In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

A fascinating biography of a revolutionary American artist ripe for rediscovery as a photographer and champion of other artists Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an enormously influential artist and nurturer of artists even though his accomplishments are often overshadowed by his role as Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband. This new book from celebrated biographer Phyllis Rose reconsiders Stieglitz as a revolutionary force in the history of American art. Born in New Jersey, Stieglitz at age eighteen went to study in Germany, where his father, a wool merchant and painter, insisted he would get a proper education. After returning to America, he became one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame. By the time he was sixty, he gave up photography and devoted himself to selling and promoting art. His first gallery, 291, was the first American gallery to show works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and other great European modernists. His galleries were not dealerships so much as open universities, where he introduced European modern art to Americans and nurtured an appreciation of American art among American artists.

"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES. The shelf has everything Rose could wish for--a classic she has not read, a remarkable variety of authors, and a range of literary styles. The early nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a picaresque novel from the seventeenth century. There are several novels by a wonderful, funny, contemporary novelist who has turned to raising dogs because of the tepid response to her work. In The Shelf, Rose investigates the books on her shelf with exuberance, candor, and wit while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf--those texts that accompany us through life. 'Fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels, ' she sustains a sense of excitement as she creates a refreshingly original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise"--

Author Phyllis Rose describes the impact of reading Proust during her midlife.

Traces Baker's life, featuring her struggles in Europe, her undercover work for the French Resistance during World War II, her tours around the world, and her adopted home.

Profiles the life and work of a nineteenth century pioneer of photography and offers a selection of her portraits of women

May Stevens' paintings weave themes of familial love and loss, societal ills, and the healing power of nature and the human community. This book surveys the full range of her remarkable lifework, from her early social protest paintings to her recent series of luminous, large-format images of lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water. May Stevens offers an insightful, in-depth look at Stevens' career, drawing on her own recollections and rounded out by informed commentary. Images and text bring to light Stevens' personal history, her humanitarian concerns, and the social context within which her art evolved.

From the author of Jazz Cleopatra comes a fresh, eclectic collection of essays that charts one woman's journeys, from New York to France to New England, to that place within us where understanding meets the human heart. Here, armed with humor and irreverence, she explores such themes as youth and motherhood, loneliness and self-discovery, memory and creation, decline and loss.