Brutal Imagination

Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America. “A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families.”—The Village Voice This poetry collection explores the vision of the black man in white imagination, as well as the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. These two main themes showcase Cornelius Eady’s range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary. Includes poems that inspired the libretto for Eady’s music-drama Running Man, a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

A bracing poetic reflection on the deadly power of the white imagination from acclaimed writer Cornelius Eady. This spare and haunting play takes its inspiration from the case of Susan Smith, a white woman who murdered her two young children by strapping them into the back seat of her car and pushing it into a lake. In statements to the police, Smith claimed she had been carjacked by a young Black man. In Brutal Imagination, adapted from his National Book Award-finalist poetry cycle, Eady conjures this imaginary Black man as Mr. Zero, who appears in order to "to get things done" when white people need a scapegoat for the consequences of their own actions. As Smith spins her story into more and more elaborate designs, Mr. Zero begins to rebel against his appointed task, leading Smith, and us, slowly closer to the dark secret at the center of the play. Brutal Imagination implicates not just the small town of Union, South Carolina, but an entire American racial imaginary in which a white woman's story, no matter how ludicrous, is always believed if it implicates a Black man.

This captivating book contains a unique mix of dialogues and poems. The dialogues are fictional conversations between historical figures, such as Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Essex and Spenser, Diogenes and Plato, Dante and Beatrice, and even Oliver Cromwell and Sir Oliver Cromwell. The poems cover a range of topics and include titles like 'Fiesole Idyl', 'To Charles Dickens', and 'The Lover'.

Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry Brutal Imagination is the work of a poet at the peak of his considerable powers, confronting a crucial subject: the black man in America. “A hymn to all the sons this country has stolen from her African-American families.”—The Village Voice This poetry collection explores the vision of the black man in white imagination, as well as the black family and the barriers of color, class, and caste that tear it apart. These two main themes showcase Cornelius Eady’s range: his deft wit, inventiveness, and skillfully targeted anger, and the way in which he combines the subtle with the charged, street idiom with elegant inversions, harsh images with the sweetly ordinary. Includes poems that inspired the libretto for Eady’s music-drama Running Man, a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.

In 1903 Lieutenant Olivier Ferri_res of the French army welcomes Captain de Saint-Avit as the new commandant of his post in Algeria. Shunned by his fellow officers, the captain has been accused of the brutal murder of his friend Lieutenant Morhange, when the two were lost alone in the desert. To Ferri_res?s horror, Saint-Avit soon confesses to the crime, unveiling a shocking tale of lost worlds, lust, murder, and the enslavement of desire in a forgotten desert kingdom?Atlantis! Antinea, the queen of Atlantis, seeks to destroy and imprison the men in her net through her beauty and cruelty, enshrining their electroplated bodies in a fantastic hall, assigning each doomed lover a number and a plaque in his memory. Caught in this web, Saint-Avit and Morhange attempt to escape until love, passion, and jealousy threaten their friendship and their very lives. For only one man has ever captured the heart of Antinea, and no one escapes the queen of Atlantis.

The ï¬?rst monograph by the art director for leading video game company Blizzard Entertainment Brütal: The Art of Samwise is a career-spanning art book that assembles the many artistic creations of world renowned artist Samwise Didier into one volume. For nearly thirty years, Samwise’s unique art style, which combines the use of bold colors, visual storytelling, and a touch of humor, has been featured in numerous art books, illustrated novels, album covers, comic books, and video games, and is instantly recognizable to his legions of fans. Brütal: The Art of Samwise celebrates all the artistic creations of Samwise’s imagination, including many images never seen before from his personal archives. This book also contains selections of Samwise’s favorite and most iconic images he created for the video game company, Blizzard Entertainment, where he has worked since 1991. As a senior art director for Blizzard, Samwise was responsible for directing the art style for Warcraft, StarCraft, and Heroes of the Storm, as well as for creating artwork for the World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo franchises.

Governments pay her. Criminals fear her. Nobody sees her coming. Vanessa “Michael” Munroe deals in information—expensive information—working for corporations, heads of state, private clients, and anyone else who can pay for her unique brand of expertise. Born to missionary parents in lawless central Africa, Munroe took up with an infamous gunrunner and his mercenary crew when she was just fourteen. As his protégé, she earned the respect of the jungle's most dangerous men, cultivating her own reputation for years until something sent her running. After almost a decade building a new life and lucrative career from her home base in Dallas, she's never looked back. Until now. A Texas oil billionaire has hired her to find his daughter who vanished in Africa four years ago. It’s not her usual line of work, but she can’t resist the challenge. Pulled deep into the mystery of the missing girl, Munroe finds herself back in the lands of her childhood, betrayed, cut off from civilization, and left for dead. If she has any hope of escaping the jungle and the demons that drive her, she must come face-to-face with the past that she’s tried for so long to forget. The first book in the Vanessa Michael Munroe series, gripping, ingenious, and impeccably paced, The Informationist marks the arrival or a thrilling new talent. “Stevens’s blazingly brilliant debut introduces a great new action heroine, Vanessa Michael Munroe, who doesn’t have to kick over a hornet’s nest to get attention, though her feral, take-no-prisoners attitude reflects the fire of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander….Thriller fans will eagerly await the sequel to this high-octane page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly, starred, boxed review

The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films–most notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi. In his superb biography, Neal Gabler shows us how, over the course of two decades, Disney revolutionized the entertainment industry. In a way that was unprecedented and later widely imitated, he built a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise. Walt Disney is a revelation of both the work and the man–of both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography USA Today Biography of the Year