Visionary Life

Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice. Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture.

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none.

Neil isn't a ghost, but he feels like one. Reincarnated with all his memories from his prior life, he spent 20 years trapped in a child's body, wanting nothing more than to grow up and reclaim the love of his life. As an adult, Neil finds there's more than lost time separating them. Joshua has built a beautiful life since Neil's death, and how exactly is Neil supposed to introduce himself? As Joshua's long-dead lover in a new body? Heartbroken and hopeless, Neil takes refuge in his work, developing microscopic robots called nanites that can produce medical miracles.

During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe’s geometry.

Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling research—including analysis of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and family—Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plath’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963

Troubled by an inability to find any meaning in his life, the 25-year-old narrator of this deceptively simple novel quits university and eventually arrives at his brother's New York apartment. In a bid to discover what life is all about, he writes lists. He becomes obsessed by time and whether it actually matters. He faxes his meteorologist friend. He endlessly bounces a ball against the wall. He befriends a small boy who lives next door. He yearns to get to the bottom of life and how best to live it.

For more than 30 years, Patience Gray, author of the celebrated cookbook Honey from a Weed, lived in a remote area of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She lived without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone, grew much of her own food, and gathered and ate wild plants alongside her neighbors in this economically impoverished region. She was fond of saying that she wrote only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady stream of international visitors to her door.

AUTISM UNLEASHED, GENIUS UNLEASHED celebrates the lives and achievements of 13 autistic visionaries, illuminating the profound contributions they have made in a variety of fields. These stories are not only a testament to their genius but also a beacon of hope and inspiration for anyone touched by autism.

Having returned to Herouxville, capital of Vestonia, Max Renard has found himself drawn into the dangerous game of courtly intrigue. King Carl III is ill and weakened by his wounds. This leads to tensions between the various princely parties at court. The struggle for influence inside the country is spilling over onto a whole new level. Carl III's foreign enemies are taking advantage of his weakness and ramping up their pressure.

In a city graveyard, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two graves. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby appears quite suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. In a snowy valley, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people who attended her funeral. And in the Jannat Guest House, two people who've known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around one another as though they have only just met.

After the death of his estranged father, Amit takes his parent's ashes to the Ganges to fulfill a deathbed promise. Instead of returning home, he wanders, his pain and grief leaving him confused about his future. Almost broke, unsure about his direction in life, and running from memories, he is led by fate to the Camino de Santiago, an ancient 550-mile pilgrimage route across northern Spain.

In his highly anticipated new novel, Albom tenderly explores the themes of family, divorce, and regrets, and the wish that we could have just one more day with a lost loved one.

Fifteen years ago, in Mitch Albom's beloved novel The Five People You Meet in Heaven, the world fell in love with Eddie, a grizzled war veteran turned amusement park mechanic who died saving the life of a young girl named Annie. Eddie's journey to heaven taught him that every life matters. Now, in this magical sequel, Mitch Albom reveals Annie's story. The accident that killed Eddie left an indelible mark on Annie. It took her left hand, which needed to be surgically reattached. Injured, scarred, and unable to remember why, Annie's life is forever changed.

Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted from spending eternity doing her job, and now she seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. Wolf Willeford, a troubled young writer, is well acquainted with death but until now hadn't met Death in person - a Black, working-class woman who shape-shifts and does her work unseen. Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death's scribe and begins to write her memoirs. Using their desk as a conduit, Wolf travels across time and place with Mrs Death to witness deaths of past and present and discuss what the future holds for humanity.

Nathaniel Moon is the reluctant messiah. He has powers that define the word miraculous. But when he used those powers to help others, he brought about a world of trouble. Now Nathaniel lives a life of quiet obscurity, performing anonymous miracles. But, his anonymity has to end, because evil is coming to Middle Falls, Oregon, and threatens the people Nathaniel loves most. It's going to take a reluctant messiah to put things right.

Yuki Hirano is just out of high school when his parents enroll him, against his will, in a forestry training program in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. No phone, no internet, no shopping. Just a small, inviting community where the most common expression is “take it easy.” At first, Yuki is exhausted, fumbles with the tools, asks silly questions, and feels like an outcast. Kamusari is the last place a city boy from Yokohama wants to spend a year of his life. But as resistant as he might be, the scent of the cedars and the staggering beauty of the region have a pull.

The Millionaire Course offers a vast array of powerful principles, truths, and exercises that will lead inevitably to a career and life path that feeds your soul. The lessons within are filled with advice and practical suggestions that are simple, clear, and easy to follow. You'll discover that you can improve the quality of life, and in the process improve the quality of the world around you.

The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or "on the dole" in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth.

After two centuries stuck in the Interim, a post-death limbo where souls must stay until they’ve been entirely forgotten by the living, Walter Augustus is finally about to move on to whatever comes next. But when Letty Ferguson uncovers the last remaining copy of Walter’s book of poetry, he finds himself in a race against time. Can Walter, aided by his former employer, Pemberton, and the mysterious and eccentric Hector, destroy the book before Letty fixes him into her memory, condemning him to eternity in the Interim?

The Magic Mala (pronounced mah-lah) is the story of Robby Robertson, a down-on-his-luck writer who realizes that he doesn't know as much about life as he once believed. His desperate financial circumstances lead him to open his mind to new ways of living. After finding some mala beads, Robby is taken on a magical journey that teaches him the secrets to personal manifestation and happiness.