Not only did its presence mean that his sister Tessa was dead—murdered and stuffed in the deep, black water of a narrow well—but the shoe itself told him so. Tessa’s death triggers an even more horrific family massacre that, combined with this new talent he neither wants nor can handle, throws Jack’s life into a tailspin. The years quickly take him from state homes to the streets to grifting in a seedy carnival, until he finally becomes the cynical All Seeing Eye, psychic-for-hire. At last, Jackson has left his troubled past behind and found a semblance of peace. That is, until the government blackmails him. After Jackson is forced to help the military contain the aftermath of a bizarre experiment gone violently wrong, everything he knows about himself will change just as suddenly as it did with his little sister’s shoe. And while change is constant . . . it’s never for the better.

Art Young was one of the most renowned and incendiary political cartoonists in the first half of the 20th century. And far more ― an illustrator for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers, a magazine publisher, a New York State Senatorial candidate on the Socialist ticket, and perhaps the only cartoonist to be tried under the Espionage Act for sedition. He made his reputation appearing in The Masses on a regular basis using lyrical, vibrant graphics and a deep appreciation of mankind’s inherent folly to create powerful political cartoons. To Laugh That We May Not Weep is a sweeping career retrospective, reprinting ―often for the first time in 60 or 70 years― over 800 of Young’s timeless, charming, and devastating cartoons and illustrations, many reproduced from original artwork, to create a fresh new portrait of this towering figure in the worlds of cartooning and politics. With essays by Art Spiegelman, Justin Green, Art Young biographer Marc Moorash, Anthony Mourek, and Glenn Bray, with a biographical overview of Young’s life and work by Frank M. Young, To Laugh That We May Weep is a long-awaited tribute to one of the great lost cartoonists whose work is as relevant in the 21st century as it was in its own time.