Every Force Evolves A Form

Davenport's subjects range from Montaigne to "Making It Uglier to the Airport", from the influence of Krazy Kat on e.e. cummings to the influence of Pergolesi's dog on artist Joseph Cornell. The New York Times hailed him as "one of the most gifted and versatile men of letters".

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

"The stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time. They are all people who see the world differently from their contemporaries and therefore seem absurd."--Page 4 of cover.

As Erik Anderson Reece says in A Balance of Quinces, "Many know Guy Davenport the creator of fiction, the critic, the illustrator, the poet, the translator.... But Guy Davenport the monastic painter is still unknown." Here gathered for the first time is a generous collection of Davenport's paintings and drawings, interwoven with commentary by poet and critic Erik Anderson Reece. The broad scope of Davenport's artistic output is included here: the pen-and-ink portraits, the abstract still lifes, and the collage compositions. Erik Anderson Reece's essay provides cultural background for the work and examines it as am extension of Davenport's writings. Besides the plentiful black-and-white reproductions throughout the text, this edition of A Balance of Quinces also includes twenty-four pages of color plates.

Fresher Styles for Web Designers surveys eight innovative, contemporary visual design styles that break the mold and offer creative solutions to a variety of interactive design challenges. Readers will learn practical ways to incorporate these design approaches into their commercial work, using specific online examples as illustration. In 2001, Cloninger wrote Fresh Styles for Web Designers, arguing that beauty actually enhances usability. Since then, styles and technologies have evolved, but clients still expect sites that both function well and visually entice. This book will inspire web designers and developers to deliver sites that do both. There are plenty of web design books that teach code. There are several books about contemporary print design that discuss visual aesthetics. This book stands out because it synthesizes experimental web design innovations with commercial marketing goals (without ignoring usability concerns).

In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the constructal law, accounts for the evolution of these and many other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical “flowcharts” or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies. All are governed by the same principle, known as the constructal law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.

This monograph is an interdisciplinary study of the concept of 'fragment' in literature and in critical and literary theory. It discusses the fragment's performativity and function within a historical perspective, stretching from Heraclitus, via the German Romantics and European writers of the Modernist period, to American postmodern manifestations of the fragment. This is the first history of the fragment to appear in English, and it is also the first attempt at producing a consistent taxonomy of literary and critical fragments. The fragments are categorised according to function, not author intention, and the study addresses a number of questions: What constitutes the fragment, when the fragment can only be defined a posteriori? Does the fragment begin on its own, or is it begun by others, writers and critics? Does it acquire a name of its own, or is it labelled by others? All these questions revolve around issues of agency, and they are best discussed in terms of performativity, which means seeing fragments as acts: acts of literature, acts of reading, acts of writing. The book demonstrates how a poetics of the fragment as a performative genre can be created, situating the fragment both as literature and as a phenomenon within postmodern criticism against the background of philosophy, art history, and theology.

Recently appointed as the new U. S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets—aspiring or practicing—can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using examples from his own rich literary oeuvre and from the work of a number of successful contemporary poets, the author schools us in the critical relationship between poet and reader, which is fundamental to what Kooser believes is poetry’s ultimate purpose: to reach other people and touch their hearts. Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend—a friend who is willing to share everything he’s learned about the art he’s spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.

Astounding and impressionistic, My Red Heaven imagines the intersection of historic figures - artists, actors, physicists, and autocrats - on a single day in Berlin, 1927.