Download or read book The Art of Illusion written by Florian Heine and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover how artists have been tricking the human eye for centuries in this gorgeous and wide-ranging exploration of the art of illusion. This spellbinding look at the history and development of illusionistic art reveals wide-ranging techniques that have piqued the public's fascination with this medium. Beautifully reproduced, the images featured in the book includes centuries-old work such as the scenery at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, and the ceiling frescos at the Würzburg Residence in Germany, that showcase processes such as trompe l'oeil and anamorphosis. It also features work from the 20th and 21st centuries, including René Magritte's classic Surrealist works; M.C. Escher's magical and mathematically precise drawings; the seemingly undulating paintings of Bridget Riley; the manipulated photography of Andreas Gursky; Duane Hanson's eerily lifelike sculptures; JR's larger-than-life portrait photographs; and Georges Rousse's mind-bending constructions. The book also has examples of amazing street art including subway graffiti and a sidewalk painting that makes pedestrians think twice. This extraordinary and informative guide to all kinds of artistic trickery will satisfy scholars as well as everyday fans.
Download or read book House of Shadows and Illusion written by Renee (Burt Demrest) Snyder and published by Hillcrest Publishing Group. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renee was adopted by Walter and Frances Burt--of the notorious Burt crime family of Rhode Island--when she was just 15 months old. While the Burts are known for their crimes involving arson, welfare fraud, and assaults, Renee's own experiences are more far-ranging and horrific than any newspaper headlines suggest. Beginning at age 6, Renee faced unspeakable instances of sexual abuse, physical beatings, and constant verbal tirades of her worthlessness, all by the "good Catholic" parents who'd adopted her. From weekly nighttime visits from her father, to lacerations inflicted by her mother's power cord, Renee's childhood was filled with traumatic horrors. It was not until Renee had her own child at age 17 that she finally found something to live and to fight for. Author Renee Snyder painstakingly details every torment she faced at the hands of the Burts for a period exceeding 20 years. House of Shadows and Illusion is Renee's own story of unspeakable suffering and, ultimately, survival.
Download or read book The Abyss of Human Illusion written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.”—Don DeLillo “Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.”—Jeffrey Eugenides “For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid-20th-century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word.”—Harry Mathews “One of [Brooklyn]’s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents, Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamud’s Crown Heights, Arthur Miller’s Coney Island, Henry Miller’s and Betty Smith’s Williamsburg, Hamill’s and Auster’s Park Slope, and Lethem’s Boerum Hill.”—Bookforum Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino’s final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion—an elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters—the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present . A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.
Download or read book The Knowledge Illusion written by Steven Sloman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.
Download or read book Grand Illusion written by Gabriela Cruz and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and groundbreaking historical narrative, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera explores how technical innovations in Paris transformed the grand opera into a transcendent, dream-like audio-visual spectacle.
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Download or read book City of Illusion written by Victoria Ying and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read the follow-up to the action-packed adventure that Dan Santat called "An-edge-of-your-seat thriller!" It's been a peaceful three months since Hannah Morgan and Ever Barnes saved their beloved Oskars, and activated the powers of their city's Megantic. Ever now lives with the Morgan family and the two children watch over and learn more about Oskar (the Megantic) every day. But their conflict-free days come to an abrupt end when Mr. Morgan is captured while on a family trip to nearby Alexios, and the kids get into a spat with a group of street magicians who con Hannah out of her pocket money. Chifa and Tanan were never planning to make friends while performing their tricks, but when Hannah and Ever learn of their connection to Vash, they realize there's much more at stake than a few coins. If Hannah and Ever want to find out what Vash is hiding and save both Oskars and Alexios before time runs out, they'll have to learn to trust Chifa and Tanan, and most importantly, find a way to work together.
Download or read book The Houses of Belgrade written by Borislav Pekić and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bernard Johnson translation of Pekic's prize-winning novel. Originally published by Harcourt in 1978. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Citizen Spectator written by Wendy Bellion and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.
Download or read book The Last Illusion written by Porochista Khakpour and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A kaleidoscopic tale inspired by a legend from the medieval Persian epic "Book of Kings" follows the coming-of-age of a feral Middle Eastern youth in New York City on the eve of the September 11 attacks. By the award-winning author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects. 25,000 first printing.
Download or read book Co Illusion written by David Levi Strauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reports from America's political crisis, exposing a new “iconopolitics,” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The political crisis that sneaked up on America—the rise of Trump and Trumpism—has revealed the rot at the core of American exceptionalism. Recent changes in the way words and images are produced and received have made the current surreality possible; communication through social media, by design, maximizes attention and minimizes scrutiny. In Co-Illusion, the noted writer on art, photography, and politics David Levi Strauss bears witness to the new “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. The collusion that fueled Trump's rise was the secret agreement of voters and media consumers—their “co-illusion”—to set aside the social contract. Strauss offers dispatches from the epicenter of our constitutional earthquake, writing first from the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions and then from the campaign. After the election, he switches gears, writing in the voices of the regime and of those complicit in its actions—from the thoughts of the President himself (“I am not a mistake. I am not a fluke, or a bug in the system. I am the System”) to the reflections of a nameless billionaire tech CEO whose initials may or may not be M. Z. Finally, Strauss shows us how we might repair the damage to the public imaginary after Trump exits the scene. Photographs by celebrated documentary photographers Susan Meiselas and Peter van Agtmael accompany the texts.
Download or read book The Alchemist s Illusion written by Gigi Pandian and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for a 2020 Edgar Award (The G.P. Putnam's Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award) "Surprising plot twists, several cliffhangers, and vivid magical imagery will keep fans of paranormal cozies turning the pages."—Publishers Weekly The latest alchemical adventure from Gigi Pandian, USA Today bestselling author and winner of the Agatha Award Centuries-old alchemist Zoe Faust is tired of running from her past. She's finally got her life on track in Portland, Oregon, gardening and cooking in her fixer-upper house with her mischievous best friend, Dorian the gargoyle chef. It seems like the perfect life for Zoe, until she discovers that her old mentor Nicolas Flamel, who she thought had abandoned her, has been imprisoned. A local artist holds the secret that could lead Zoe to her mentor, but the artist is murdered and the painting containing the hidden clue is stolen. To rescue Nicolas, Zoe and Dorian must explore art forgery, a transformative process that has much in common with alchemy and cooking—but one that proves far more dangerous. Includes delicious vegan recipes! Praise: "Sparkles most when it stays true to the wonder of its magical subject."—Foreword Reviews "Pandian paints a lovely picture of relationships throughout the book's mystery of greed and violence."—New York Journal of Books
Download or read book Empire of Illusion written by Chris Hedges and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion. Chris Hedges argues that we now live in two societies: One, the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world, that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other, a growing majority, is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. In this “other society,” serious film and theatre, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins. In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Hedges navigates this culture — attending WWF contests as well as Ivy League graduation ceremonies — exposing an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.
Download or read book The Memory Illusion written by Dr Julia Shaw and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Truly fascinating.' Steve Wright, BBC Radio 2 - Have you ever forgotten the name of someone you’ve met dozens of times? - Or discovered that your memory of an important event was completely different from everyone else’s? - Or vividly recalled being in a particular place at a particular time, only to discover later that you couldn’t possibly have been? We rely on our memories every day of our lives. They make us who we are. And yet the truth is, they are far from being the accurate record of the past we like to think they are. In The Memory Illusion, forensic psychologist and memory expert Dr Julia Shaw draws on the latest research to show why our memories so often play tricks on us – and how, if we understand their fallibility, we can actually improve their accuracy. The result is an exploration of our minds that both fascinating and unnerving, and that will make you question how much you can ever truly know about yourself. Think you have a good memory? Think again. 'A spryly paced, fun, sometimes frightening exploration of how we remember – and why everyone remembers things that never truly happened.' Pacific Standard
Download or read book The Power of Illusion written by Christopher Anvil and published by Baen Publishing Enterprises. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of stories by the master of humorous science fiction adventure, including: The full-length novel, The Day the Machines Stopped¾and what happens, not just to civilization, but to humanity and its chances of survival when all the machines stop working at once? A man is captured by aliens who are investigating the Earth as a possible target for colonization. The aliens have science and technology far in advance of humans¾but, unfortunately for them, they have never developed the human art of bluffing. For the first time in book form, Anvil's stories of Richard Verner, who is called in to solve apparently insoluble problems, such as explaining why experimental missiles keep failing for no apparent reason, or locating a kidnapped judge, or even solving an inexplicable murder that's interrupting his vacation. And much more, in a generous volume of sardonically humorous science fiction. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Download or read book The Palace of Illusions written by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking us back to a time that is half history, half myth and wholly magical, bestselling author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni gives voice to Panchaali, the fire-born heroine of the Mahabharata, as she weaves a vibrant retelling of an ancient epic saga. Married to five royal husbands who have been cheated out of their father's kingdom, Panchaali aids their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war. But she cannot deny her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna—or her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands' most dangerous enemy—as she is caught up in the ever-manipulating hands of fate.
Download or read book Lord of Illusions written by Clive Barker and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 1995 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on The Last Illusion, a short story in Clive Barker's Books of Blood, Volume 6, this book is being released to tie in with the film starring Scott Bakula. Harry D'Amour, private investigator, thought he had seen the worst that flesh could suffer, but he hadn't.
