"In an unnamed British city, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness retreats inside. She isolates herself in her immense studio, Burntcoat, with Halit, the lover she barely knows. As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat, Edith and Halit find themselves changed as well: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside, and by the...

"When Eve Duncan gave birth to Bonnie, she experienced a love she never knew existed. Eve's entire life came into focus (delete reference to forensics--that happened later, right?--) and nothing was going to stand in the way of giving her daughter a wonderful life--the kind of life she herself never experienced. And then, the unthinkable happened. On an ordinary class trip to a local park, seven-year-old Bonnie vanished. Eve found herself in the throes...

"The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud" -- In 1761 a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son....

"Eve Duncan is the most sought-after artist in the field of forensic sculpting. Dedicated to her work ever since her daughter Bonnie was taken and killed at the age of seven, Eve feels a sense of duty to those whose lives were lost and whose bones are now in her hands. When a sheriff in California contacts her with a request for help on the reconstruction of the skull of a nine-year-old girl whose body has been buried for eight years, his intensity...

Norma Duffield (nee Strong) Lyon became known as 'the Butter Cow Lady' after years of sculpting the Iowa State Fair's Butter Cow. Initially done in the name of dairy promotion, Duffy's sculptures gained a large following. Each year she would choose a topic or current identity that would resonate with the wider community and drew thousands of patrons through the turnstiles of the State Fair. Her appeal broadened over time, expanding to butter sculptures...

A culture writer and dance critic describes how to see elegance and grace in the everyday, finding examples in the most unlikely of places, from the bustling kitchen of a high-end restaurant to strippers in a basement go-go bar.

"A thrilling, witty, and slyly original Cold War mystery about a ragtag group of Jewish refuseniks in Moscow. On his wedding day in 1976, Viktor Moroz stumbles upon a murder scene: two gay men, one of them a US official, are axed to death in Moscow. Viktor, a Jewish refusenik, is stuck in Russia due to the government's denial of his application to leave for Israel; he sits "in refusal" alongside his wife and their community of intellectuals, Jewish...

Ringgold's most formative and influential political works are gathered in this beautifully designed clothbound volume -- Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's seminal artistic and activist work, and its historical context during these years, including accounts by the artist herself. During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil...

"Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings's groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to "a cluster of epigrams," forty-nine essays, a poem, and three speeches from an unfinished play. Seven years later, George J. Firmage-- editor of much of Cummings's work, including Complete Poems-- broadened...

Meet forty-six movers and shakers who made their mark before age twenty.