Literature in Art Books

"Erotica: An Illustrated Anthology of Sexual Art & Literature," Charlotte Hill & Wm. Wallace, NY, Carroll & Graf, 1992, ISBN: 0-88184-874-3, PC, 160 pgs., Intro. 4 pg. & Ref. 2 pg., 10 5/8" x 8 7/8".

Two authors provide a colorful collection of erotic illustrations "excluding pernicious, degrading or violent material" together with erotic literature from "fiction, poetry, drama, songs, letters & journals" covering an expanse of 2,000 yrs,, purporting appeal to both sexes, emphasis on "life-enhancing qualities of good erotica."

"Erotica" has Introduction to its origin (deriv. Gk. Eros, god of love) in both Eastern & Western cultures, its pirating, rendering, expurgation but inherent reluctance of many library repositories to make their erotic cache available for research, review, etc. "Erotica" literary review includes excerpts from Kama Sutra, My Life & Loves, Satyra Sotadica, Decameron, Story of O, Tropic of Cancer, etc. Overall, the textual & illustrative contents share equally in annotation of sexuality. The 176 illutrations include depiction of art objects, carvings, pencil sketches, cartoons, oil & watercolor paintings & charcoal drawings, but not erotic photography.

Authors' disclaimer states "Women-haters and those addicted to cruelty and violence must look elsewhere - there is nothing in this book for you." The many illustrations vary from amusing, sordid, candid, wollgathering & for some a phatasmagoria of abject vs. dignified realism that the reader must judge for himself those he finds exciting, enjoyable, banal but otherwise entertaining or titillating. Obviously, much research went into the production of this anthology, a book for your library shelf & not yet ready for the coffee table.

Today, moreso than ever literature fine works of art never change .... a book, once written can easily become timed, but the works of art of the ages become more valuable with age and allows us an insight into the many hidden treasures of the past.

The erotic art contained in this illustrated anthology shows works over a span of 2000 years from all on the continents and many many cultures. From painings, etchings, drawings, snuff boxes, carvings, mouldings etc etc this book is exquisitely compiled and a pleasure to read and enjoy. If you have ever enjoyed wandering into chinatown in San Francisco to see the wide selection of erotic ivory carvings being offered then definitely you will just devour this book which also includes some fine examples of these carvings.

Most erotic literature published as little as ten years ago always included some of the drawings and etchings to illustrate the stories. Todays books however are devoid of these little pleasures which makes this illustrated anthology that much more important.

If you have any appreciation for fine art and erotica then buy this book it's a treasure to be enjoyed over the years.

This is a sexy, lighthearted book with pictures and writing that ranges from gorgeous to goofy.
A fun book for couples as well as to look over alone or with a friend.
A lot of the pictures appear in other erotic anthologies, but the presentation here is worth the buy.

I first heard about Friedl Dicker-Brandeis at a 2007 exhibition in Vienna titled "Austrian Art Between the Wars" - where she was honored for her remarkable ability to run art classes for children in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin). "Fireflies" offers a glimpse of Friedl's ability to bring joy and light into the unbelievable horror of children's lives during the Holocaust.

This book is wonderful, It is a must read, Freidl Bicker-Brandeis is a heroine, and her story is amazing. One look at this book and you will be glad you bought it. Rubin did a great job choosing pictures for this book, and bringing a hard issue of WWII concentration camps to a child level. Very good at illustrating the importance of Art Therapy.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was an artist of the Bauhaus who was also a Jew, sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and eventually executed at Auschwitz. The story, set against this bleak and oppressive history, is one of love and hope: she teaches children art and helps with "art therapy" in the camp. The importance of her choice in relentlessly pursuing a beautiful and healing expression of the spirit is revealed by the testament of a few who survived. There are numerous examples of the children's art, some of Dicker-Brandeis' art, and photographs that bring the story to life. Interesting, informative, and moving. This is a book to read to children (ages six to nine) or to allow older children to read on their own, and of course it raises questions that will explore the very meaning of humanity.

My son still throws lines at me from this book from time to time! He is now 12 and remembers it well. We read it daily (sometimes more than once) for about 2 years between his ages of 3 and 5 and now, when we do the annual bookshelf cleaning, he still insists on leaving that one on the shelf! No, he doesn't pick it up to read anymore (boo hoo...they all have to grow up), but boy, on that bookshelf-clean-out-day, he likes to remember! Also, when someone brings a child to our home, its one of the first he chooses to read to him/her! This book is beautifully illustrated, reminds us of our hometown (Lancaster PA) and has a GREAT alphabet learning rhythym with this prose! I reccomend this book to parents with toddlers and to early readers!

Better than the usual A-Z teaching tool in that it's a well-written piece of prose--how surprising. Lovely illustrations with an Amish theme. Will please adults as well as the young.

I used the book with my students and they really enjoyed it. They learned about the Pennsylvania Dutch and their life style along with the alphabet. A new word, "row", was introduced and lead to a wonderful dictionary lesson.

You know what? My daughter, 23 months, LOVES this book. Gargoyle (or rather, "ga-goyle") has become one of her favorite words. She asks for this book by name frequently, and excitedly points out gargoyles she sees on local buildings in Chicago. This is a pleasant change of pace from the usual childhood fare.

"Gargoyles: Monsters in Stone" is a fine educational book by young readers. Jennifer Dussling's text is accompanied by Peter Church's charming full-color illustrations. Together, these collaborators explain the story behind the stone gargoyles that can be seen high up on many buildings.

The book explains the practical function of the gargoyles (to drain water from buildings). The book also explains how a stone carver creates a gargoyle, and illustrates various types of gargoyles. The illustrations are particularly pleasing, as are the Celtic-looking design borders that are used on the pages. A must-have for kids with an interest in the topic.

Children will walk away from this easy reader with a wealth of knowledge about gargoyles! The illustrations complement the rich and accessible text by giving a medieval feel! A great read aloud! A great independent read!

Like the gay sleuths of whom he writes, esteemed scholar and gay historian Gunn leaves no stone unturned in his roundup of gay detective and mystery fiction. As entertaining as it is erudite, this reference book belongs on the shelf of every mystery lover, and especially of every fan of gay fiction and gay history. Victor J. Banis, author of TALES FROM C.A.M.P., JACKIE'S BACK

Wayne Gunn's THE GAY MALE SLEUTH IN PRINT AND FILM covers books and movies never treated with any seriousness among bibliographers--that's because, in order to treat gay issues, an author often had to market his or her works as pulp fiction. Here, Gunn has treated pulp as if it mattered, and found some eye-opening themes and ideas, hidden in the genre fiction. His work is a labor of love: pulp is not generally available at your neighborhood bookstore! His work is thorough, smart, and very readable.

For mystery buffs or fans of gay literature, The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film by Drewey Wayne Gunn is a must-have. The book is pretty evenly divided between a fascinating look at the gay male sleuth throughout history and a comprehensive bibliography of books featuring gay male sleuths.

It's obvious that Gunn has done his homework here, and equally obvious that this is a genre he loves. While academic in nature, the book is easy to read and understand, and actually quite enjoyable. It certainly fills a void. While there have been a few other studies and bibliographies on LGBT mystery and detectives novels, they missed many titles and practically ignored books featuring gay males. There were virtually no books indexing gay male sleuths in film.

There is much to learn in these pages, even for a writer of a gay male sleuth! For instance, did you know that the first recognizably gay detective did not appear until 1953 in an English novel The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland? However, it was not marketed as a gay mystery and so it is often overlooked. The first actual gay sleuth presented as such appeared in 1961 in a pulp novel by Lou Rand titled The Gay Detective. It too was largely overlooked because of its pulp origins. It was only recently that gay mystery novels really took off and became truly a marketable subgenre.

Gunn breaks his history into bite-sized sections based on authors, characters, themes, and sometimes the target audience. For instance, you'll find Bleeding Hearts listed under Teenage Sleuths (for Teenage Readers). The bibliography claims to be the most comprehensive ever offered on this subject, including more than 600 novels, over 100 movies, and nearly 20 television or video series.

If you enjoy mysteries in general, and gay mysteries in particular, then you'll want to be sure to pick up a copy of this book. It will provide you with a reading list to last a long, long time!

So much of the critical reaction to the work of Tennessee Williams was colored by the prevailing social attitudes toward homosexuality. Michael Pallers GENTLEMEN CALLERS: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA provides a fascinating critical study of Williamss work in the context of his sexual orientation and the particular time in which he lived. In the 50s he was criticized for being too gay. By the 1970s, he was criticized for being not gay enough and was labeled as a self-loather. Mr. Pallers book puts the arguments into perspective and provides a calm, well-documented argument that Williams never denied that he was gay and never wrote male characters disguised as females. He presented the American theatre of the 1950s only unapologetically gay character in CAMINO REAL. While the unsavory homosexual character in his grim 1970 play SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS was such a smoking gun for the scathing criticism of Williams from gay critics, Paller convincingly argues that the heterosexual characters in that play fare no better.

Parts of the book I consider brilliant, especially the section analyzing Williams's neglected one-act "Something Unspoken," which portrays a power struggle between two latent lesbians. (Now I want to see this play performed!) This section alone makes the book essential reading for any serious scholar of Williams's work, but the whole book offers one eye-opening passage after another. I would highly recommend this book to any theatre artist planning to direct or act in a Williams play as well as to lovers of Williams's work in general. Five stars.

Gentlemen Callers is a penetrating look at the work of Tennessee Williams in the context of his homosexuality and the pervasive homophobia in the midst of which he grew up and created some of the most moving and significant works of drama in the English language. Gentlemen Callers describes in all its chilling reality the emergence of intense homophobia in the mid-20th century, intentionally fostered by government agencies, and discusses how this homophobia impacted his life and his work. Author Paller makes a particular effort to point out the wrongmidedness of latter day gay liberationist critics who pilloried Williams for supposedly creating characters from an internalized homophobia, criticism which failed to appreciate the process of artistic creation and the characters themselves in their dramatic settings. Paller analyzes a number of the most developmentally significant of Williams' plays in the light of the homosexuality that was such an important motif in his oeuvre. Gentlemen Callers is an engaging study, and the most substantial examination of this writer in the context of the homosexuality that so signficantly informed his work.

This book is kind of a mixture. Partly it's a biographical sketch of Tennesee Williams, partly it's a review of the struggles gay and lesbian people had during the 1940's and '50's, partly it's an analysis of the homosexuality in Williams plays, partly it's an analysis of the critics writing about his plays. And all of that is a lot to put in one rather small book.

Strangely enough, even with all that in the book, Mr. Paller pulls it off quite well. He is able to describe the gay-bashing of the time, and the tremendous internal struggles that this created in Williams. His descriptions of the critics analysis of the plays tells us a lot about the critics themselves, more about them than the plays.

It's too much to say that this is a book that you can't put down. Instead I found it's a book that you read for a while, and then you want to think about what you've read before you go on.

Tennessee Williams is probably America's foremost playwright. Some like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and more are still among the best plays ever done. The anguish in the writer in facing first his own discovery of his homosexuality and then finding it in the opressive eyes of the time make for quite a story.

I may do an actual review later after some more reading, but some people may want to know, as I did, what relationship this book has to some other slightly differently named books by Lewis Hyde that were published under starting name "The Gift".

On the copyright page it states: Originally published in hardcover as "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" in a slightly different form in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and published in paperback in a slightly different form in the United states by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York in 1983.

Update #1: This edition has a three page preface from 2007. It also has a 16 page chapter from 2007 entitled "On Being Good Ancestors: Afterword to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition".

well so far so good, I have not finished this book yet. it is a bit long for me, not being much of a book finisher. But it is a nice slow read if you keep with it. it makes me think alot and it takes me a while to apply some of his persectives to my life. Ah but when I do! it is a very rewarding experience and truly gets me far more excited about the digging through the rest of this book. It is a bit to filled with old world tales or obscure facts about the unusual scitzophrenic rate in scottland for my tastes. Yet these stories do work and I am reminded of my philosophy 101 teacher who said, "you can tell by how well someone can illustrate something, how well they understand what they are tallking about", so over illustration is not a bad thing to me, because I do sense and feel how deeply this author believes in what he is talking about. You get the feeling he spent his whole life thinking about it. The tone reminds me of listening to my beloved father inlaw who grew up driving tractors at 11 yrs old Nebraska. The authors heart like my Father inlaws heart is the real gem of this book. I did not major in philosophy, but this feels like my kind of philosophy. the book does stick to its promise to encourage bedroom musicians and artists struggling with their place in a capitalistic world.

If you need some wholesome optimism, I can say it is working for me.

"Freely you have recieved, Freely give" maybe easier than you think.

The main notion of THE GIFT is that works of art must be permitted to flow through their own creative economy, affected by but not restricted by the world's market economy. The book itself has functioned this way, recommended by one writer or artist to another since it first appeared in the early 1980s. Twenty-five years later, it's as pertinent as ever. Hyde's wide range of references, from anthropological sources to lit-crit and biography of Whitman and Pound, is itself an amazing show -- not only of erudition, but of a kindled knowledge. THE GIFT is a variety show for artists, suggesting by way of all sorts of material how the writer and creator can survive in a mercantile world. There's an interesting perspective of the book at [...], and recently the major literary sections of UK publications, like The Guardian, have covered this new issue of THE GIFT. That's because the book has just now been released in the UK for the first time.

This book was given to me as a gift, and I must say that I cherish it not only because it came from a special person, but because it is absolutely magical. There is a diversity of the goddesses given press in this book, as well as the mediums...poetry and prose. This is in no way a dictionary of goddesses or an in-depth study of them, however, it is quite a tribute. I would recommend this book to anyone into Goddess worship, divinity or art....it's fine pages, beautiful cover and content make it worth the price.

I have been coveting this book for a few years when it first came out. The artwork is lovely and each goddess image is accompanied by information about the goddess - a poem or short history. I would recommend this book to art-lovers, goddess- lovers and people interested in Wicca. The book covers many different pantheons.

I picked this up on a whim and am absolutely ecstatic that I did. Not only is the artwork varied and beautiful, but the (albiet shortened) myths are nicely told. As the book itself points out, there is the idea that a particular myth will spark something in you and make you research it further. Don't expect to use this as a reference manual, the myths are too shortened for that, but as a general overview it's great, and beautifully done to boot.

Another nice bonus is the quality of the book itself. The pages are thick, the binding is well done, and even the "paper" cover is pretty sturdy - a pet peeve of mine is wimpy throwaway paper covers on hardbacks. This book will survive the many readings which it will certainally experience on my shelves. And at the outlet price...absolutely worth every penny!!

I think the book From the mixed up files of Mrs.Basil E Fankweiler is a great book to read! I like it because Claudia makes me fell that I'm a kid living in a meusaem !Just like Jamie and her.When you buy it your not wasting your money.Angel is a satue that Micle Angeloe.

I think the book From the mixed up files of Mrs.Basil E Fankweiler is a great book to read! I like it because Claudia makes me fell that I'm a kid living in a meusaem !Just like Jamie and her.When you buy it your not wasting your money.Angel is a satue that Micle Angeloe.

I absolutely adore this book. I read it 25 years ago when I was in the fourth grade, and I just recently read it again - and it never lost its adventure, its character, or its enticing quality. Claudia is just as endearing to my outer adult as she continues to be to my inner child...I still couldn't put the book down!

I have used many activities from this book in my classroom and the students have enjoyed them.

It is a great book that is sad yat very exciting on every page and I think it is a lesson to all of us who think we have terrible problems in life because we can have a exaple of how bad other use to have it back then and we can know that todays life ain't as bad as it used to be. It is worse in others ways. But back then it was worse in rasism. Now we still have [roblems with it but not as bad as before. This also is a book about suvival and how the children have to life through such harch condishions even though they are in a bad situation and have lost almost everything they ever charished.

You never know what will happen to the people in the story.It really makes you believe that you are part of it.It also lets you know what it felt like to be Afican-American and live in the times of slavery and hate against you