The Eye Like A Strange Balloon

The poems in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon find their seed in paintings, film, video, photographs, and collage, and the end results are something more than a sum of their parts.

The ever-adventurous author of Louise in Love looks to the visual arts for inspiration with this astonishing fourth collection. The poems in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon find their seed in paintings, film, video, photographs, and collage, and the end results are something more than a sum of their parts. Beginning with a painting done in 2003, the poems move backward in time to 1 B.C., where an architectural fragment is painted on an architectural fragment, highlighting visual art's strange relationship between the image and the thing itself. The total effect is exhilarating-a wholly original, personal take on art history coupled with Bang's sly and elegant commentary on poetry's enduring subjects: Love, Death, Time, and Desire. The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Bang stands at the front of American poetry with this new work, asking more of the English language, and enticing and challenging the reader.

Volume covers the Collection of Prints and Illustrated Books, not the collection of artists' books.

Nichols and May. John Belushi. Bill Murray. Chris Farley. Tina Fey. Mike Myers. Stephen Colbert. For nearly a half century, Del Close—cocreator of the Harold, director for the Second City, San Francisco's the Committee, and the ImprovOlympic, and “house metaphysician” for Saturday Night Live—influenced improvisational theater's greatest comedic talents. His students went on to found the Groundlings in Los Angeles, the Upright Citizens Brigade in both New York and Los Angeles, and the Annoyance Theatre in Chicago. But this Pied Piper of improv has gone largely unrecognized outside the close-knit comedy community. Del was never one to let the truth of his life stand in the way of a good story—and yet the truth is even more fascinating than the fiction. In his early years, he traveled the country with Dr. Dracula's Den of Living Nightmares, knew L. Ron Hubbard before Scientology, and appeared in The Blob. Del cavorted with the Merry Pranksters, used aversion therapy to recover from alcoholism, and kicked a cocaine habit with the help of a coven of witches. And when he was dying, Del bequeathed his postmortem skull to the Goodman Theatre for use in its productions of Hamlet—a final legend that lives on, long beyond the death of the father of long-form improvisation.

Nadya Aisenberg discusses the potentialities of the crime novel, its implications, principles, and scope, and its analogy of myth and the fairy tale. She proposes that the detective story and the thriller have made an unacknowledged contribution to "serious" literature. Her discussion of Dickens, Conrad, and Green indicate that each borrowed many important ingredients from the formulaic novel.

In one of the most striking opening scenes ever written, a bizarre ballooning accident and a chance meeting give birth to an obsession so powerful that an ordinary man is driven to the brink of madness and murder by another's delusions. Ian McEwan brings us an unforgettable story—dark, gripping, and brilliantly crafted—of how life can change in an instant.

The "boxes" and collages constructed by Joseph Cornell (1903–72) are among the most intriguing and beguiling works of art made this century. Old toys, photos, magazine illustrations, bits of electrical wiring – anything in fact more usually left to molder in lumber rooms or junkshops – were hoarded by him as the elemental materials he needed for his constructions. The finished works are visually entrancing, but the intensely personal webs of reverie and association that determined their content make these boxes at once both oddly familiar yet ineluctably strange. Drawing on the widest range possible of primary material – virtually all Cornell's scrapbooks and source files, as well as correspondence and diaries – supplemented by further details gathered during more than fifty interviews undertaken with the artist's family and acquaintances, including Robert Motherwell and Susan Sontag, Lindsay Blair gives us the most detailed picture yet of an artist who hid so much of his life from the world. Her conclusion, wholly convincing in the light of the evidence she provides, is that Cornell's ultimate subject was the mind itself.

In an age of globalization, computerization, and commodification, why read poetry? It seems ill suited to meet today's challenges. Or is it? This volume, which collects papers and poems read at a conference on British and North American experimental poetry, demonstrates the opposite.

Illustrated with black and white and colored prints from Edvard Munch. Original pictorial wrappers and color illustrated frontispiece. Published alongside the exhibition of the same name. "This exhibition considers Munch's relevance to a modern world through three interpretive paths." (From the forward) These paths are the technical methods Munch used as a Symbolist printmaker, his reception and exhibitions in North American, and Munch's influence in popular culture. With several essays and a chronology.