Wright Retreat

Sylvia Drummond Wright needs to escape. A Toronto-based, Giller-longlisted novelist who's been married thirty years, she secretly buys a dilapidated old lodge in New Brunswick and plans to move there with her grandmother and her disabled adult daughter. But her husband, Kent, takes over and, capitalizing on his wife's success, turns the lodge into a business venture -- a writing retreat. Sylvia is determined not to have anything to do with the Wright Retreat, but as an eclectic group of people converges in the renovated lodge by the water, compelling stories and beautiful friendships emerge, and Sylvia finds herself drawn in. There's Janice, a residential school survivor. Irma, whose husband has dragged her here, and who carries an unbelievable grief. Veronica and Dot, who each carry terrible secrets connected to this very lodge, which used to be a Catholic girls' home and was the site of unbelievable cruelty. By the time the retreat is over, not a single person is unchanged -- least of all Sylvia. Even the lodge itself has been transformed from a place of terror to one of healing. The Wright Retreat is an irresistible celebration of story, friendship, and the astonishing power of connection.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings on the West Coast have not been thoroughly covered in print until now. Between 1909 and 1959, Wright designed a total of 38 structures up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to Southern California. These include well-known structures such as the Marin County Civic Center and Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, and many lesser-known gems such as the 1909 Stewart House near Santa Barbara. MARK ANTHONY WILSON is an architectural historian who has been writing and teaching about architecture for more than thirty-five years. He holds a B.A. in history from UC Berkeley and an M.A. in history and media from California State University, East Bay. He has written four previous books about architecture, including Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty (Gibbs Smith, 2007) and Bernard Maybeck: Architect of Elegance (Gibbs Smith, 2011). His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and elsewhere. Mark lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Ann, and his daughter, Elena. With more than 200 photographs by veteran architectural photographer Joel Puliatti and 50 archival images (many of which have never been seen in print before), this comprehensive survey of Wright’s West Coast legacy features background information on the clients’ relationships with Wright, including insights gleaned from correspondence with the original owners and interviews with many of the current owners.

In African American fiction, Richard Wright was one of the most significant and influential authors of the twentieth century. Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary analyses Wright's work in relation to contemporary racial and social issues, bringing voices of established and emergent Wright scholars into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume show how Wright's best work asks central questions about national alienation as well as about international belonging and the trans-national gaze. Race is here assumed as a superimposed category, rather than a biological reality, in keeping with recent trends in African-American studies. Wright's fiction and almost all of his non-fiction lift beyond the mainstays of African-American culture to explore the potentialities and limits of black trans-nationalism. Wright's trans-native status, his perpetual "outsidedness" mixed with the "essential humanness" of his activist and literary efforts are at the core of the innovative approaches to his work included here.

A cultural icon who defined the twentieth-century American landscape, Frank Lloyd Wright has been studied from what seems to be every possible angle. While many books focus on his works, torrid personal life, or both, few solely consider his professional persona, as a man enmeshed in a web of prominent public figures and political ideas. In this new biography, Robert McCarter distills Wright’s life and work into a concise account that explores the beliefs and relationships so powerfully reflected in his architectural works. McCarter examines here how Wright aspired to influence America’s evolving democratic society by the challenges his buildings posed to traditional views of private and public space. He investigates Wright’s relationships with key leaders of art, industry, and society, and how their views came to have concrete significance in Wright’s work and writings. Wright argued that architecture should be the “background or framework” for daily life, not the “object,” and McCarter dissects how and why he aspired to this and other ideals, such as his belief in the ethical duty of architects to improve society and culture. A penetrating study of the foremost pioneer in modern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright offers a fascinating biographical chronicle that reveals the principles and relationships at the base of Wright’s production.

The Communist International's Popular Front campaign of the 1930s brought to the fore ideas that resonated in Chicago's African American community. Indeed, the Popular Front not only connected to the black experience of the era, but outlasted its Communist Party affiliation to serve as both model and inspiration for a postwar cultural insurrection led by African Americans. With a new preface Bill V. Mullen updates his dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history. Mullen's study includes reassessments of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation and a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronzeville. He also takes an in-depth look at the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: the Chicago Defender, the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story, the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about African Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768-1848 offers a range of case studies which consider individual artists' personal, professional and artistic relationships with the Royal Academy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bringing together the research of leading historians of British artistic culture during this period. Over its introduction and nine essays, this collection considers the Academy as a lived organism whose most effective role, following its establishment in 1768, was as a reference point towards, around and against which artists operated in their relationships with each other and with artistic practice itself. In so doing, this collection also considers the relationship between Academic ideals and individual practice (as well as lived experience) during this period of art?s increasingly public manifestation at the Academy. Individual artists examined include Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright of Derby, Benjamin West and William Etty. Thinking beyond the dichotomy of loyalism and rebellion - and complicating notions of the Academy as a monolithic ossifying institution from which progressive artists would be ?liberated? in the wake of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?s emergence in 1848 - this volume investigates the Academy?s varied impact upon the lives, experiences and ideals of its diverse artistic communities.