Concentrating on North American and European artists from the Renaissance to the present, Artists covers the life stories of 60 sculptors, painters, architects, photographers, illustrators and designers. It also provides a view of the artists worlds and impact of their art on society and future generations of artists.The entries include 50 new entries plus 10 updated profiles of artists from the first edition. A timeline, words to know section, sidebars and a cumulative index are included. 01

Artists: 2 Volume set

Galens, Judy

Swartz, Mark

Ergas, Aimee

Arts & Photography

U*X*L

Part Unabomber, part van Gogh, David Pelenstein yearns to create an unforgettable masterpiece. He spends his days in the Chicago Public Library, browsing the stacks in search of connections between obscure volume, scrupulously footnoting his research into anarchy, magnetotherapy, plastic surgery and more. We read this journal, tracing his course through books and philosophies as he prepares his magnum opus—blowing up the library that he loves. Fueled by lust for Eve Jablom, the young woman at the library's checkout desk, Felsenstein hones his plans to perfection. All that remains is to carry them out.
"Instant Karma is irresistible from beginning to end. To make this original treatment of a complex and indeed zany subject so consistently entertaining is proof of a new and prodigious talent."—Harry Matthews, author of Cigarettes and Tlooth
" . . . a tour de force, an engaging, farcical, joyful reprise of 1000 great ideas tumbling around in one humble brain, in one ordinary body."—Frederick Barthlme, author of painted Desert
" . . . concentrated and diabolically clever novel . . . this is a tricky puzzle of a tale, one readers will enjoy in direct proportion to their interest in the roles books and libraries play in our lives, and to their familiarity with the diverse sources Swartz so cannily samples and remixes in this intelligent, arch, timely and piquant satire."—The Chicago Tribune
"Welcome to the oddball world of David Felsenstein, a Chicago loner who's part Young Werther, part Travis Bickle and part post-adolescent Borges . . . a kind of Dewey Decimal tribute to Paul Auster’s Leviathan . . . "—The Los Angeles Times
"Imagine a collaboration between David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace on a book about the interrelationship of art and anarchy . . . What you end up with is Mark Swartz's weird but wonderful Instant Karma . . . "—Washington City Paper
"Mark Swartz's irreverent first novel, Instant Karma, features a lonely bookish pack rat . . . there is some sense in which Instant Karma can stand as an odd second cousin to Jonathan Franzen's recent collection of essays, How To Be Alone."—Readerville
"An obsessive read about an obsessive reader, Mark Swartz's Instant Karma is a book with the sort of power that makes you remember the sort of power books have."—Daniel Handler, author of Watch Your Mouth and The Basic Eight
"This novella proves that too much reading can cause a shy boy to use explosives. The attenuated Young Werther here, direct heir to all the neurasthenic adolescents in literature, updates himself with late twentieth-century books, but stays in character. Nice satire, useful common reader."—Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and author of Ay Cuba! A Socio-Erotic Journey and Cassanova in Bohemia
"As a reference librarian I have sometimes wondered what goes on in the hearts and minds of the many people who use the library all day, every day. Swartz provides just such a glimpse into one fictional psyche. Instant Karma’s troubled protagonist’s diary entries, obsessively footnoted from idiosyncratically disparate library texts, lead toward a potentially explosive end."—Jim Van Buskirk, Reference Librarian, San Francisco Public Library
Mark Swartz is a writer from Chicago now living in Brooklyn. He works for the Museum of Modern Art as a copywriter and editor.

Instant Karma

Literature & Fiction

Literary

City Lights Publishers

It's 1986, and the Wisconsin summer air is filled with mosquitoes and Aqua Net. When the beautiful, reckless daughter of a multimillionaire vanishes from a Jewish overnight camp, junior counselor and wannabe songwriter Eric Weintraub summons the courage to investigate. John Hughes meets Philip Roth in this coming-of-age tale laced with as much profanity as profundity.Mark Swartz is the author of "Instant Karma" (City Lights, 2002), which Booklist called “a first novel of remarkable compression, lithe satirical humor, impressive intellectual dimension, and sly provocation.” The Chicago Tribune review stated: “Adept at deadpan humor and fluent in high-tone irony, Swartz guides his misanthropic diarist and pseudo-Talmudic scholar to the works of a mishmash of tantalizing thinkers.”Swartz's H2O (Soft Skull, 2006) was hailed in Bookforum as "a deft vision of America's postindustrial future in the stylized guise of noir fiction.... At once fantastic and eerily plausible." Jeff VanderMeer wrote, "Savagely precise, clever but not shallow, Swartz's writing lacerates even as it's deeply, disturbingly funny.”

Summertime Jews

Genre Fiction

Independently published

It's 2020 and the world is facing an unthinkable crisis: shortages and contamination have made drinking water scarce. Hayden Shivers is a lowly filter and drains engineer employed by Drixa, a mega-corporation with a monopoly on water. When he stumbles upon a method for synthesizing fake water, Hayden is promised a big promotion if he signs over his patent to Drixa. As the company hustles to get the product on the market, Hayden frantically tries to stop them until the new water is confirmed safe. The situation grows increasingly dire as advice pours in from all fields: a fanatically loyal manager, a cynical divorce lawyer, a muckraking reporter, and his brilliant mail-order maid.” Told in a brilliantly off-kilter style that reverberates with the sublime and the paradoxical, H2O traces and retraces the overlapping family and corporate intrigues that threaten to turn a life-saving invention into an instrument of disaster.

Contemporary

SOFT SKULL PRESS *

The Music Never Died: Tales from the Flipside

Verse Chorus Press

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Books by Swartz, Mark