How did Richard Ford's cat influence his work as a novelist? How is Chuck Close's portraiture driven by his inability to remember faces? What pivotal moment helped Rosanne Cash understand the healing power of the stage? Creativity is an elusive subject. We enjoy its fruits--movies, novels, paintings, songs--but rarely are we privy to what happens in the creative process. In Spark, journalist Julie Burstein traces the roots of some of the twenty-first...

""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone...

An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist's life. Still as vital today-or perhaps even more so-than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon the impact of "The Artist's Way" and describes the work she has done during the last decade and the new insights into...

Full of valuable new strategies and techniques for breaking through difficult creative ground, Walking in This World is an inspired work by a leading author on the subject of creativity.

A writer for the New Yorker explores the themes and complex influence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, discussing how her own repeated readings of the literary classic shaped her education, career, relationships and family life.

" 'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of...

Creating stylish sketches by hand is easy and fun with this inspiring guide. Freehand breaks down basic drawing techniques into bite-sized chunks, and reveals their practical application in dazzling examples by today's coolest artists. Over 200 innovative works of art demonstrate all the fundamentals-line, tone, composition, texture, and more-and are presented alongside friendly text explaining the simple techniques used to achieve each stylish effect....

Ten years after graduating with a degree in philosophy from UC Berkeley, filmmaker Tao Ruspoli returned to visit his one-time professor, world-renowned philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. That visit led to meetings with a whole generation of philosophers whom Dreyfus had taught, which subsequently sparked the inspiration for this film. Being in the World raises the question of whether we have forgotten what it means to be truly human in today's technological...

"This book is a guide to the process of artistic self-discovery"--

"André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing "Marshlands," which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and...