Blaise Cendrars, one of twentieth-century France's most gifted men of letters, came to Hollywood in 1936 for the newspaper Paris-Soir. Already a well-known poet, Cendrars was a celebrity journalist whose perceptive dispatches from the American dream factory captivated millions. These articles were later published as Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies, which has since appeared in many languages. Remarkably, this is its first translation into English. Hollywood in 1936 was crowded with stars, moguls, directors, scouts, and script girls. Though no stranger to filmmaking (he had worked with director Abel Gance), Cendrars was spurned by the industry greats with whom he sought to hobnob. His response was to invent a wildly funny Hollywood of his own, embellishing his adventures and mixing them with black humor, star anecdotes, and wry social commentary. Part diary, part tall tale, this book records Cendrars's experiences on Hollywood's streets and at its studios and hottest clubs. His impressions of the town's drifters, star-crazed sailors, and undiscovered talent are recounted in a personal, conversational style that anticipates the "new journalism" of writers such as Tom Wolfe. Perfectly complemented by his friend Jean Guérin's witty drawings, and following the tradition of European travel writing, Cendrars's "little book about Hollywood" offers an astute, entertaining look at 1930s America as reflected in its unique movie mecca.

Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies

Literature & Fiction

CENDRARS, BLAISE

Guerin, Jean

Garrett White

Humor & Satire

University of California Press

A dark, fast-paced proletarian novel originally published in 1949, Thieves' Market was written out of the author's youthful experiences as a trucker carrying produce to the packing houses of California's Central Valley. Immigrant Nick Garcos, like his father before him, becomes an independent trucker, soon landing in the brutal and crooked underworld of the produce markets of San Francisco, Oakland, Stockton, and Los Angeles.

Thieves' Market

Bezzerides, A.I.

United States

On V.J. Day in Times Square, a sailor kissing a pretty girl he's never met before is caught in the act. Newly arrived European immigrants at Ellis Island gaze at the camera with a mix of apprehension and hope. A groundbreaking still life artfully eroticizes the curves and shadows of a twisted bell pepper. These are a few of the more than 150 photographs collected in American Photography that document a century of our national experience. Whether viewed as a purely artistic medium, a tool for influencing public opinion, or a recorder of events both public and personal, photography has been a powerful and intimate vehicle for communicating our values and our dreams. Focusing on one or more images for each year, this companion book to the PBS series considers some of the century's best-known photographs as well as everyday snapshots, examining the diverse roles photography has played in shaping our lives. From the one-dollar Brownie snapshot of a baby in 1900 to the awesome potential of computer-enhanced images at the brink of the millennium, American Photography covers a range of styles, formats, and subjects as diverse as the nation they sprang from. Richly detailed, authoritative, and abundantly illustrated, American Photography is a landmark look at the pictures we have taken, and where they have taken us.

American Photography: A Century of Images

Arts & Photography

SIlberman, Robert

Goldberg, Vicki

Photography & Video

Chronicle Books+

―The definitive monograph on this major American painter, whose work is in some of the most important public and private collections in the country ―Three descriptive essays provide insight into Hannock's work including his major work The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded, Green Light (Flooded Rivers for the Matriarchs: E. and A. Mongan), 1999, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art ―Never-before-seen works including Northern City Renaissance, Newcastle, England, completed in 2008 for the musician, Sting as a gift to his hometown Stephen Hannock is a contemplative and iconoclastic artist who brings fresh vision and new insight into his studies of light and reflection in the landscape. His work, which echoes the tradition of the Luminist paintings of the 19th century, springs from a sensibility unique among contemporary artists. As in his well-known Oxbow series, his landscape paintings, subtly lit with the rising sun's rays over flooded waters, build their depth with the layers of lacquer Hannock adds; it is this polishing technique, adding as many as twelve layers to his oil paintings, that allows him to play with the reflections of light and shadow over his subjects. At the same time, current events and moments from the artist's life are brought into his pieces in the form of messages, clippings and photographs built into the lacquered layers, which recede into the painting when viewed from a distance, making the work not only a representation of the subject but also a reflection of the life and preoccupations of the artist at a specific point in time. The final presentation is a painting that is deeply human, touching the viewer with its honesty, wit and humor. This richly illustrated monograph includes a wide spectrum of paintings spanning the artist's career, as well as drawings done while traveling in Asia, Europe, and North America, and of friends in music and the arts, at work in their homes and studios.

Stephen Hannock

Jason Rosenfeld

Martha Hoppin

History & Criticism

Hudson Hills

Eye to Eye gathers for the first time more than 150 photographs by rock musician Graham Nash. While best known as a founding member of the rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and (sometimes) Young, Nash also developed a parallel career as a photographer, collector, and pioneer of digital imaging. Shot between 1969 and 2003, Nash's photographs include revealing portraits of family and friends, images of life on the road, still lifes and landscapes, street photographs, and a unique series of self-portraits which often shows him reflected in windows and mirrors. Eye to Eye establishes Nash as a masterful visual artist with a keen eye for moments and scenes not immediately available to the common eye.

Graham Nash: Eye To Eye

Graham Nash

Individual Artists

Steidl

Painter, photographer, watercolorist, and printmaker Sean Scully roams the world with his camera, capturing its surfaces in places as far-flung as Mexico and the Aran Islands, as close to home as his own studio. His photographs sometimes consist of close-up shots of his own paintings, wherein he zooms in on the material reality of his richly painted surfaces and transforms their colors and shapes into a different abstract configuration. More often, Scully goes from recognizable objects in the larger world to subjective impressions of them. Snapshots of fa ades, windows, and doors are never straightforward recordings of architectural elements. By depicting fading walls, cracked surfaces, rough edges, and the deep shadows created by them, these images capture beauty in decay, and evoke the basic contradiction of nature and life: solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. As metaphors of physical and mental conditions, the photographs capture the memories, feelings, and thoughts connected to the experience of that reality. It is precisely this continuing interchange of the recognizable and abstract worlds, the visible and the invisible, that empowers Scully's works in all media.

The Color of Time: The Photographs of Sean Scully

Arthur C. Danto

Mia Fineman

Sean Scully

edward-lucie-smith

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Books by Garrett White