The Vexations

The Vexations
Author: Caitlin Horrocks
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316316938

This "enthralling" debut novel and Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of the Year circles the life of eccentric composer Erik Satie in La Belle Époque Paris and examines love, family, genius, and the madness of art (New York Times Book Review). Erik Satie begins life with every possible advantage. But after the dual blows of his mother's early death and his father's breakdown upend his childhood, Erik and his younger siblings -- Louise and Conrad -- are scattered. Later, as an ambitious young composer, Erik flings himself into the Parisian art scene, aiming for greatness but achieving only notoriety. As the years, then decades, pass, he alienates those in his circle as often as he inspires them, lashing out at friends and lovers like Claude Debussy and Suzanne Valadon. Only Louise and Conrad are steadfast allies. Together they strive to maintain their faith in their brother's talent and hold fast the badly frayed threads of family. But in a journey that will take her from Normandy to Paris to Argentina, Louise is rocked by a severe loss that ultimately forces her into a reckoning with how Erik -- obsessed with his art and hungry for fame -- will never be the brother she's wished for. With her buoyant, vivid reimagination of an iconic artist's eventful life, Caitlin Horrocks has written a captivating and ceaselessly entertaining novel about the tenacious bonds of family and the costs of greatness, both to ourselves and to those we love.

Victory and Vexation in Science

Victory and Vexation in Science
Author: Gerald Holton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2005-05-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674015197

This book shows why at any given time there exists no single scientific “paradigm,“ but rather a spectrum of competing perspectives. Considering conflicts between Heisenberg and Einstein, Bohr and Einstein, and P. W. Bridgman and B. F. Skinner, Holton demonstrates a masterly understanding of modern science and how it influences our world.

Vexation Lullaby

Vexation Lullaby
Author: Justin Tussing
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1936787393

Winner of the 2017 Maine Literary Award for Fiction • One of Amazon's Best Books of the Month, April 2016 "Justin Tussing rocks the rock novel. Vexation Lullaby is pure raw pleasure from start to finish."—Lily King, author of Euphoria Peter Silver is a young doctor treading water in the wake of a breakup—his ex–girlfriend called him a ""mama's boy"" and his best friend considers him a ""homebody,"" a squanderer of adventure. But when he receives an unexpected request for a house call, he obliges, only to discover that his new patient is aging, chameleonic rock star Jimmy Cross. Soon Peter is compelled to join the mysteriously ailing celebrity, his band, and his entourage, on the road. The so–called ""first physician embedded in a rock tour,"" Peter is thrust into a way of life that embraces disorder and risk rather than order and discipline. Trailing the band at every tour stop is Arthur Pennyman, Cross's number–one fan. Pennyman has not missed a performance in twenty years, sacrificing his family and job to chronicle every show on his website. Cross insists that ""being a fan is how we teach ourselves to love,"" and, in the end, Pennyman does learn. And when he hears a mythic, as–yet–unperformed song he starts to piece together the puzzle of Peter's role in Cross's past.

Vanity and Vexation

Vanity and Vexation
Author: Kate Fenton
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2005-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312328023

In this modern-day retelling of Pride and prejudice, novelist and occasional journalist Nicholas Llewellyn Bevan watches as a television production company invades his small Yorkshire town to film Jane Austen's romantic classic.

The Vexations of Art

The Vexations of Art
Author: Svetlana Alpers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300126136

Now available in paperback A major art historian reflects on a great tradition of European painting. "The Vexations of Art is an engrossing, passionate attempt to re-engage with painting as a mode of thought at a time when 'it is not clear in what form the resource of painting?for surely painting has been a singular resource of the greater European culture?will continue."?Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times "[A] fascinating book that will surely generate discussion for some time to come."?Mindy Nancarrow, Renaissance Quarterly

Prophets of Extremity

Prophets of Extremity
Author: Allan Megill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0520908376

In this book, the author presents an interpretation of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. In an attempt to place these thinkers within the wider context of the crisis-oriented modernism and postmodernism that have been the source of much of what is most original and creative in twentieth-century art and thought.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise
Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 706
Release: 2007-10-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1429932880

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses
Author: Lucy Corin
Publisher: McSweeney's
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2016-08-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1944211101

Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" (Publishers Weekly), now in paperback. At the heart of Lucy Corin’s dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate. In three longer stories, contemporary American life is playfully, if disturbingly, distorted: the rite of passage for adolescent girls involves choosing the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; California burns to the ground while, on the east coast, life carries on; and a soldier returns home broke from war to encounter a witch who extends a dangerous offer. At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is "deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times" (Lambda Literary).

Vexation

Vexation
Author: Elicia Clegg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2010-03-25
Genre:
ISBN: 9781935605218

For him power and glory are not enough, immortality is the only possibility. His vanity consumes him, forcing his actions to capture, control, and twist her very reality. He will make her like him, in this he will not yield. Welcome to Devin Sinclair's world... A world where each move is watched, each move is carefully controlled, and trusting your eyes can be a fatal mistake. She is alone, terrified of even her own deteriorating sanity. She must find the truth which hides in the book, the book that reviles what really happened the few months she was held captive, locked in a game he directs. Devin must unravel the truth and learn to trust her mind if she is ever to find freedom for her and her fellow captives.

The Best People in the World

The Best People in the World
Author: Justin Tussing
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-10-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061986879

In Paducah, Kentucky, seventeen-year-old Thomas feels as reined in as the mighty Ohio, a river confined by high floodwalls protecting his small Southern hometown. But all boundaries vanish when Thomas experiences first love with Alice, his new history teacher, a woman eight years his senior—and when he meets Shiloh, a misfit vagabond and anarchist who becomes his new role model. Fleeing to rural Vermont, this unlikely trio boldly pursues freedom, intimacy, and seclusion, unfettered by commitments and rules. But a life apart from the world does not ensure a life apart from the past—and for one of them, the past that emerges will threaten tragedy.