 |
Alameddine, Rabih (USA, Lebanon) |
PS3551.L215 K6 |
| Koolaids: the Art of War |
New York: Picador, 1998 |
| This dazzling meta fiction set in 1980's San Francisco, follows a group of gay men, some of them Lebanese immigrants, all dying of AIDS. The principal protagonist is an artist of some repute. At the same time the narrative cuts back and forth to Lebanon and through news articles, diaries and memories records the horrors of the Civil War which devastated the country between 1975 and 1990. |
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Baldwin, James |
PS3552.A45 A84 |
| Another Country |
New York: Dial Press, 1962 |
| Various artists and musicians black and white, straight and gay, try to make sense of their lives while living in Greenwich Village in the 1950's. |
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Chabon, Michael |
PS3553.H15 A82 |
| The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay |
New York: Random House, 2000 |
| The story of the golden age of superhero comics is told through the stories of two young men who drew them. This novel sets the story of the comics against the threat of Hitler and World War II. |
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Chevalier, Tracy |
PS3553.H4367 G57 |
| The Girl with a Pearl Earring |
New York: Plume, 1999 |
| The art of Vermeer is examined through the medium of an imagined servant who was his muse. |
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Chevalier, Tracy |
PS3553.H4367 L33 |
| The Lady and the Unicorn |
New York: Dutton, 2004 |
| This novel explores the creation of the Medieval tapestries known as "The Lady and the Unicorn." The author imagines the lives of the weavers who created the masterpiece. |
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Cohen, Arthur Allen |
PS3553.O418 A89 |
| Artists and Enemies |
Boston: Godine, 1987 |
| These three connected novellas follow the lives of three artists, a German art restorer, a French sculptor, and a russian painter all working in europe in the period between the two World Wars. The enemies tend to be the artists themselves. The author died before the work was actually published. |
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De Kretser, Michelle |
PR9619.4.D4 L67 |
| The Lost Dog |
New York: Little Brown, 2008 |
| When a college professor loses his dog in the Australian outback, his search takes him not only through the wilderness, but also through his own personal history and that of his close friend, an artists with a scandalous past. |
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Dunant, Sarah |
PR6054.U45756 B58 |
| The Birth of Venus |
New York: Random House, 2003 |
| Set in fifteenth century Florence, this novel looks at the life of a young woman who wants to create art at the time when the fanatic monk Savonarola led a crusade to purge the aristocrats of their decadent art and many masterpieces were thrown on the bonfires. It describes the artists of the era and the precariousness of the artistic life. |
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Eberstadt, Fernanda |
PS3555.B484 W48 |
| When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of Earth |
New York: Knopf, 1997 |
| This novel looks at the dizzy activities of the New York art scene during the 1980's when fortunes and reputations were made in a day. It follows a naive young painter who gets mixed up with the very rich collectors and dealers. |
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Flanagan, Richard |
PR9619.3.F525 G68 |
| Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish |
New York: Grove, 2002 |
| A convict, in a prison colony in 1830's Tasmania, earns favors from the authorities by illustrating a book describing the fish in the waters around the island. His manuscript, discovered in modern-day Australia, becomes a surreal document about perverse interests of nineteenth century science and technology. |
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Grushin, Olga |
PS3607.r85 D74 |
| The Dream Life of Sukhanov |
New York: Putnam, 2005 |
| A Russian artist compromises his vision in order to marry the daughter of a famous painter. He becomes an art critic, criticizing Western art. After Perestroika, he is revealed for the sellout he became and is haunted by visions of his past. |
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Heller, Joseph |
PS3558.E476 P5 |
| Picture This |
New York: Putnam, 1988 |
| The author of Catch-22 writes a meditative novel on the painting by Rembrandt - Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer - and jumps back and forth through time from the Golden Age of Greece to the Golden Age of Dutch economic imperialism to the present - and finds that little changes. He sees greed and war. the book is particularly relevant today with economic crises and wars as rampant as they were in the other "Golden Ages". |
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Horn, Dara |
PS3608.O76 W67 |
| The World to Come |
New York: Norton, 2006 |
| The impulsive theft of a Chagall painting sets off a chain reaction of memories as the novel moves back and forth between contemporary New York, Soviet Russia in the twenties, Vietnam in the sixties, the Jersey suburbs in the seventies, and World to Come - a mystical place where babies live before they are born, cared for by those who have already died. The theme of the novel focuses on the life of the Jews in the twentieth century and the betrayal of trust by those you love most. |
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Hulme, Keri |
PR9639.3.H75B6 |
| The Bone People |
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1985 |
| An artist, who can no longer create, befriends a Maori factory worker and his adopted son. Despite some horrific situations, the three emerge healed from various traumas. |
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Kehlmann, Daniel |
PT2671.E32 I3413 |
| Me and Kaminski |
New York: Pantheon, 2008 |
| A clueless German art critic, trying to outdo a rival, insinuates himself into the household of a reclusive artist - and while he thinks he is manipulating his subject, he is actually being manipulated by the artist. |
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Kipling, Rudyard |
PR4854.L5 |
| The Light that Failed |
Garden City: Doubleday, 1899 |
| This novel, by a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, describes the life of a British war correspondent whose drawing of battles in the Sudan make him famous. He returns home to Britain, frantic to paint his masterpiece because a war is rapidly causing blindness. |
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Kliment, Alexandr |
PG5039.21.L53 N813 |
| Living Parallel |
North Haven: Catbird Press, 2001 |
| This novel is about a Czech architect who is forced by politics to design flimsy, apartment blocks with a twenty-year life expectancy. He sublimates his unhappiness with love for the land, and when offered a chance to emigrate, discovers that his attachment to the countryside is a potent counterbalance to his desire for the freedom to create art. |
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Lurie, Alison |
PS3562.U7 T7 |
| The Truth about Lorin Jones |
Boston: Little Brown, 1988 |
| An art historian is writing a biography of a noted woman artist. The historian hopes to prove that the woman's career was undermined by various men in the art establishment, but what she discovers is something different. At the same time she reexamines her own sexuality. |
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Otto, Whitney |
PS3565.T795 P37 |
| The Passion Dream Book |
New York: HarperCollins, 1997 |
| Moving between the Renaissance when Michelangelo was creating the monumental statue of David, and twentieth century Harlem, the novel looks at women who dream of being artists and examines the struggles they face. |
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Pamuk, Orhan |
PL248.P34 B4613 |
| My Name is Red |
New York: Knopf, 2001 |
| This is a challenging and exciting narrative about the time when the Ottoman Empire began its decline. It tells the story of the search for the murderer of a manuscript illustrator. Along the way the novel discusses the nature of art, the place of art in Islam, the nature of fundamentalism and also manages to be a love story. |
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Schmitt, Gladys |
PS3537.C5253 R4 |
| Rembrandt |
New York: Random House, 1961 |
| This is a biographical novel about the life of the artist Rembradt van Rijn. |
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Sellers, Susan |
PR6119.E45 V36 |
| Vanessa & Virginia |
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009 |
| This novel imagines life in Britain's Bloomsbury circle from the point of view of the artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's older sister. Examining a relationship between sisters in which love and jealousy are constants, the novel is told in a painterly style in which layers of information deepen the readers understanding and the beauty of the narrative. |
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Shange, Ntozake |
PS3569.H3324 S2 |
| Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo |
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982 |
| The three daughters of a South Carolina weaver attempt to reconcile their art, their magic, and their lives. |
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Simmonds, Posy (Great Britain) |
PN6737.S46 T36 |
|
Tamara Drewe |
Boston: Houghton Mifflin |
| A rural British writers' retreat is the setting for this take-off on Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. A sexy reporter, returning to the countryside after a nose job and various other physical enhancements, lures several of the dissatisfied writers into relations that unsettle everyone. In the meantime, the financially struggling locals view the writers with anger and envy. Simmonds' pen is as sharp as her eye and this graphic novel is a delight for adult readers. |
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Sole, Robert |
PQ3989.2.S62M3613 |
| The Photographer's Wife |
London: Harvill, 1999 |
| In Cairo at the end of the 19th century, the wife of a photographer not only learns his craft but also becomes better than he is, causing strains in their marriage. This is the first of three novels written by a former Le Monde reporter about his family's life in Egypt. It is an excellent portrait of Egyptian politics at the turn of the century. |
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Stone, Irving |
PS3537.T669 L8 |
| Lust for Life |
Garden City: Doubleday, 1934 |
| This biographical novel about the life of the famous Dutch artist, whose vision and bouts with madness have fascinated readers and viewers for generations, remains a classic about an artist and his tortured visions. |
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Tuten, Frederic |
PS3570.U78 V36 |
| Van Gogh's Bad Café |
New York: Morrow, 1997 |
| The novel imagines the artist's nineteen-year-old lover, a drug-addicted photographer who is both his inspiration and tormenter. |
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Ulitskaya, Ludmilla |
PG3489.2.L58 V4713 |
| The Funeral Party |
New York: Schocken, 2001 |
| A Russian émigré painter lies dying in an un-air conditioned New York loft during the summer of 1989. He is surrounded by his friends and lovers who celebrate his life and mourn his incipient loss as he has been the glue to hold them together. At the same time the soviet Union is collapsing which eliminates the meaning of émigrés' reasons for fleeing their homeland. |
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Urquhart, Jane |
PR9199.3.U7 U5 |
| The Underpainter |
New York: Viking, 1997 |
| This novel explores the life of a fictional American minimalist painter, Austin Fraser, who has lived his life as he painted - minimally - without close human relationships. In a stunning narrative, the reader sees Fraser slowly erase himself as he slowly erased his most praised paintings. |
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Vreeland, Susan |
McNaughton Collection |
| Luncheon of the Boating Party |
New York: Viking, 2007 |
| Imaging the life of the Parisian artists who created impression, Vreeland focuses on Auguste Renoir as he rushes to complete the painting "The Luncheon of the Boating Party" before the season changes and the light is no longer perfect. |
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