Each chapter of A Chance Meeting takes up an actual encounter between two historical figures. As Rachel Cohen writes in her introduction: 'They met in ordinary ways - a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend's casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.' A Chance Meeting opens with a young Henry James in the studio of the great Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, and captures the boy in a moment of exquisite self-consciousness about being American. Later in the book Brady will return with Walt Whitman and with Ulysses Grant, while Henry James reappears with William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett. Cohen brilliantly reanimates such unforgettable pairings as Grant and Mark Twain; William James and W. E. B. Du Bois; Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz; Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein; Hart Crane and Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore; Richard Avedon and James Baldwin; and John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. In all, thirty figures

A Chance Meeting : Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

Cohen, Rachel

Literature & Fiction

JONATHAN CAPE.

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an illuminating new biography of the connoisseur who changed the art world and the way we see art When Gilded Age millionaires wanted to buy Italian Renaissance paintings, the expert whose opinion they sought was Bernard Berenson, with his vast erudition, incredible eye, and uncanny skill at attributing paintings. They visited Berenson at his beautiful Villa I Tatti, in the hills outside Florence, and walked with him through the immense private library—which he would eventually bequeath to Harvard—without ever suspecting that he had grown up in a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family that had struggled to survive in Boston on the wages of the father’s work as a tin peddler. Berenson’s extraordinary self-transformation, financed by the explosion of the Gilded Age art market and his secret partnership with the great art dealer Joseph Duveen, came with painful costs: he hid his origins and felt that he had betrayed his gifts as an interpreter of paintings. Nevertheless his way of seeing, presented in his books, codified in his attributions, and institutionalized in the many important American collections he helped to build, goes on shaping the American understanding of art today. This finely drawn portrait of Berenson, the first biography devoted to him in a quarter century, draws on new archival materials that bring out the significance of his secret business dealings and the way his family and companions—including his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, his lover Belle da Costa Greene, and his dear friend Edith Wharton—helped to form his ideas and his legacy. Rachel Cohen explores Berenson’s inner world and exceptional visual capacity while also illuminating the historical forces—new capital, the developing art market, persistent anti-Semitism, and the two world wars—that profoundly affected his life. About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent" –New York Times "Exemplary" –Wall Street Journal "Distinguished" –New Yorker "Superb" –The Guardian

Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (Jewish Lives)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

One ofThe Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020 "A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer's commitment to another." --The New York Times Book Review(editors' choice) "An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again."--Helen Macdonald, author ofH is for Hawk An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live "About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author." In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen's novels. Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer's relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen's novels, the scope ofAusten Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father's last letter, a moment paired with the grief ofSense and Sensibility and the social bonds ofPride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father's legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complexMansfield ParkandEmma. With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen's life and literature, and guided by Austen's mournful and hopeful final novel,Persuasion, Rachel Cohen'sAusten Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.

Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman

Children's Books

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Scholastic, Incorporated

Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between American writers and artists, from Henry James and Mathew Brady, to Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, to Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, to Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process by which creativity has been sparked and passed on, from the Civil War through the civil rights movement.

A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Random House Trade Paperbacks

British & Irish

MacMillan Audio

About the Author\nRachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize, and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, which was longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago.\nOne of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020\n"A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer’s commitment to another." --The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)\n"An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." ―Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk\nAn astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live\n"About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author."\nIn the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels.\nAusten Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma.\nWith unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.

Austen Years

Picador Paper

“They met in ordinary ways,” writes Rachel Cohen in her introduction, “a careful arrangement after long admiration, a friend’s casual introduction, or because they both just happened to be standing near the drinks. . . . They talked to each other for a few hours or for forty years, and later it seemed to them impossible that they could have missed each other.” Each chapter of this inventive consideration of American culture evokes an actual meeting between two historical figures. In 1854, Henry James, as a boy, goes with his father to have a daguerreotype made by Mathew Brady and is captured in a moment of self-consciousness about being American. Brady returns to photograph Walt Whitman and, later, at City Point in the midst of the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant. Meanwhile, Henry James begins a lasting friendship with William Dean Howells, and also meets Sarah Orne Jewett, who in turn is a mentor to Willa Cather. Mark Twain publishes Grant’s memoirs; W.E.B. Du Bois and his professor William James visit the young Helen Keller; and Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz argue about photography. Later, Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein, who was also a student of William James’s, attend a performance of The Rite of Spring; Hart Crane goes out on the town with Charlie Chaplin; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston write a play together; Elizabeth Bishop takes Marianne Moore, who was photographed by both Van Vechten and Richard Avedon, to the circus; Avedon and James Baldwin collaborate on a book; John Cage and Marcel Duchamp play chess; and Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell march on the Pentagon in the anti–Vietnam War demonstration of 1967. The accumulation of these pairings draws the reader into the mysterious process through which creativity has been sparked and passed on among iconoclastic American writers and artists. Ultimately, Rachel Cohen reveals a long chain of friendship, rebellion, and influence stretching from the moment just before the Civil War through a century that had a profound effect on our own time. Drawing on a decade of research, A Chance Meeting makes its own illuminating contribution to the tradition of which Cohen writes.

A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

Random House]

A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York Review Books Classics)

Humor & Entertainment

NYRB Classics

Outsider art, traditionally the work of psychiatric patients, offenders and minority groups, and art therapy have shared histories of art created in psychiatric care. As the two fields grow, this book reveals the current issues faced by both disciplines and traces their shared histories to help them build clearer and more coherent identities.More often than not, the history of art therapy has been tied to psychological and psychiatric roots, which has led to problems in defining the field and forced boundaries between what is considered 'art' and what is considered 'art therapy'. Similarly, the name and identity of outsider art is constantly debated. By viewing art therapy and outsider art through their shared histories, this book helps to alleviate the challenges and issues of definition faced by the fields today.

Outsider Art and Art Therapy

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

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